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LawMall - a Unique Website for Antitrust and Civil Rights Litigation and Needed Political Reform - Especially as to Education

1st Pub.: 1995; New Look 11/11/07; Last Update: 12/18/16-7:03 am

Now that the 2016 election is over, I want to present a major political issue that needs to be overcome, before the problem does additional damage to the lives of Americans and our economy. The problem is the regulation of education, something which nobody seems to understand because they don't understand that most regulation of education, at least, is unnecessary, costly, and quite counter-productive. Instead of regulation, we should let education float in a free market and depend upon fraud actions by students, parents, governments, teachers and others to encourage schools to obey the law and avoid costly litigation and adverse publicity. The country, however, has chosen instead to regulate education to a formidable extent, thereby suppressing the natural development of needed educational programs, including programs that could be developed to put 10,000,000 Americans to work earning $25 to $60 per hour or more as an assistant to the owner of a small business. Perhaps newly-elected President Trump, with his adverse experience with regulation of education through his Trump University, will deal with the problem of regulation of education, and try to undo the mess created over the years, including the student loan program, which would not be needed if the regulation of education were terminated. Terminating regulation would reduce the costs of education from the present $10,000-$70,000 per year to an affordable $1,000-$2,000 per year - keep reading. Elimination of the regulation of education (especially as to programs training persons for jobs) would enable the U.S. to put millions of unemployed persons back to work - at very high salaries or compensation - as employees of the smallest businesses, who have no time, personnel, money or facilities to provide the type of training needed to be of substantial assistance to the owner of a small business. A copy of my proposed curriculum for such a training program (a 1-year program) can be found at Curriculum to Train American Adults to Become the Assistant to the Owner of a Small Business - and Earn $25 to $60 or more per hour.

Regulation of Education Is a Major Problem to Overcome

In the same way that the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was fraudulently enacted, and has been a major malevolent economic and political force in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world (for which President Wilson later apologized), the regulation of education in the United States has been a major contributor to a decline in the U.S. economy. This no doubt is far from self evident, but I at least want to set forth the basics of my understanding of the problem, spoken by someone who has participated in the problem as a student, as a student-loan borrower, as a student-loan signing parent of a college student, as an attorney for proprietary schools, as a part-time college instructor, as a licensed instructor in a proprietary school, as the creator of a career field, and as the founder, owner and C.E.O. of a proprietary school for 18 years. Few persons in the United States have such a background.

First of all, let me deal with my reference to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which put the United States during the last 103 years in the position of a borrower of money to run the government, instead of the direct issuer of money without any borrowing. Whatever borrowing that has taken place during the past 103 years was on the full faith and credit of the U.S. government anyway, and needed no intervening loans with interest to put the nation into debt, and especially an ever-increasing debt that can never be paid off through taxation. If there had been no Federal Reserve Act and the U.S. just issued its money directly, with no borrowing involved, there would be no U.S. debt - which at this time is almost $20 trillion dollars ($20,000,000,000,000)- and the United States would be able to issue whatever money was needed to accomplish its mission, with inflation, deflation and politics being the regulators rather than the $20 trillion U.S. deficit and arguments about the need to decrease spending to lower this wholly unmanageable and ever-increasing debt.

President Wilson stated, shortly after enactment of the Federal Reserve Act ( source: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Woodrow_Wilson ):

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

Now, back to the regulation of education. Not only has this country been subject to the regulation of money by a concentrated part of the economy, but there has been in addition a similar regulation of education, with adverse consequences that are comparable to the regulation of money and credit (through the Federal Reserve system). About 100 years after enactment of the Federal Reserve Act it has become known to many voters and politicians that the Federal Reserve Act was unnecessary and and a major adverse force in the U.S. and beyond. What is not known to any appreciable extent is the adverse effect that regulation has upon education in the U.S., and perhaps a major reason for a decline in the U.S. economy for most residents, and an ever-increasing concentration of the economy in favor of a select few.

In the same way that healthcare is about 19% of the U.S. economy, the nation's expenditures on education are (in 2010) 7.3 % of the U.S. gross domestic product (source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/ ), and probably exceeds 10% of the gross domestic (national) product when taking into account the moneys spent by students and parents to keep the students in distant colleges and universities. In other words, education is a major expense in our economy, and the regulation of education has caused the expenditures to be misdirected, into regulation of education rather than to education itself. To understand this, at least at the secondary school level (i.e., schools coming after high school, including community colleges, 4-year colleges, universities, specialized schools (such as for law, medicine, podiatry), and vocational school programs) you need to see how they are regulated:

First, is licensing. It is illegal in most states to provide a college degree or a vocational education unless the school is licensed, usually by the state department of education, a major source of political power in most if not all states;

Secondly, accreditation, which requires periodic updating and re-accreditation; and

Thirdly, approval by the U.S. Office of Education to have its students obtain student loans to pay for all or part of the student's tuition and other expenses.

Without continuation of these 3 types of regulation, a school cannot exist, because its students would not be able to obtain student loans and the school could not be paid its tuition and other charges (such as for room, board, books and other fees).

What the public does not know is the total cost of this regulation. Nor does it understand that the regulation does everything except regulate the quality of the education. The one thing needed in any educational program - high quality - is the one thing that the regulators have not been able to regulate.

Regulation destroys educational institutions because it forces the school the devote its energy, time and resources to complying with the monumental regulatory demands made by the 3 types of regulators instead of devoting the energy, time and resources to making the education of the highest quality. For example, the U.S. Office of Education makes an inspection every so many months to the licensed proprietary schools and asks for about 5 student folders, and as to each of such 5 arbitrarily selected folders the inspector will find at least one missing or mis-filed paper (such as a test) and require the proprietary school to refund 100% of the student's $10,000 or so tuition, even though the student has graduated and has a job. Thus, every so many months the U.S. Office of Education arbitrarily fines proprietary schools many thousands of dollars through these mandatory refunds, making the schools unprofitable unless they increase their tuition to be able to pay for such fines. What is most revealing is that the U.S. Office of Education does not go ito non-profit or government-owned colleges and universities and force them to make any refunds. At NYU, for example, if the Office of Education acted comparably, it would ask for 500 files and require 500 refunds of perhaps $100,000 each, for a total fine of $50,00,000 per visit. Because of this disparity in regulation, the non-profit and government-owned colleges and universities are allowed to survive, but proprietary schools are put out of business.

A NYS Senator told the proprietary school association that NYS has a policy of discriminatory regulation against proprietary schools because they have better instruction, better marketing, better placement, more entry points and better instructors, and get more students, and each student could cause a loss of federal student loan money to the government-owned school, which increases taxes to NYS taxpayers. Therefore, by putting the better schools out of business NYS is lowering taxes by protecting its inferior schools.

The public does not need this type of regulation, especially as to education.

I tried going into federal court to assert First Amendment rights to protect proprietary schools against regulation, but lost. This was not only a loss for me, but it was a loss for education in the U.S. We have to worry about the government deciding who can teach, when they can teach, and what they teach, contrary to the First Amendment which entitles Americans to the right of free speech. Education does not fall within the Freedom of Speech part of the First Amendment.

The most important thing I can tell you is that after 18 years of running a proprietary school, I understand the costs. I could run a lecture type school at the college level and make a profit charging tuition of only $1,000 per year, with 30 students in a classroom, with students living at home, and assuming the students had free parking. In fact, a college education today is training persons mainly for major corporations, the military and government agencies, most of which have training programs because a college education often doesn't provide any job skill. The problem is that big business, the military and governments are not hiring any net number of new employees, so that the college-university dominance is putting millions of students into a lifetime of debt and jobs not using a college education, and that the schools which would be training students for jobs are being suppressed (in what is a suppression of training persons to work for small business, which is only one more way that big business is in control of the economy, by not permitting the training of small-business employees through appropriate college, university or proprietary-school programs. Big business does not want small business to be competitive with big business so the first thing they've done is eliminate training of small business employees through the excessive regulation of proprietary school programs, and not having any programs whatsoever to train small business employees in any colleges or universities. I know because I created the first such course to train small- business employees. This is much different from courses that try to teach students how to be entrepreneurs, which generally have not been successful. What we need is training of persons who would be hired by existing small- business entrepreneurs instead.

The cost of attending NYU per year is about $70,000 ($63,472 in 2015 and increasing - source: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/010915/cost-studying-new-york-university-nyu.asp ), or 70 times more, thereby requiring student loans, lifelong student debt when finally (if at all) getting jobs that could never pay off the loans and allow the graduated student enough money to pay necessary living expenses for himself/herself or a family.

I explain all this at in my election-issues-us.com website, click on Low-Cost, Local, Effective Job-Oriented Education - $1,000 Per Year for 10,000,000 Jobs Paying $25-$60 or much higher per hour.

Explanatory Note as to Lawmall Website Development; Website Search Technique

My name is Carl E. Person, and I am an attorney located in New York, NY. I started this website in 1995 and have made hundreds of changes from then to the present, including Lawmall's new look (using "php"). When I started using professional programmers, I started using new URL's, but I still consider these "independent" websites part of my Lawmall. Many of my most important websites are not under this "Lawmall" structure, but I'm including them in the various lists below. Most of my Lawmall websites are pure HTML websites, which I'm gradually changing. My newer, professionally-programmed websites generally have or will have independent domain names. Regardless, I include both types in my list below, to try to have one place where I can refer to most of my websites.

Searching for Website Material I Have Published

To search this lawmall website for my own material, I use a search engine such as Google or Bing. I search for "Lawmall" + "Topic" such as "lawmall jury nullification".

All I do is put the word "lawmall" before what I'm searching for, and I could generally find what I'm looking for. Try it using a major search engine. Search for "jury nullification" with quotation marks (311,000 hits) and then search for: lawmall "jury nullification" with quotation marks (only 8 hits in 2007, but 97 in 2016).

A Self-Assessment of My Activities

Prior to Internet, I published two books (one book, published by Doubleday, sold 60,000 hardcover copies) and several articles. Internet encouraged me to write and publish many more times on a broad range of subjects. I am trying to provide access to most of the subjects through this single home page of lawmall (including the options in the left sidebar).

I have gone from writing about problems into writing about solutions. The solutions generally are not legal solutions, because the courts increasingly refrain from enforcing what in past years we considered our "rights" as citizens, residents, employees, homeowners and small business owners. As a result, I have turned to practical political solutions. I emphasize the word "practical" because I don't waste my time thinking about writing proposals to amend federal or state constitutions, or writing proposed statutes for enactment by Congress or state legislatures. I leave this to the highly-paid lobbyists who have been instrumental in stealing the United States from its lawful owners, through providing incentives to our elected officials to enact statutes, rules and enforcement policies that transfer the nation's wealth to the world's largest corporations, and deprive Americans of their standard of living and meaningful jobs. My hat is off to those of you who have worked hard to ruin America. You have done a great job, and your respective families will at some time recognize you for what you have done.

Meanwhile, there is a job to be done in trying to restore the United States in a variety of ways, such as in its economy, standard of living, a competitive and representative news media providing news needed by the public to make meaningful political and other decisions; health care availability and quality, oil prices, educational costs and opportunities, freedom from prosecutorial abuse and other governmental oppression, absense of major voter fraud, just to list some of the areas of my concern.

First Solution

I have three basic solutions:

The first is to reform the economics and quality of life of a single town in the United States, to create a model for reform which in theory should spread on a grass-roots basis to most other towns and villages in the country. In 2007 or so I tried doing this with a town I called "Hopeless, Indiana" (with the mayor wanting to start this makeover without any public announcement). Hopeless and I were starting to implement my concept for a "Town Attorney General", a tuition-free equivalency college (and remedial programs) for town residents; an area-wide payroll administrator to reduce the costs and time required for small businesses (and households hiring babysitters or domestic workers) when trying to comply individually with the federal, state and local payroll withholding and insurance requirements; and finally, we were going to try to sell the unused hours of town residents by registering residents and their tasks on my "task marketplace" myclads.com [no longer operational - but go to archive.org - the wayback website], and then advertise the database of "One Million Offered Tasks" to the 75-mile radius surrounding Hopeless (i.e., in a 17,671 square mile area), with the expectation of getting $25,000 to $50,000 in earnings per year for the average participating town resident. See my website election-issues-us.com for an explanation of the foregoing, and a major, more workable improvement on my equivalency college concept.

Note: I am looking for a town or group within a single town or village in the U.S. willing to spend $50,000 for a drive to register residents on a dedicated town website I will create, assist them in listing their tasks and goods they wish to buy or sell (hopefully an average of hundreds of tasks and goods per resident) and then advertise those tasks and goods to the 17,671 square miles (75-mile radius around the town - area = pi x radius squared) and bring in perhaps $250,000,000 or far more in revenue for town residents - assuming a town of about 10,000 population. Any town should jump at the chance of spending $50,000 for the purpose of bringing in $250,000,000 or more of annual income to its residents. If you, the reader of this paragraph, would like to start the ball rolling in your own town, please call me (Carl Person, 212-307-4444) and let's plan how you and I can go about doing this. Don't forget to study my election-issues-us.com website before calling me, which contains a lot of the answers to the questions you may have. Also, please look at my ballot initiative for Hudson NY, by clicking on Ballot Initiative for Hudson NY to require Hudson to spend $50,000 annually for advertising by radio a local database for residents and businesses.

Second Solution - Probably not as likely to occur as the other two

The second solution I propose is Internet based, through the creation and use of email mailing lists to serve as the nation's news media, to provide the news needed by the public to select, nominate, support and elect candidates who will represent the interests of voters rather than the interests of the top 1% of the economy, including the nation's and world's largest corporations.

I feel that by creating free websites of value to voters, I and others can create email lists of voters to enable voters to get weekly emails of information not being provided to them by the monopolized media. These email lists can be used to identify and promote the right type of candidates for public office, and help to get them elected, in competition with the main media who are highly successful in finding, promoting and electing tweedle-dum and/or tweedle-dee, with the election of either being acceptable to the economic forces controlling the United States and the major media. The problem with this second proposed solution is that it is difficult to obtain valid email addresses in the numbers needed; the emails would probably be disregarded or considered spam in too many instances; and there is no way of demonstrating success (to encourage others to do the same) unlike the other two options.

Third Solution - NYS oriented through a ballot initiative

New York State offers an excellent opportunity to achieve political change from the ground up, through New York law that permits voters in 62 cities throughout New York State to enact laws themselves, provided the laws include the financing needed. These laws, however, are not allowed to change the office of the prosecutor or the office of the county clerk. For 42 proposed statutes which should be enacted by NYC voters please look at my website 42 NYC Statutes for Enactment by NYC Voters in Ballot Initiatives. Also, look at my voterlaws.com website for 15 fully-prepared ballot initiatives, by clicking on 15 Fully-Prepared Ballot Initiatives for use with slight modification in any of NYS's 62 cities.

If voters can pass laws in spite of their elected legislators, voters can start seeing an improvement in their position. For example, in NYC the mayor (Bloomberg starting in 2001, followed by di Blasio starting in 2009) is attempting to force "congestion pricing" down the throats of voters, motorists and persons living outside of Manhattan. I have prepared a ballot-initiative petition which, if adopted by NYC voters, would declare congestion pricing illegal. See my petition at Petition to Make Congestion Pricing Illegal in NYC. Also, see my website against congestion pricing - updated in December, 2016 as to my ill-fated Article 78 lawsuit to end the deliberately-created congestion, at Website and Article 78 Lawsuit against Congestion Pricing in NYC.

Another problem I'm working on is trying to make work more meaningful and more valuable to voters and residents. We should not become a nation of Wal-Mart associates, at $8.50 per hour, no benefits, and a 28-hour workweek. You can't live on $12,376 per year (28 x $8.50 x 52) before or after taxes. One of my solutions (discussed partially under "First Solution" above) for the problem of our diminishing base of good jobs is to have a national database of tasks that each website user would like to perform for money, with a 75-mile ZIP Code radius to enable the providers of the tasks to be found in the geographic area in which the tasks are to be performed. Take a look at my website www.myclads.com in archive.org (meaning "My Classified Advertisements"). Through community use of this website, the community can create a vibrant economy for its members, and persons living in the surrounding area. The persons who are benefited from this new income are more inclined to listen to the persons providing them with new income - as to political matters - than the persons responsible for taking away their standard of living. This seems to be a key to political change, perhaps hard to grasp by everyone, but there nevertheless. You can compare the situation to the "ward healers" in NYC from the 1790's to the 1960's (see Wikipedia entry for "Tammany Hall"). The political wards had "healers" or "ward healers" who took care of the people living in the ward (really, a welfare system), and could count upon them to vote for the candidates being supported by the ward healer. This is a bottoms up approach which is needed in the United States at this time. We need to get more money to most of the voters by giving them greater earning opportunities, and an all-purpose website for the offering and sale of all types of goods and services limited to the residents and businesses in a specific town, village or city is undoubtedly the way to do this, provided the website is properly marketed by the town, village or city involved. See my website election-issues-us.com for a detailed description, by clicking on Local Website for Creating $25,000 to $50,000 Additional Income for Each Resident of a Town, Village or City.

During 2012, I ran for U.S. President, but failed to obtain nomination by the Libertarian Party, the 3rd largest party in the U.S., in spite of my demonstration of how 20,000,000 high-paying jobs can be created, easily, in the U.S. by adoption of the 3 reforms needed for achieving full employment. By the way, President Obama or his immediate staff must have looked for ideas he could adopt because on April 6, 2012 he signed into law a statute drafted by him two weeks earlier which enacted (among other things) the first of my 3 proposed reforms. Take a look at my website (carlperson2012.com) to see the 3 reforms needed for full employment. I'll bet that you are unable to name any of the 3 reforms, which is why we have massive unemployment. The public is not being told the real reason for unemployment.

I need some help in accomplishing these objectives, and if you are interested in getting involved, please let me know, by email to carlpers2@gmail.com

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