Janine Wedel - Unaccountable - How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

23. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120901755.html. Schroeder remains chair of the Nord Stream shareholders’ committee, which is 51 percent controlled by Gazprom. Gazprom nominated him to that position (Nord Stream Pipeline Project, Management, http://www.nord-stream.com/about-us/our-management/).

24. Tony Paterson, “Merkel Fury after Gerhard Schroeder Backs Putin on Ukraine.” The Telegraph , March 14, 2014 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10697986/Merkel-fury-after-Gerhard-Schroeder-backs-Putin-on-Ukraine.html).

25. Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick, “Unease at Clinton Foundation Over Finances and Ambitions.” New York Times, August 13, 2013 (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/us/politics/unease-at-clinton-foundation-over-finances-and-ambitions.html?pagewanted=all).

26. Of course, these patterns apply not only to former heads of state. For instance, just a week after stepping down in 2006, Alan Greenspan took in a reported $250,000 for a dinner with top hedge-fund managers hosted by Lehman Brothers (http://nypost.com/2006/02/11/stolen-thunder-critics-rip-greenspans-big-bucks-shadow-fed/). Counterparts overseas did not always follow this pattern. Masaaki Shirakawa said he would say nothing for six months after stepping down as governor of the Bank of Japan (see, for instance, Henry Sender, “Geithner Joins Top Table of Public Speakers with Lucrative Appearances,” Financial Times, July 7, 2013 [http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3dd59602-e42c-11e2-91a3-00144feabdc0.html#axzz34M54g3bL]).

27. Graham Bowley, “The Academic-Industrial Complex.” New York Times, July 31, 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/business/01prez.html?pagewanted=all).

28. The critic, John Gillespie, wrote a book on corporate boards, Money for Nothing (see Bowley, op. cit.).

29. Within the military, some referred to Petraeus as King David, a brainy figure with boundless ambition. See, for instance, this report published after the fact: Mark Thomas, “The Rise and Fall of ‘General Peaches.” Time, November 14, 2012. This article says he also was unpopular with the CIA rank and file (Joe Nocera, “Hacking General Petraeus.” New York Times, November 16, 2012 [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/opinion/nocera-hacking-general-petraeus.html]).

30. See Vanity Fair: Mark Bowden, “The Professor of War.” Vanity Fair, May 2010 (http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/05/petraeus-201005); and Foreign Policy : Blake Hounshell, “David Petraeus: Smart Like That.” Foreign Policy, October 17, 2008 (http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2008/10/17/david_petraeus_smart_like_that).

See also these book reviews in Foreign Affairs : “COIN of the Realm: Is There a Future for Counterinsurgency?” (reviews by Colin H. Kahl of these books: The U.S. Army and Marine Corps, The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual ; and William R. Polk’s Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq . Foreign Affairs , Council on Foreign Relations, vol. 86, no. 6, November-December 2007, pp. 169-176 [http://www.jstor.org/stable/20032516].)

See also Fred Kaplan’s article in Foreign Affairs (“The End of the Age of Petraeus: The Rise and Fall of Counterinsurgency.” Foreign Affairs , vol. 92, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2013, pp. 75-90); and his book ( The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

31. Halah Touryalai, “An Unlikely Alliance? KKR Hires Former US General, CIA Director, David Petraeus.” Forbes, May 30, 2013 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2013/05/30/an-unlikely-alliance-kkr-hires-former-us-general-cia-director-david-petraeus/).

As Forbes put it, “The [KKR Global] institute will deal with macro-economic issues like the role of central banks in the world since the crisis, changes in public policy and other areas where KKR has interests like environmental and social issues that would influence its investment decisions. There’s no doubting Petraeus has a powerful Rolodex—one that KKR is likely to leverage.”

32. George Anders, “The Real Reason Why KKR Wants Petraeus On Call.” Forbes, May 30, 2013 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2013/05/30/the-real-reason-why-kkr-wants-petraeus-on-call/).

KKR explicitly has Petraeus under its “thought leadership” business (http://www.kkr.com/leadership/david-h-petraeus).

33. “The Crash: Risk and Regulation, What Went Wrong.” Anthony Faiola, Ellen Nakashima, and Jill Drew, Washington Post , October 15, 2008, p. A01 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/10/14/ST2008101403344.html); and Manuel Roig-Franzia, “Brooksley Born, the Cassandra of the Derivatives Crisis.” Washington Post, May 26, 2009 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/25/AR2009052502108.html).

34. Cyrus Sanati, “10 Years Later, Looking at Repeal of Glass-Steagall.” New York Times , November 12, 2009 (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/10-years-later-looking-at-repeal-of-glass-steagall/?_r=0).

Ironically, there were few policymakers more capable of understanding derivatives or their real world impact than Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers. And both were there when derivatives could have been at least partially reined in before they became, to quote Warren Buffett, “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Instead, they did exactly the opposite, blocking key regulation at pivotal moments, with both Rubin and Summers moving on to benefit from this deregulated Wild West when they left Washington.

35. Myron S. Scholes and Robert C. Merton, principals at LTCM, received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics for a “new method to determine the value of derivatives.”

36. U.S. Department of the Army & U.S. Marine Corps, The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, with forward by David H, Petraeus and James N. Mattis, December 15, 2006, December 2006 (http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf). See also United States Department of the Army, David Howell Petraeus, James F. Amos, John A. Nagl, and Sarah B. Sewall, The US Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual: US Army field manual no. 3-24: Marine Corps warfighting publication no. 3-33.5 , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

37. See, for example, Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

38. See, for example, Eleni Tsingou, “Transnational Policy Communities and Financial Governance: The Role of Private Actors in Derivatives Regulation.” CSGR Working Paper, 111/03, 2003 (http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2009/1/WRAP_Tsingou_wp11103.pdf). See also Diane Stone, “Transfer Agents and Global Networks in the ‘Transnationalisation’ of Policy,” Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 11, issue 3, 2004.

39. Interview with Stuart Mackintosh, executive director, Group of Thirty, June 13, 2014.

40. The first quote is from: Leonard Seabrooke and Eleni Tsingou, Revolving Doors and Linked Ecologies in the World Economy: Policy Locations and the Practice of International Financial Reform , University of Warwick, 2009 (http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/1849/1/WRAP_Seabrooke_26009.pdf), p. 20. The second quote is from: Eleni Tsingou, “Club governance and the making of global financial rules,” Review of International Political Economy , March 2014, p. 2 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2014.890952).