The Political Class has honed a dangerous skill, building the perfect undetectable fraud machine. Americans need to learn to spot these scams for their own protection and realize that the perpetrators can come from either political party and often work in cahoots with attorneys or big business.

Think about three seemingly unconnected news stories, all examples of costly or dangerously indictable fraud machines…

• The economic collapse of 2008 was caused in part by relaxed mortgage rules that allowed borrowers to get a home loan without a down payment or even proof of income in some cases.
• In the Pigford settlement, claimants were able to get $50,000 checks by asserting without proof that they had “attempted to farm.”
• In a move strongly supported by the NAACP and other liberal advocacy groups, the Obama Department of Justice just stopped South Carolina’s plan to put in place some minimal ID requirements for voting. Currently voters in a number of states don’t need to show any photo ID or other identity checks in order to cast a ballot.

All three stories are examples of systems that have been intentionally set up with such low standards that they invite fraud. But ingeniously, they have also been set up in a such a way that makes them almost critic-proof because the lack of standards makes detection of fraud nearly impossible. When the system is questioned, the defenders, creators and beneficiaries then point to the lack of “proof” of fraud as a reason to keep the status. Thus, a self-perpetuating fraud scheme is kept alive as long as possible.

Make no mistake, these scams are costly….

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From Bloomberg:

Federal employees whose compensation averages more than $126,000 and the nation’s greatest concentration of lawyers helped Washington edge out San Jose as the wealthiest U.S. metropolitan area, government data show.

The U.S. capital has swapped top spots with Silicon Valley, according to recent Census Bureau figures, with the typical household in the Washington metro area earning $84,523 last year. The national median income for 2010 was $50,046.

The figures demonstrate how the nation’s political and financial classes are prospering as the economy struggles with unemployment above 9 percent and thousands of Americans protest in the streets against income disparity, said Kevin Zeese, director of Prosperity Agenda, a Baltimore-based advocacy group trying to narrow the divide between rich and poor.

“There’s a gap that’s isolating Washington from the reality of the rest of the country,” Zeese said. “They just get more and more out of touch.” (more…)

Say you don’t have the dough to add the fashions you see at Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony to your closet. If you buy knockoffs instead, are you shopping smart or stealing?

Today it’s perfectly legal to copy whatever you see on the red carpet and sell it yourself. To some, such as  Diane Von Furstenburg, this sounds a lot like theft. The former German princess is one of the world’s most successful fashion designers and she’s teaming up with Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to push a bill that would give designers a three-year monopoly on new creations.

The whole point of intellectual property is to spur innovation, and that, according to supporters, is exactly why the fashion industry needs such a bill. Without tougher protections, they say designers will have less incentive to create new looks.

But is the fashion industry really hurting for innovation? And are top-tier designers like Von Furstenberg really getting ripped off by bargain hunters? And even if they were, who’s to say whose look is truly original?

Johanna Blakely of USC’s Norman Lear Center worries that the relentless push for more intellectual property protection could lead to a situation where big design houses lawyer up and sue young designers. Designer Galina Sobolov, head designer and owner of Single by Galina Sobolov, agrees.

“If this bill was in effect as we grew our company, we would have faced probably millions of lawsuits,” says Sobolov, whose designs have been worn by celebs such as Katy Perry and Rachel Hunter. “And we would have never actually had a company.”

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There’s a new site to add to your blogroll:  Congress Shall Make No Law.

The site, which has the address makenolaw.org, empowers grassroots activists from around the country that are standing up and saying no to unconstitutional attacks on free speech coming in the guise of campaign finance reform.  The site explains all the latest news and events going on in this increasingly complex area of law.  All of the writers are First Amendment attorneys and experts at the Institute for Justice (IJ)—the libertarian law firm dedicated to striking down campaign finance laws in state and federal courts.

The unfortunate reality is this:  Campaign finance laws are a way to regulate speech and silence speakers.  And they have seriously negative impacts on everyday Americans.

Consider Karen Sampson of Parker North, Colorado:

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A trial lawyer reading through the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) will immediately, almost unconsciously, begin generating a list of questions he would love to ask the authors if he were able to face them on the witness stand and under oath.  The beauty of the adversarial process is how cross-examination tests and challenges the other side’s position – precisely what the emails indisputably show the CRU and its allies in the climate change scam have gone to shocking lengths to avoid.

There are several lines of examination that come immediately to mind.  We can rest assured that it will never happen – as the emails show, the last thing they want to do is be in a position where they have to explain themselves.  But certainly asking leading climate change cheerleader Phil Jones about his email describing his use of a “trick” to describe the manipulation of observed temperature data to “hide the decline” in order to achieve the desired result would be amusing:

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