W made a speech on Wall Street yesterday on corporate accountability and ethics in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals. However, it has been suggested that the “new” standards that are supposed to be enforced by an FBI “corporate SWAT team” would have landed both W and Vice President Cheney in jail for accounting practices of the companies they headed, Harken Energy and Halliburton, respectively. I wonder how long it will take the American press to get a whiff of the blatant duplicity of W’s new “hard” stance on corporate accountability, which is by no means coincidental to the upcoming elections.

Update: Apparently, W’s ploy of appearing as a regular guy fighting corporate fraud has not gone unnoticed: the New York Times has a piece that has some more details of W’s financial dealings with Harken and the kinds of “creative accounting” they used, not unlike WorldCom and Enron, come to think of it.