Wall Street's Fear: Senators Who Know Things

Get Wall Street executives drunk enough, and David Sirota of Salon is pretty sure they'll confess that they like their legislators to be incurious and ill-informed. How does he know? Because one former Lehman Brothers trader recently admitted as much in a recent Businessweek piece on the Massachusetts Senate race. He said Wall Street was backing Scott Brown because Elizabeth Warren would be "seen as an expert" by the Obama administration, whereas Brown "wouldn't be an adviser to either candidate in a financial crisis."

"Get that? Warren is disliked precisely because of her years of distinguished research," Sirota writes, while Brown is praised "specifically because he lacks policy knowledge … Oh, and because he has a proven track record of saying 'how high' when Wall Street says 'jump.'" To be fair, the trader's broader point was that the "expert" label itself is arbitrary. That's true enough, but it got that way thanks to these same expert-fearing special interests, who have worked hard to elevate as experts "automatons who are mostly willing to simply take orders." (More Elizabeth Warren stories.)