Oklahoma isn't working. Can anyone fix this failing American state?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
In the end, it's time to look at the value proposition everywhere, cutting education as deeply as they have should be a last resort. I'm all for cutting in most places, but it's pretty clear that they have larger issues to address than 4-day schools and a 1:12 felony rate will fix.
That's the easy part.
Maybe when an ultra conservative stake goes bankrupt, they will turn around.
Umm... the article is making the case for how Oklahoma is failing it's people. A case accompanied with publicly available data. The tone seems mostly reasonable.
> It sounds like criticism and resentment pointed at red states.
You seem to be the one who's conflating Oklahoma with red states.
If you think there's something wrong about the article, maybe critique something in the article. Right now, all you seem to be doing is lobbing ad-hominem attacks.
The author explicitly links Oklahoma to Trump by describing it as having the third-largest margin of victory in the presidential election. Hence the red state comment.
I don't think you actually read the article, because you assumed that i was lobbing ad-hominem attacks instead of directly referencing what the author has written.
Three points:
One, your argument seems to be with the title and the tone of the author's book. I'm looking purely at the content of the article which seems reasonable to me.
Second, the response of Oklahoma's /governor/ to falling revenues is prayer: > “Our situation is dire,” Oklahoma finance director Preston Doerflinger said. “To use a pretty harsh word, our revenues are difficult at best. Maybe they fall into the category of somewhat pathetic.”
> Governor Mary Fallin had an answer: prayer. The governor issued an official proclamation making 13 October Oilfield Prayer Day.
Doesn't that seem mind boggling to you? That definitely seems /dumb/ to me.
Third, I don't think that epithet "dumb okie" necessarily applies to you. The author's argument -- without having read the book -- seems to apply to a subset of Oklahoma. For instance the author is clearly sympathetic to the victims of police brutality, the teachers of Oklahoma etc.
> The author explicitly links Oklahoma to Trump by describing it as having the third-largest margin of victory in the presidential election. Hence the red state comment.
That's fair. Sidepoint: how do you feel about Pruitt at EPA?
your own black box idea of "Reasonable" is basically the justification for everything you're saying. I can't really communicate with you when you are setting the criteria for every point on which you and I seem to disagree.
And, then I even give examples from the article describing how they seem reasonable.
Look you clearly disagree with my criteria -- so go ahread and back that disagreement up with an example from the article.
And you totally glossed over something from the article that I referenced, instead calling it an ad hominem attack against the author. He straight up linked Oklahoma to Trump as a glaringly high-margin-of-victory state. I'm not disputing the vote tally, but I'm simply saying that the mention of it in the article expressed an opinion on the relationship between red-state conservatism and allegedly bad government.
So your comments aren't actually connected to what the author is saying, and my larger criticism of his bias. I don't buy the idea that the funding and role of the speaker are irrelevant. You seem to be pushing that idea pretty hard. It just seems like you're selectively ignoring certain aspects of the discussion because they don't line up with what you want to believe.
Not only that, but if I say something is a "failing" government entity, then I am absolutely setting a critical tone, and perhaps a pejorative one. You can have efficient, good government among religious folks, or you can have ineffective government among religious folks. There isn't a causality demonstrated by the author, but he still implies that government administered by religious people is naturally ineffective.
You're going through the motions of discussing the article but you're arbitrarily ignoring the context of the article, the bias clearly represented by the author both in the text and in his other work, and the links the author draws between Oklahoma, Trump and religion as a way of disparaging the state.
If you can't see that the author is not cold and unbiased in his arguments, and would clearly prefer to live in a more secular and socialist (why else criticize his own mother for refusing government welfare money) place than Oklahoma, then I don't know how to say anything that is "reasonable" in your view.
I totally agree.
I do note that the conversation about prisons, and about mental healthcare, is larger than Oklahoma.
There have also been incidents in recent years of police officers in Oklahoma killing innocent people of nonwhite descent. That conversation about police brutality is also larger than Oklahoma.
I think the best argument in criticism of the Oklahoma state government is to say: Look at the wealth amassed by oil companies like Continental, Devon Energy, and Chesapeake. Devon Energy was building a massive skyscraper during the financial crisis, as the rest of America reeled. Now juxtapose that massive profitability in oil and gas with Oklahoman problems like drug abuse among young people, inadequate funding for schools, and significant amounts of high school pregnancy. Clearly there's a disparity between what the petroleum companies are earning, and what Oklahoma is receiving (as a state) for its part as an enabler of their profits. Further, it's easy to argue that these firms not only benefit from selling Oklahoma's resources and harvesting talent from petroleum engineering programs in the state's public universities, they also have caused geological anomalies with yet-unknown consequences.
And I suppose Oklahomans are complicit in this, because ultimately they elect the government and they remain tacit about many things that happen in the state. But if there were a discussion, it would have to start with, "is this how an oil-rich region should function?"
Edit: and btw, I would argue that even if DVN, CLR, and CHK are going through a turbulent market moment, the problems we are discussing preceded the selloff in crude oil by at least a decade.
To put that in perspective, a single large frac well can pull in a million dollars a day easily.
The earthquake problem is caused by salt-water injection over-budgets (no, fracking does not cause earthquakes no matter what you read on the news). The better question is: why was this never an issue when business was _booming_ in the 70s-80s?
Obama's administration removed a key tax credit for prospecting businesses if they hit a dry hole (A tax credit that's available to any other business for failures). These wells used to be completed and leased as injection wells. Now, if a hole starts to appear dry, drilling is stopped and the well sealed and capped.
This has decrease the diversity of injection sites across the states, straining current infrastructure.
The state is an interesting mix of utterly dysfunctional state government and reasonably competent city governments, in a state where most of the people live in either Oklahoma City or Tulsa metro areas. I don't know much about Tulsa but Oklahoma City has repeatedly passed sales taxes over the last 30 years in order to bring about civic improvements. These tax plans are known as MAPS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Area_Projects_Pla... These plans have been executed pretty much according to what they claimed to do, and the administration over the years has been competent and uncontroversial.
The state government, on the other hand, is totally dominated by the homophobia, Islamophobia, and the rest of the guns-and-gays distractions of the national far right. State government has repeated slashed taxes on oil and gas extraction, plunging the state into the crisis described in this article. No meaningful debate ever takes place in the state legislature or executive. Campaigns are fought entirely on the basis of who hates gays and loves Jesus more than the other guy. It is really sad, and a strange contrast to the major local governments.
When I was going to high school in Oklahoma I was offered a perfectly adequate education at the public school nearest my house. We had all the AP subjects. We had music, drama, and art. We had football, baseball, basketball, swimming, and any other sport you'd care to think of, even rodeo. Of course we didn't have sex education, which is why Oklahoma suffered from, and continues to suffer from the worst teen birth rate of any state in the nation.
Back then, people went to private schools only because either their parents were utterly unhinged Jesus freaks, or because they failed out of the public schools. Private schools were for weirdos and losers. Now it's the opposite. No family with any kind of money sends their children to public school in Oklahoma. The state educational apparatus has completely failed in the span of only about 25 years.
If you graduated ten years ago you probably got, according to aggregate measures, an education on par with the one being offered 25 years ago. The real crisis has accelerated in the last five years. Per-pupil spending is declining not only in real dollars, but even in nominal dollars, and stood fourth-lowest among the states in 2014. It is even lower today.
With such leadership is it any wonder the state is failing? Oil is over. Either find another industry or accept the inevitable poverty. If the cities are indeed doing well, however, then it's hard to say the state is failing. Of course rural areas are poor, though the police and public workers could have some empathy and compassion, both sorely lacking. Rural areas will fail as they are failing and have been failing everywhere in the world. Only entitlement created by some unusually prosperous years due to oil have made the people not realize this.
This is about what you expect from kakistocracy.
If Illinois suffered an economic collapse I'm pretty sure the futures and options exchanges could be moved out of the city in short order. There are other big cities on Lake Michigan or Superior that can (and do) act as ports that could take over the shipping traffic. What else would be left?
I think this article touches on at least one of the problems: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/21/univer...
Here's a link to current projects that teachers in OKCPS are requesting: https://www.donorschoose.org/donors/search.html?state=OK&cit...
I haven't used the site yet, but know of several teachers who were able to purchase things for their classroom (computers, instruments, etc) that they wouldn't have been able to afford otherwise thanks to people asking questions like yours!
Add to that, shipping ports and the fact that both Hollywood and tech started there and a nice eternally warm climate and you have a recipe for a thriving economy. None of which have anything to do with political leanings.