Your last paragraph--about places changing hands--really speaks loudest to me. New managers and new DOSs over and over again. There's no continuity of anything, and that seems to me the best way for oppurtunistic (deceitful) people to ply their wares. Built in loop holes and ever-changing rules get pretty demoralizing after a while. And that's just within the confines of a school or learning center; add on top of that the corruptive nature of government agencies and the overt distrust of each side toward the other and it all becomes a beehive of deceit.

There must be an end point somewhere, but where?

Maybe it time to unionize. If Walmart employees in China can, maybe the rest of us can!