A lot of critics of American capitalism and American society often point to the different way regular bad guys -- drug dealers, bank robbers, and thugs -- are treated differently than white collar criminals by the media. Local television news programs in the U.S. and sometimes in Canada, for example, will be filled with scenes of police officers roughly treating arrested persons who are too often black and often poor and often accused of relatively minor crimes. But local TV news doesn't humiliate white collar criminals in the same way. Well, for what it's worth, there are some different images filling TV screens today. My colleagues at CTV Newsnet are showing video in which former Enron executive Jeffrey Andrew Fastow and his wife are being paraded today by scores of media cameras and it's pretty clear that they're in handcuffs and have done something wrong. I suppose the images are arresting, if you'll pardon the pun, because we see so few of these kind of white collar criminals arrested and given the media perp walk. For what it's worth, regulators and police investigators are happy to oblige media requests for these kind of perp walks, even if the rich and powerful don't like it, because they believe that if the TV screen is filled with images of corporate executives in expensive suits and handcuffs, there will be a powerful deterrent effect. The Associated Press has more on the Fastow story today and also the news that Fastow could be looking at 10 years in jail for his role in the Enron affair.