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This article will blow your mind:

Professor Todd Zywicki is vying to be the toughest critic of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new agency set up by the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform law to monitor predatory lending practices. In research papers and speeches, Zywicki not only routinely slams the CFPB's attempts to regulate bank overdraft fees and payday lenders; he depicts the agency as a "parochial" bureaucracy that is "guaranteed to run off the rails." He has also become one of the leading detractors of the CFPB's primary architect, Elizabeth Warren, questioning her seminal research on medical bankruptcies and slamming her for once claiming Native American heritage to gain "an edge in hiring."

Zywicki's withering arguments against financial reform have earned him guest columns in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times and on The New York Times's website. Lobbyists representing the largest consumer finance companies in the country have cited his writings in letters to regulators, and the number of times he has testified before Congress is prominently displayed on his academic website at the George Mason University School of Law.

What isn't contained in Zywicki's university profile, CV, byline or congressional testimony is the law professor's other job: he is a director of the Global Economics Group, a consulting business that boasts in a brochure that its experts have been hired by industry to influence the CFPB and other regulatory agencies. Nor does Zywicki advertise Global's client list, which includes some of the biggest names in the financial industry, among them Visa, Bank of America and Citigroup.

Last summer, Zywicki's firm was retained for $500 an hour on behalf of Morgan Drexen, a debt-relief company accused by the CFPB of deceiving consumers and charging illegal upfront fees. None of these potential conflicts of interest, however, have been disclosed during the course of Zywicki's anti-CFPB advocacy in the media or in government.

This example and many others are detailed in this important piece of investigative journalism. Make sure to remember this next time you hear some academic shilling for corporate interests.

Wouldn't it be nice if our representatives made them reveal who's paying them?

As Michael Greenberger,

'a law professor at the University of Maryland who is in favor of greater regulation of commodity speculation, testified before Congress alongside' one-such "expert" - Pirrong - says he had no idea of the latter's financial ties to speculators. Pirrong "presents himself as an independent academic, and he's not," Greenberger says. If Pirrong's funding had been disclosed during the course of his advocacy over the position --limits rule, "his influence would have been a tenth of what it is."

Exactly: ONE-Tenth the amount of influence if these financial ties were revealed.

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