Andy Kroll

Reporter

Andy Kroll is Mother Jones' Dark Money reporter. He is based in the DC bureau. His work has also appeared at the Wall Street Journal, the Detroit News, Salon, and TomDispatch.com, where he's an associate editor. He can be reached at akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. He tweets at @AndrewKroll.

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Ex-IRS Director on Dark-Money Groups: "Investigate Them and Prosecute Them"

The IRS needs to crack down on political nonprofits, experts say—or risk looking weak and useless.

—By Andy Kroll

| Mon Jan. 14, 2013 4:06 AM PST

Big dark-money groups like the Karl Rove-advised Crossroads GPS promised the IRS they would have "limited" involvement in politics—in order to protect their nonprofit tax-exempt status—yet went on to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the 2010 and 2012 federal elections. Now several tax policy experts, including a former high-ranking IRS official who ran the division overseeing nonprofits, say the IRS must bring the hammer down on these shadowy nonprofits or risk looking weak and useless.

"The government's going to have to investigate them and prosecute them," says Marcus Owens, who ran the IRS's tax-exempt division for a decade and is now a lawyer in private practice. "In order to maintain the integrity of the process, they're going to be forced to take action."

[Read the full article]

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Russ Feingold: Democrats Sold Out in 2012 and Need to Quit Big Money

—By Andy Kroll

| Thu Jan. 10, 2013 10:01 AM PST

Former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.).

President Obama's decision to let his 2013 inauguration committee accept corporate cash and million-dollar donations marks quite a reversal for the president: for his first inaugural in 2009, he capped individual donations at $50,000 and banned corporate money. The Associated Press calls the decision "part of a continuing erosion of Obama's pledge to keep donors and special interests at arm's length of his presidency." But for former Sen. Russ Feingold, it's yet another sell-out by his friends in the Democratic Party to the big-money forces so dominant in politics today.

No Democrat has so publicly ripped his own party for embracing super-PACs and dark-money nonprofits than Feingold. In a new article for the journal Democracy, Feingold, who co-wrote the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, the last major campaign finance restriction in the US, takes Democrats to the mat. He calls 2012 "a big step" back for Democratic-led efforts to get big money out of politics, and singles out Obama's reversal on super-PACs. In February 2012, the president encouraged his donors to give to Priorities USA Action, the super-PAC backing him, while allowing his top deputies to appear at Priorities events. On the PBS NewsHour, top Obama strategist David Axelrod defended Obama by saying that the president hadn't warned at all toward super-PACs but had to play by the rules of the game. You heard that a lot from Democrats in 2012. Yet with statements like that, Feingold says, Democrats were posing as a pro-reform party while tripping over themselves to "exploit any avenue to accept unlimited, corporate dollars to fund elections."

Beltway Democrats, Feingold argues, aren't going to reform big-money politics from the inside; they're addicted and they just can't quit. The task of fighting for real reforms to money in politics, of building what Feingold—who now runs his own pro-reform nonprofit, Progressives United—calls a "permanent majority" for reform, falls instead to liberal donors and activists outside of Washington.

Feingold says the most important thing big donors can do is stop giving—to super-PACs or any of the other Citizens United-enabled fixtures of our big-money politics. "Donors hold more leverage to create a movement for reform than almost any other actor in the political system," he says. If donors ignore super-PACs and nonprofits, "Washington will notice." And as for the liberal activists out there, they should redirect all the energy they've invested into passing a constitutional amendment reversing the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision and channel it into "achievable goals"—public financing of elections, disclosure of donors to dark-money nonprofits and shell corporations, overhauling the dysfunctional Federal Election Commission, the nation's top elections cop.

The stakes are high, in Feingold's view, for the Democrats. "Unless Democrats embrace election reform as a central tenet of our platform," he writes, "we will face another era reminiscent of soft money—when the dominance of corporate interests meant that no matter what party held power, the influence of Big Money always won."

Flashback: Obama's Treasury Secretary Pick Claimed Deregulation Did Not Cause the Financial Crisis

—By Andy Kroll

| Wed Jan. 9, 2013 10:51 AM PST

Jack Lew.

President Barack Obama is expected to nominate Jack Lew, the wonky White House chief of staff and former director of the Office of Management and Budget, as the new secretary of the US Treasury. The current secretary, Tim Geithner, plans to step down soon.

Here's a crucial piece of information about Lew: He has said he doesn't believe financial deregulation was a major cause of the financial crisis. In 2010, Lew testified before Congress that the deregulation of Wall Street in the Clinton era—the repeal of Glass-Steagall, say, or the ending of real regulation of complex derivatives—wasn't a critical factor. "The problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation," Lew told members of the Senate budget committee in September 2010. He added that he didn't "personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it, but I don't believe that deregulation was the proximate cause."

Lew knows that period of deregulatory zeal well, having served as President Bill Clinton's director of the Office of Management and Budget from May 1998 to January 2001. Lew has spent much of his career in government, is a savvy negotiator and budget wonk, and is respected by Republicans and Democrats. Republicans, though, have been grumbling about him more recently—after all, in 2011, he outsmarted the congressional GOP in intense budget talks. And liberals have criticized Lew for his post-Clinton work for the mega-bank Citigroup, where he ran a unit that profited off shorting the housing market.

Lew's 2010 claim that deregulation wasn't a major cause of the financial crisis is disputed by many experts as well as the government's own investigatory body, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. In its final report (PDF), the commission stated that "widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision proved devastating to the stability of the nation's financial markets."

The commission went on to conclude, "More than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others, supported by successive administrations and Congresses, and actively pushed by the powerful financial industry at every turn, had stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe."

Obama, Lew's boss, has said before that deregulation played a major part of the financial meltdown. In October 2008, Obama, then the Democratic candidate for president, said "we know that it's because of deregulation that Wall Street was able to engage in the kind of irresponsible actions that have caused this financial crisis."

Upon signing the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, which was chock-full of new regulations, in July 2010, Obama noted the failure of the regulators and the banks: "It was a crisis born of a failure of responsibility from certain corners of Wall Street to the halls of power in Washington. For years, our financial sector was governed by antiquated and poorly enforced rules that allowed some to game the system and take risks that endangered the entire economy."

It's clear Obama believes deregulation played a role in the crisis. Apparently, he's fine with a treasury secretary who's a former Clintonite not eager to acknowledge the Clinton era's mistakes.

Revealed: The Massive New Liberal Plan to Remake American Politics

A month after President Obama won reelection, America's most powerful liberal groups met to plan their next moves. Here's what they talked about.

—By Andy Kroll

| Wed Jan. 9, 2013 4:06 AM PST

It was the kind of meeting that conspiratorial conservative bloggers dream about.

A month after President Barack Obama won reelection, top brass from three dozen of the most powerful groups in liberal politics met at the headquarters of the National Education Association (NEA), a few blocks north of the White House. Brought together by the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Communication Workers of America (CWA), and the NAACP, the meeting was invite-only and off-the-record. Despite all the Democratic wins in November, a sense of outrage filled the room as labor officials, environmentalists, civil rights activists, immigration reformers, and a panoply of other progressive leaders discussed the challenges facing the left and what to do to beat back the deep-pocketed conservative movement.

[Read the full article]

GOP Sen. Ted Cruz: "I Don't Think What Washington Needs Is More Compromise"

—By Andy Kroll

| Mon Jan. 7, 2013 8:00 AM PST

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

The 112th Congress that ended last week as one of the least productive of any Congress in 70 years. The Huffington Post found 219 pieces of legislation that were passed by the last Congress and signed into law, down from 383 during the 2009-2010 session and 460 from 2007-2008. At the same time, a small fraction of Americans—just 18 percent in a December Gallup survey—approve of the way Congress is doing its job.

Yet Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), an tailored suit-wearing tea party favorite and rising star in Republican politics, says the way forward for Congress is less, not more, compromise.

On Sunday, Cruz said on Fox News that bipartisanship and deal-making is not the way forward for Congress. Here's his full comment:

I think the fiscal cliff deal was a lousy one, but moving forward with the debt ceiling and those who believe in limited spending and solving the debt...I don’t think what Washington needs is more compromise, I think what Washington needs is more common sense and more principle.

Cruz's dim view of compromise in Congress clashes with what Americans say they want. A December NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that, on the fight over the so-called "fiscal cliff," 65 percent of respondents wanted Congress to compromise on a deal to stop from going off the cliff. (Cruz said he would've voted against the deal that ultimately passed.) Indeed, Americans have told pollsters over and over and over in recent years that they want more compromise.

Cruz, of course, is no moderate. He is, as Mother Jones reported in October, "the thinking man's tea partier," an authentic conservative with no qualms for gumming up the works in Congress in defense of what he believes to be right and true. With his latest comment, Cruz appears to be well on his way to doing just that.