Wind turbines have raped West Texas and the Great Plains: I hate the goddamn things

  John Prine wrote a lovely song called Paradise, a tribute to the landscape of his childhood, located "down by the Green River, where Paradise lay."

But that landscape was destroyed by strip mining, as Prine's lyrics attest. "I'm sorry my son, you're too late in asking; Mr. Peabody's coal trains have hauled it away."

Progressive Americans hate coal as they hate all fossil fuels. They lament the damage that was done by strip mining.

Let's stop drilling for oil and gas, they say. Let's stop mining for coal. Let's switch to renewable energy: solar power and wind power.

And the nation is going in that direction, faster than most Americans realize.  Enormous wind turbines are being erected on the Great Plains, turbines so large than an 18-wheeler can only transport one turbine blade at a time.

Year by year, wind power supplies a larger percentage of the nation's energy demands. But you have to drive over the High Plains to grasp the scope of the transformation.

Drive along Highway 84 across the Llano Estacado or motor up Highway 281 in western Oklahoma. Wind turbines by the thousands blight the landscape.

If you live in Boston, you may say that is all to the good. Sure, wind turbines destroy the grandeur of the prairie country, the majestic vistas of West Texas. But who cares?

After all, the nation's truly beautiful scenery only exists on America's East and West Coasts and in blue-state Colorado.  Nobody lives in West Texas, and those who do are elderly white people with non-progressive values who need to be ground down for the greater good.

But I disagree. The vast, lonely panoramas of the trans-Brazos country, the undulating hills of the Oklahoma short grass country are beautiful--as beautiful as the Rockies or the seascapes of California. This country once sustained the Kiowa, the Comanche, and the Cheyenne, who lived off the buffalo that grazed these lands in the millions.

If our national policy is to pollute our natural environment with wind turbines, I say let's share the pain. I will reconcile myself to wind turbines in West Texas when I can see them off the beaches of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and the Hamptons.

Voting with their feet: College enrollment dropped by 475,000 students in the fall of 2021

As the Chronicle of Higher Education reported recently, college enrollment dropped by 475,000 students last fall. Since the COVID pandemic began two years ago, undergraduate enrollment has plunged by 9.2 percent.

A look at college enrollment over the last 10 years shows an even more dramatic decline.  Dahn Shaulis, writing for Higher Education Inquirer, reported that college enrollment is down by 20 percent or more in 18 states during the past decade. Unless conditions change, Shaulis writes, most states will see enrollments drop by 25 percent in the 20226-2027 academic year when compared to enrollment levels in 2010.

COVID is blamed for the recent enrollment exodus.  Doug Shapiro, Executive Director of the National Student Clearing House Research Center, said that students "are continuing to sit out in droves" due to the pandemic, which has forced colleges all over the U.S. to switch from face-to-face instruction to an online teaching format.

But there are larger forces at play. As Shaulis explained:

Enrollment declines are the result of several interrelated economic and demographic shifts. Reduced populations of college age people, economic distress, growing inequality, and migration are some of the interacting factors. 

 And there is another factor at work--difficult to quantify. Young people have begun to figure out that a college education is too damned expensive and often does not lead to a good job.  Liberal arts majors, in particular, often find that their college degree was not a ticket to the good life. Instead, it was a trap that ensnared them in debt and sentenced them to a life of penury. 

Perhaps that is why the number of students majoring in the liberal arts declined by almost a million students last fall, a drop of 7.6 percent from the previous year (as reported by CHE).

We're outta here!

College students: Avoid majoring in liberal arts, social sciences, or humanities: "Nothing was delivered"

 "Nothing was delivered," the Byrds sang more than fifty years ago, and "nothing was received."

I have no idea what the Byrds were singing about when they cut Nothing Was Delivered, but they might have been referring to college degrees.

In 2015, the Department of Education posted its College Scoreboard, allowing people to determine the return on investment for thousands of academic programs across the United States. Several think tanks and policy organizations analyzed the data, and their findings are sobering.

According to Third Way, "a center-left, public policy group," people who graduate in electrical engineering and nursing have very high returns on their investment. Most will be earning more than their student debt within five years of graduation.

On the other hand, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity has terrible news for people getting degrees in the liberal arts. The poor schmucks who study art, music, philosophy, religion, and psychology are likely to end up financially worse off than if they had never gone to college. 

If you want to know more about the financial costs of majoring in liberal arts or the social sciences, you can read the various think-tank reports or the articles posted by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

But the bottom line is this. Given the transformation of the American workplace, with its increased focus on technological skills and mathematics, you would be nuts to take out student loans to get a college degree in a major that does not lead to a good job.

Why do so many colleges offer degrees that don't lead to remunerative employment? A couple of reasons. Schools have thousands of tenured professors teaching subjects for which there is falling demand. No one wants to take Professor Egghead's course on Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Soren Kierkegaard. Still, the old gasbag is tenured, and he's going to hang around the university until he is in his eighties.

Second, American universities are not subject to the laws of supply and demand. Enrollments in the humanities and the social sciences have been shrinking for decades. Colleges don't close these programs; they simply raise their prices to cover the growing cost of their bloated overhead and their unproductive faculty.

Students don't complain about rising tuition prices because they take out student loans to pay their tuition bills.  Millions of rubes don't realize they've been swindled until they graduate and suddenly realize they're hopelessly mired in college debt and have no job prospects.

As Friedrich Nietzsche observed, "Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed." That's good advice. Maybe Nietzsche was trying to warn people not to major in philosophy.

Friedrich Nietzsche: For God's sake, don't major in philosophy!

Who the hell is Maximus--the new giant student-loan servicer?

 On October 20 of last year, the Department of Education announced that Navient, a giant student-loan servicer, was turning its business over to Maximus, a government services company. 

DOE spokesperson Richard Cordray said this about the switchover:

We are confident this decision is in the best interest of the approximately 5.6 million federal student loan borrowers who will be serviced by Maximus and will provide the stability and high-quality service they deserve.

So, who the hell is Maximus? To start with, it is a publicly-traded company whose shares are worth about $77.  Bruce Caswell, Maximus's CEO, is well compensated; he made more than $6 million last year.

Maximus has 35,000 employees, including the drudges who chase down student-loan defaulters. How much do the low-end employees make? The new minimum wage for federal contractors was recently raised to $15 an hour. Last year, Maximus's hourly wage for low-end workers was around 13 bucks.

Forty-five million Americans have outstanding student loans, and Maximus will be servicing 5.6 million of them. For those lucky millions, Maximus will be collecting student-loan payments and keeping track of delinquent debtors and defaulters.  Maximus will also replace Navient as the agent that will help student-loan borrowers switch repayment plans and certify eligibility for loan-forgiveness programs.

Navient, you recall, recently settled multiple lawsuits accusing it of deceptive trade practices.  As Pennsylvania's Attorney General summarized:

Navient repeatedly and deliberately put profits ahead of its borrowers – it engaged in deceptive and abusive practices, targeted students who it knew would struggle to pay loans back, and placed an unfair burden on people trying to improve their lives through education.

Will Maximus do a better job servicing student loans than Navient? Maybe, but probably not.

However, of one thing you can be sure. Navient's stockholders will do alright. And who are those stockholders?

They include institutional investors like BlackRock and giant banks such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America. 

And--ponder this: At least 17 public-employee retirement funds own shares in Maximus, including funds for California, Louisiana, New York, Oregon, and Wisconsin.

So if you are one of those 5.6 million Americans whose student loans are being serviced by Maximus and you are being ground down by your debt, you can take comfort in the fact that a lot of massive institutions--both public and private--are doing just fine.

Note: This blog relies heavily on Dahn Shaulis's reporting for Higher Education Inquirer. 

You should have bought Navient stock a year ago: Navient settles deceptive lending claims for $1.85 billion

 Forty state attorneys general sued Navient Corporation for deceptive lending practices in its student loan business. Navient settled the lawsuits last week for $1.85 billion.  

The loan giant admitted no wrongdoing, saying the claims against it were "unfounded."

The participating states will split $145 million, and Navient will forgive 66,000 private student loans.  In addition, Navient will pay $260 apiece to 350,000 federal student borrowers whose loans were serviced by Navient.

Did this settlement bring Navient to its knees? No, it did not. 

Almost exactly one year ago, Navient stock was worth about eleven dollars. What's it worth today? Twenty-one bucks.

During the past year, Navient sold its federal student-loan servicing business to an outfit called Maximus, which already had its tentacles in the healthcare industry. Then it settled lawsuits for deceptive lending, which cost it $1.85 billion.

But Navient will stay in the private student-loan business, which must be profitable. After all, Navient's stock price nearly doubled within the last year.

If you were one of the 350,000 student borrowers who will be getting a $260 check, lucky you! You'll be able to pay your light bill next month.

A measly 260 bucks

Why does Oklahoma have 8630 licensed marijuana growers and only 471 dairy farms?

 When I was in college, it was a felony to possess marijuana in any amount. If the cops caught you with it, you could go to the state penitentiary for a very long time.

When I was a child, Oklahoma prohibited the sale of hard liquor. Okies could drink 3.2 percent beer (usually Coors), but they couldn't buy a bottle of whiskey or order an Old Fashioned in an Oklahoma restaurant.

When I was growing up, there was no legal gambling in Oklahoma: no lottery, no casinos, no slot machines, and no video poker. 

My, how times have changed!

Medical marijuana has been legalized, and you can buy it in special dispensaries all over the state. The dispensary in my hometown of Anadarko is on Main Street.

Indeed, Oklahoma now has 8,630 licensed marijuana growers--18 times the number of dairy farms. The state lists them on a website, and ten growers give their addresses as Anadarko.

Once considered a grave sin in the Sooner State, gambling is now legal. The Native American tribes have casinos all over Oklahoma. One does business just two miles outside my hometown.

If you want to drink while you gamble (and who doesn't?), you don't have to find a bootlegger anymore. You can order a cocktail at the casino bar.

Ain't life grand? 

Even better, hardly anyone goes to church now. When I was a child, I got up on Sunday mornings, shined my shoes, put on my clip-on bow tie, and trotted off to Sunday School. 

My teachers kept track of attendance, and if I had a perfect attendance record for one year, I received a lovely ceramic pin for the lapel of my little sports coat.

Everyone went to church in those days, and adults dressed up for the occasion. Most men owned one suit, which was reserved for weddings, funerals, and church.

Of course, a few people still attend church on Sundays in my hometown--primarily old people. But the church parking lots are no longer full.

Anyway, what do the pastors preach about now?  Don't drink? Don't gamble? Don't do drugs? Oklahoma's politicians tell us all that stuff's OK.

When I was a child, some evangelical ministers preached that going to the movies was a sin (and they may have been right!).  But there are no movie theatres in my hometown anymore, so why bring up the subject?

I wish I could say Oklahomans are happier now that they can drink, gamble, and smoke marijuana. But I don't think they are.

Feel like praying? Go to the Prayer Teepee.

"A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground": I return to Anadarko

 I grew up in Anadarko, a small town settled near the banks of the Washita River in southwestern Oklahoma's Caddo County.

Anadarko was a thriving community when I was a child. Family shops lined Broadway, the town's main street. Farmers and their families came to town on Saturdays to do their weekly shopping, and elderly Plains Indians gathered on the sidewalks, talking to one another in Kiowa and Comanche.

Our town boasted a fine Victorian courthouse, as elegant as any county courthouse in Texas. The town square had a bandstand and a statue honoring the Caddo County boys who died in the Great World War.

And what a statue! A life-size bronze figure of a doughboy stood on a granite pedestal, where the names of all the dead were listed. The soldier wore a campaign hat and a uniform with puttees. In one hand, he held the staff an American flag. In the other, he clutched the barrel of his Springfield rifle. 

Facing the courthouse square stood the First Methodist Church, erected in 1917 in the Greek Revival Style. A Tudor-style Presbyterian church and the First Baptist Church also faced the square. All these churches were full when I was a child.

I returned to Anadarko a few days ago, and the town of my boyhood is gone. The county bureaucrats tore down the Victorian courthouse in the 1950s and replaced it with a concrete structure built in the mid-century modern style--which, of course, is no style at all.

The Presbyterian church still stands but is closed-- not enough Presbyterians to pay the light bill. The Methodist church can't afford its own preacher anymore and shares a minister with a nearby town. The Baptist church stands abandoned, although a new church was erected at the edge of town.

The bandstand is gone, and so is the bronze doughboy. All the local businesses are closed, wiped out by Walmart, which sells everything a rural Oklahoman could ever need.

Anadarko’s losses are sad, but the new town is sadder still.

I drove by the home my father built with his own hands in 1953. It is empty now and looked abandoned, just one of a few hundred abandoned houses in the town.

Anadarko had two movie houses when I was a kid, as well as a drive-in movie theater. They are all gone—killed off by television.

Of course, there are new things for the townspeople to do. The Plains Tribes are now in the gambling business, and the citizens of Anadarko can gamble with the Kiowa, the Comanche, the Fort Sill Apache, or the Wichita. Most casinos are open until 2 AM if they can’t sleep and want to play the slots.

When I was a kid, a person could be sent to state prison for possessing a single marijuana joint. But times have changed. 

Now there’s a medical marijuana dispensary on Anadarko's Main Street. Of course, you have to have a medical prescription, but I don’t imagine it is difficult to find an accommodating doctor.

And my hometown's marijuana might have been grown locally. Oklahoma has hundreds of licensed marijuana-growing sites, and ten are near Anadarko.

Perhaps these marijuana greenhouses brought new jobs to Anadarko, which would be good. But no, growers bring in workers from outside.  Someone told me that some of the guys who grow marijuana in Caddo County are Chinese.

But at least the landscape of my childhood is still lovely—the stunning Oklahoma sunsets, the red-dirt hills, and the timeless vistas of the Great Plains.

But again, no. Corporate America has built hundreds of wind turbines in Caddo County—scarring the landscape I once believed could never be changed. 

Anadarko—abandoned homes, closed businesses, a marijuana dispensary, and nearby gambling dens. No wonder many of the people I saw looked clinically depressed. The town has a high suicide rate—primarily young people.

As I stood in the courthouse square, I saw an empty lot where someone had painted a mural on the side of a building—a mural that proclaimed this cryptic message: 

A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.

I do not know if the hearts of Anadarko’s women are on the ground. But if they are not, the town has some goddamned strong women.