Before a recent episode of Oh My Fraud discussed how America legalized corruption over the past 50 years, it started with something simpler: Olympic-level credit card fraud.
French biathlete Julia Simon won gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics while carrying some interesting baggage. Last October, she received a three-month suspended sentence and a €15,000 fine for spending €2,000 on her teammate’s credit card. The teammate she scammed finished 80th at the same Olympics. Simon also used the team physiotherapist’s credit card in 2021 and 2022.
The best part is, Simon denied the crime for three years, claiming identity theft until investigators found photos of the credit cards on her phone. “I confess the accusations, but I don’t remember committing them. It’s like a blackout,” Julia told the court.
That’s the kind of corruption we can all understand: straightforward, prosecutable, and absurd. But the most effective heists in American history aren’t happening with stolen credit cards but with Supreme Court rulings, secret contracts, and fee structures so boring that nobody bothers to read them.
That’s the world investigative journalist David Sirota has spent decades mapping. Recently, David sat down with host Caleb Newquist for what he calls “not a political episode in the tribal sense,” although he admits upfront that two self-described lefties are about to discuss how money corrupts democracy.
Who Is David Sirota?
David isn’t your typical political commentator. He’s written four books, most recently Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America. He founded The Lever, an investigative news outlet focused on how money manipulates power. He co-wrote the Oscar-nominated film Don’t Look Up with Adam McKay. It’s the fourth most-watched Netflix original movie ever. And he created award-winning podcasts on everything from the 2008 financial crisis to, well, legalized corruption.
David has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. But his real education came from sitting in on politicians begging donors for money.
The Windowless Room Where Democracy Goes to Die
Fresh out of college, David landed a job running the fundraising call room for a congressional candidate in the Philadelphia suburbs. The candidate was on his fourth run for the same seat, having lost the previous race by just 40 votes.
For eight hours a day, David sat with the candidate as he worked the phones, begging for money. Then David handled the follow-up calls to ensure those commitments actually materialized.
“If you’re not willing to take fundraising seriously, to raise enough resources to communicate with voters, there’s no point in running a campaign,” David told Caleb. “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? That’s not real. That’s not a real thing.”
What struck David wasn’t the grind; it was the distortion. The candidate spent all day talking to people who could write thousand-dollar checks, not knocking on doors in neighborhoods where people couldn’t spare ten bucks. The donors’ concerns inevitably became the candidate’s concerns. Not through explicit bribery, but through simple repetition. Eight hours a day, every day, he listened to what wealthy donors care about.
“You can see how what the candidate worries about and what they’re thinking about is distorted,” David explained. “They’re not necessarily spending eight hours a day knocking on doors and talking to people who can’t even write a $10 check.”
Bernie Sanders and the Bill That Died on Christmas
Later, David went to Washington as press secretary for “this obscure, independent weirdo named Bernie Sanders.” It was the late 1990s, and Sanders was considered fringe. He was a self-described socialist in an era when that word was political poison.
Working for Sanders meant seeing Congress from the outside looking in. One of his first experiences came when setting up a camera to beam Sanders questioning Alan Greenspan to local TV stations via satellite. While other congressmen fawned over the Fed chair, Sanders “ripped his face off.”
“The whole room is quiet,” David recalled. “And I was like, oh, this is a way different job than any other press secretary for any other member of Congress.”
But the moment that crystallized how corruption really works came later. Sanders championed a bill allowing Americans to buy cheaper prescription drugs from Canada. These were the exact same drugs, but at Canadian prices. After massive effort, they got it through the Republican House, the Republican Senate, and Bill Clinton signed it.
But three weeks before Clinton left office, during Christmas week when nobody was paying attention, HHS Secretary Donna Shalala killed the program using a poison pill provision someone had slipped into the final bill.
“We defeated money, and money still won,” David said.
When Fighting Corruption Gets You in Trouble
The final lesson in David’s corruption education came at the Center for American Progress, the Clinton machine’s think tank in exile. David published a report showing how much money 30 key House Democrats had taken from the credit card industry, right before they helped pass President Biden’s bankruptcy bill, legislation that made it dramatically harder for Americans to escape predatory debt.
House Democrats went ballistic. They dragged John Podesta to Capitol Hill and demanded David be fired or muzzled.
“I thought we were doing the right thing, even if it pissed off some Democrats,” David recalled. “You’re supposed to be against corruption as long as being against corruption helps the party that you’re affiliated with. You can combat corruption, but only up to a point.”
That’s when David left for what Caleb called “the literal wilderness” of Montana.
What Corruption Actually Is (And Why We’ve Legalized It)
When Caleb asked David to define corruption, David had a ready answer.
“It’s something that interferes with how a system is supposed to work,” he said. “Specifically, how a democratic institution is supposed to work.”
When the public overwhelmingly wants lower prescription drug prices but money ensures it doesn’t happen, that gap between public will and policy outcome is corruption. Legal or not.
And the kicker is, America has legalized most of it.
If you hand a congressperson $5,000 cash with a specific legislative ask, you can go to prison. But funneling $50 million through dark money groups to elect 25 congresspeople who write every bill you want is perfectly legal.
“We have created this patina of ‘that’s just politics, that’s just the way it works, it’s all legal, so there’s nothing dirty,'” David explained. “This is a deeply, deeply corrupt system. We’ve just put a nice fresh coat of paint on it.”
The 50-Year Master Plan
How did we get here? David traces it to a deliberate campaign that began after Watergate, ironically, right when real anti-corruption reforms were passed.
In 1971, Lewis F. Powell (then head of the American Bar Association and Philip Morris board member) wrote his now-famous memo arguing that corporations needed to start buying American politics because the government was too responsive to ordinary people. Shortly after, Powell landed on the Supreme Court.
There, he engineered the Buckley v. Valeo ruling, which established a radical idea as constitutional doctrine: money isn’t corruption, money is free speech. The legal argument was crafted by, among others, John Bolton. Yes, that John Bolton.
That ruling became the foundation for corporate spending rights, then Citizens United, transforming elections from democratic contests into auctions.
Meanwhile, courts were narrowing what counts as prosecutable bribery. The culmination came recently when an Indiana mayor awarded a municipal contract to a company that then gave him $10,000. The mayor was prosecuted and convicted, but the Supreme Court overturned it, ruling it wasn’t a bribe but a “gratuity,” and thus, perfectly legal.
“That’s where we are,” David said. “That is literally where we are right now.”
The $5 Trillion Heist Nobody’s Watching
While everyone’s distracted by culture wars and political theater, there’s $4-5 trillion sitting in public pension funds across America. That’s money from teachers, firefighters, and first responders, invested for their retirements.
Increasingly, it’s flowing into private equity, hedge funds, and venture capital, despite these “alternative investments” often underperforming simple index funds over the long term while charging astronomical fees.
A Vanguard fund charges almost nothing. Private equity charges the classic “two and twenty:” 2% management fee plus 20% of profits.
“Even Warren Buffett would say nobody can beat the market,” David noted. So why pour billions into high-fee, high-risk investments? Maybe because the people running those firms donate heavily to the politicians who appoint pension board members.
When David’s team obtained leaked contracts, they discovered investment funds charge different fees to different investors in the same fund. The billionaire investing his own money negotiates a better rate than the pension fund managed by political appointees without skin in the game.
“The pensioners subsidize the free ride of the billionaire who’s investing alongside,” David explained.
The old cliché about the mafia looting pension funds “is happening every day in every state and city in America,” David said. “And it’s not a story.”
When David exposed these connections in New Jersey’s $100 billion pension fund, Governor Chris Christie attacked him by name at multiple press conferences. “You’re talking about a $100 billion pension fund,” his editor explained. “There are a lot of really powerful people that want things from that, and you’re getting in their way.”
If Humans Built It, Humans Can Unbuild It
Despite everything, David strikes a surprisingly hopeful note. The corruption is no longer hidden. Trump, if nothing else, made the transactional nature of politics explicit. “You don’t have to explain that there is a problem anymore,” David said. “Everybody understands there is a problem.”
David offers practical advice for fighting corruption:
- Run for local office where elections are small enough that money doesn’t determine everything
- Support ballot initiatives for dark money disclosure and limits on corporate spending
- Push for publicly financed elections so candidates can run without relying on donors who demand favors
“Back in the 1970s, the people who legalized corruption worked at it for 50 years,” David said. “Those dreamers made their dream happen. And now we’re all living in their nightmare.”
But if they could dream their corrupt system into existence, we can dream something better. The work starts now.
The pension fund story should hit particularly close to home for accounting professionals. This is about fiduciary duty, fee transparency, and what happens when the people guarding the money answer to the wrong stakeholders. You’re trained to see what others miss in the numbers. The people benefiting from this system count on complexity and boredom to keep everyone else looking away.
Don’t let them be right about that.
Listen to the full episode of Oh My Fraud for more, including David’s Bernie Sanders rental car bus story and his Oscar night encounter with Harvey Keitel. Because sometimes understanding corruption requires understanding the people fighting it, and they’re more human than you might think.