#he has no respect for 250 years of national precedent

[nefretemerson]

birthright citizenship is one of The best things about america. birthright citizenship is constitutionally protected and no law of congress or executive order from the president can legally take it away.

[scottguy]

Rich white privilege is pure injustice.

We have two legal systems... one for the poor that's super strict and sends people to jail for a long time for minor property or drug crimes.

The second legal system is for the wealthy that gives just fines for inhumane behavior, such as breaking child labor laws, unsafe working conditions, or polluting the local community - all things that actually hurt multiple people far more than any simple drug possession.

If you're rich, you can keep justice at bay with endless appeals on minor technicalities using all the lawyers you can afford. (Trump is a perfect example of that.)

All justice and punishment are put on hold for YEARS while the criminal appeals his (obvious) crimes all the way to the Supreme Court hoping for a sympathetic judge to ignore reality.

Finally, of course, white, powerful politicians, like Jim Jordan, can break and ignore laws with impunity. No one enforces any ethics behavior. There's no real mechanism. The worst that happens is that you get fired / expelled.

Mitch McConnell broke his oath to uphold the constitution by refusing to do his job and fill the Supreme Court vacancy. He cheated American voters of the representation VOTERS WANTED, and he just got away with it.

The press treated his dereliction of duty as if it was JUST a clever strategy to refuse to meet his ethical legal responsibility and cheat American voters. (We should have taken to the streets and had a national strike.)

Trump broke the emoluments clause - one of our most BASIC rules in the most crucial laws of all in the US, our constitution, a law designed to protect us from corrupt presidents.

Yet, no one of significance said a word! Just like McConnell, breaking his oath was met with a shrug. (Probably because corruption for personal gain in American politics is simply business-as-usual. So, fellow corrupt politicians didn't want to rock the boat by calling it out. )

Breaking your oath to the country should be first met with political impeachment, then conviction, and, finally, because those two consequences are purely political, followed by actual criminal trials.

Politicians are routinely breaking their oaths now in order to circumvent democracy. Nothing serious has happened to them! Seditionists are still in office being treated as if they deserve respect.

We need to pass laws making breaking your oath, as a legislator or office holder for our country, punishable in criminal court (after a 2nd legal trial)

Corruption for personal gain has been a long-standing problem for all governments everywhere.

But this corruption ....

... as a means of circumventing democracy ....

is new and extremely dangerous.

We can't rely, like we have for the past 250 years, on politicians just choosing to do the right thing, because it's good for their country.

Trump led politicians down the path of putting themselves ahead of United States democracy.

Disrespecting our democracy used to be considered unthinkable!

But now such behavior has become commonplace due to the traitorous precedents set by Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and certain members of our Supreme Court.

(via mhnt4rnd8sda1.jpg (JPEG Image, 924 × 960 pixels))

[misfitwashere]

Judge J. Michael Luttig's endorsement of Kamala Harris in full:

Endorsement of Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris

Almost four years ago now, on January 6, 2021, a stake was driven through the heart of America’s Democracy, and on that day American Democracy was left teetering on a knife’s edge. On that day, the prescribed day for choosing the American president, there was not a peaceful transfer of power in the United States of America — for the first time in the almost 250 years since the Founding of the Nation.

As a consequence of the former president’s continued denial of that appalling day, and his defiance of America’s Democracy to this day almost four years later, millions of Americans still believe that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from the former president, despite the fact that he lost that election fair and square in what has been proven over and over to have been the freest, fairest, and most accurate election in American history.

Because of the former president’s continued, knowingly false claims that he won the 2020 election, millions of Americans no longer have faith and confidence in our national elections, and many never will again.

Because of the former president’s knowingly false claims, many Americans — especially young Americans, tragically — have even begun to question whether constitutional democracy is the best form of self-government for America.

The 2020 presidential election of course was not “stolen” from the former president and he knows that. It was the former president who attempted to steal the 2020 presidential election from the American People, not they from him. To attempt to steal an election in the United States of America is to attempt to steal America’s Democracy.

For the former president to continue to persist in the knowingly false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him is a profound affront to American Democracy and to the Constitution of the United States — an affront without any precedent in all of American history.

In his utterly inexplicable obsession to this very day to deny, attempt to justify, even to glorify January 6, and to bludgeon Americans into believing that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him when he knows it was not, the former president has corrupted America’s Democracy.

Yet, to this day — to this day still — not only does the former president, and now the Republican Party of which he is again the standard bearer, continue to falsely claim that the former president won the 2020 election. He and his Party defiantly refuse even to pledge that they will honor and respect the vote and the will of the American People in the upcoming presidential election. In this defiant refusal, the Republican candidate for the presidency and the Republican Party have literally taken America political hostage, threatening the Nation with the specter of another January 6, 2021 on January 6, 2025, if the former president again loses his campaign for the presidency by a vote of the American People.

Until January 6, 2021, there was a peaceful transfer of power from one President of the United States to his successor for almost 250 years. The peaceful transfer of power from one President of the United States to the next and the commitment of presidential candidates and their respective political parties to the peaceful transfer of power in the next election are fundamental tenets of our constitutional Republic. Adherence to these tenets is essential to American Democracy, American governance and government, and to the Rule of Law in the United States of America. Without the peaceful transfer of power, America would have no democracy.

The politicians tell us that America’s Democracy and the Rule of Law are too “abstract” to “resonate” with American voters. If that was ever true in the past, which I do not accept, it is emphatically not true today. For reasons we all know too well, there could not possibly be any more concrete and consequential issues for the Nation and the American voter today than America’s Democracy and Rule of Law. America’s Democracy, and along with it the Rule of Law, were almost stolen from us on January 6, 2021, by the former President of the United States, who is, today, asking us to return him to the Highest Office of trust in the land.

America’s Democracy and Rule of Law are the defining features of our Nation. It is America’s Democracy, Constitution, and Rule of Law that have made America the envy of the world and the beacon of democracy and freedom for the world for almost 250 years.

This presidential election is a test of Americans’ commitment to America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law. It is so because the former president and the Republican Party have shamefully made it so.

The often lofty, at times even noble, policy differences that have been the hallmark of American Politics and partisan debate for almost a quarter of a millennium pale in comparison to the foundational national policy issues of America’s Democracy, Constitution, and Rule of Law. American Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law are the stakes — the only real stakes — in the upcoming election.. Having made them so, these foundational issues of our times cannot now be wished away by the former president and his Republican Party, as they would have it. And they must not be wished away by the American People.

The fact remains to this day that even the loftiest and noblest of policies and policy differences will be comparatively inconsequential unless and until we Americans bring to an end the war on America’s Democracy that was instigated by the former president and his allies on January 6, 2021. For their part, the former president and the Republican Party have determined to prosecute their war against America’s Democracy to its catastrophic end. As a consequence, for our part, “We the People” must bring this unholy war to an end – now.

The Founders of our Nation and the Framers of our Constitution feared most of all this very moment in American history, when the American People would be tempted by the seductive demagoguery of a modern-day populist demagogue. In a letter to George Washington in 1792, over 230 years ago, Alexander Hamilton warned of this day and this demagogue, who would “mount the hobby horse of popularity” and whose “objects” “may justly be suspected to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

Thomas Jefferson agreed with Alexander Hamilton about very little, except about the existential danger to the Republic of a populist demagogue. “If once elected, and at a second or third election outvoted by one or two votes, he will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the States voting for him,” Jefferson presciently wrote to James Madison in 1787.

The time for America’s choosing has come. It is time for all Americans to stand and affirm whether they believe in American Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law, and want for America the same — or whether they do not.

The former president and the Republican Party have cynically framed this choice as a Hobson’s choice and they have cynically forced their supposed Hobson’s choice upon the Nation. But they have chosen as their standard bearer the one man who is singularly unfit to embody and represent not only to the Nation, but to the world, America’s sacred Democracy, Constitution, and Rule of Law.

In a word, for America and Americans, this is no Hobson’s choice at all.

America’s two political parties are the political guardians of American Democracy. Regrettably, in the presidential election of 2024 there is only one political party and one candidate for the presidency that can claim the mantle of defender and protector of America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law.

As a result, I will unhesitatingly vote for the Democratic Party’s candidate for the Presidency of the United States, Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris.

In voting for Vice President Harris, I assume that her public policy views are vastly different from my own, but I am indifferent in this election as to her policy views on any issues other than America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law, as I believe all Americans should be.

In the 2024 election for President of the United States, there are no more important issues for America.

It is our Democracy, our Constitution, and our Rule of Law that bind us together as Americans. We Americans must never allow ourselves to be put asunder from this that binds us by the siren calls of the politicians and the political sophists, the mercenaries and the opportunists, who entreat us that the only thing that matters in this presidential election is the candidates’ different positions on the sundry policies of the day. All, as if nothing had come before.

We Americans know all too well what has come before. We understand what the political class does not want us to understand. That in the presidential election of 2024, the candidates’ policy differences are the least that matters to the United States of America.

J. Michael Luttig

<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25050952-luttig-endorsement>

[keywestlou]

GOODNESS WILL RISE

An unusual occurrence last night. My blog talk radio show only went 15 minutes. Normally, a half hour show.

The company I operate the blog through keeps me advised time wise what is happening. End of the show especially. I receive a 60 second warning and then a 30 second one. I hear them. You do not.

Last night, I heard the 60-30 second warnings at the end of 15 instead of 30 minutes. Nothing I could do but sign off. I swiftly explained to my audience what was happening.

Only the second time this has occurred. The last time no one could tell me why. Sloan will check it out and see if there is a reason this time.

You might think I could use the unused material next week. Does not work that way. Material has to be fresh. most reportable events stale after a week.

During the past Presidential race, Trump assured the American people he would clean up the Washington swamp. He has failed to do so. If anything, the swamp is in worse condition. I would describe it at this time as a cesspool. Maybe even a toilet.

There is a saying that quality rises to the surface. So it does also with goodness. Goodness will overcome the pollutant which has become our national government and is best represented by Trump himself.

Occurrences everywhere. If you do not see them, you are blind. Abuses of all kinds. To children and women. Evangelicals having sold their souls to politics. A President whose greatest claim on the road to the Presidency was his success with women. A President who paid 2 women significant monies prior to his election to keep their mouths shut re his extra-marital activities.

Republicans for over a 100 years were the protectors of Christian values. Now fearful of offending the President, they quietly accept his malfeasances. The abuses heaped upon immigrant children. A President who shows no respect for anyone or group other than himself. A man who is delivering the U.S. into anarchy. The newest scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein could prove to be the biggest of all time. It will touch many. Perhaps even the White House.

So many things. The preceding a mere handful.

I hope the U.S. will survive. Goodness and character return. It is difficult for me to believe that 250 years of democratic government can be torn down by one man in 2 1/2 years.

Let us hope not.

Three times a year Mel Fisher Treasures sponsors a treasure search. The most recent one a search for emeralds.

Mel Fisher’s boat the Magruder still in service. The crew this time took interested persons to the underwater Emerald Island. It sits near the portion of the discovered Atocha.

Several Mel Fisher staff members join in the search.

A winner this year! Another Jean Thornton!

Megan McDowell is the public relations and marketing manager for Mel Fisher. She saw what appeared to be an emerald sitting among some rocks. She swam over and took it.

Turns out the emerald is relatively large. Like 2 carats. High quality. Value to be determined by experts.

Megan has a winner!

Lobster Mini Season will soon be upon us. Two days. July 24 and 25. Strictly for sport fisherman. Commercial boaters not permitted. The regular season runs from August 6 to March 31.

Fun time!

Recall all the boats going out in Shark to capture the denizen of the deep. That is how it is during the 2 day mini season. Hundreds of boats. Thousands of fishermen.

Barry not yet Barry. Close, however.

I mentioned yesterday that a tropical storm was brewing in the Gulf. Might turn into a hurricane. If it made tropical storm, the government would name it Barry.

The storm is still forming. Not yet at tropical level. Expected to be there tomorrow. So I will refer to it as Barry from this point forward.

Heavy rains, flooding and strong winds expected. Barry will hit somewhere along the Louisiana coast. If not, Mississippi. Could be the Mississippi and Florida’s Panhandle. Could be all three. Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida.

Nothing certain yet.

Rain will begin wednesday morning and continue through saturday. Much too much rain expected. Ten to twenty inches.

Barry hitting Florida’s Panhandle will be an additional hit for the area. It got beat up with Irma and Michael. Not recovered as yet. Only minimally.

On this date in 1821, the American flag was raised for the first time at St. Augustine and the Spanish flag lowered. The event marked the end of Spanish rule in Florida.

A bit of humor and an environmental disaster.

Jim Beam is killing tens of thousands of fish. Alcohol! Even marine life can suffer therefrom.

The fish did not become drunk, however.

Jim Beam has a facility for the making of its product in Versailles, Kentucky. Part of it is a large warehouse. Forty five thousand barrels stored in the warehouse.

A fire occurred. The 45,000 barrels were displaced and their contents flowed into a nearby river. The fish were contaminated by the alcohol. Not made drunk. Did not die from alcohol poisoning. Affected otherwise.

The fish cannot breathe due to the sugar in the alcohol. The sugar creates a microbe feeding frenzy in the water which reduces the water’s oxygen level and suffocates the fish.

The recent Jim Beam event not the first such. In 2000, a fire occurred at a nearby Old Turkey warehouse. Seventeen thousand barrels involved. Ten of thousands fish  killed.

Enjoy your day!

    GOODNESS WILL RISE was originally published on Key West Lou

[oilsteven80-blog]

How Zillow’s Stan Humphries came to define the role of “data guru”

Stan Humphries (Illustration by Mario Wagner)

The loosely defined term “big data” is on the lips in real estate offices around the world these days, describing sets of facts and figures that are too large and complex to work with using nonspecialized computers. The industry’s so-called “big data gurus” are designing algorithms parsing the data that do everything from calculate a home’s market value to match commercial spaces with ideal tenants.  

Stan Humphries, chief economist and chief analytics officer for the Zillow Group, is the O.G. who defined the role of data guru. He is the man behind the first Zestimate algorithm and was instrumental in other tools that have attracted millions of users to the platform, helping to make Zillow the $10 billion company it is today. 

Humphries set a precedent for the role of chief economist in the real estate space — someone who could crunch numbers, spot trends and then hop on a call with a reporter and explain it to the average American, thereby driving Zillow brand awareness sky-high. 

“He certainly set an industry standard for what it means to be a chief economist,” said Ralph McLaughlin, former chief economist for Trulia, which is owned by the Zillow Group. “Some of his work is the most respected out there, and he set a standard in terms of his ability from an external perspective to be a very clear and coherent expert in the housing market, and that’s not easy.”

The key to getting the public to appreciate and understand the products and the insights Zillow produced was Humphries’ ability to put a cogent message together, sources said.

“Stan was certainly a pioneer in the space because he had this mixture of solid data analytics, this ability to take things from economics and forecasting to figure out what this means for the market, and also an element of storytelling,” said former Realtor.com chief economist Jonathan Smoke.

A zap to the market

There’s no greater example of the tectonic shift big data is capable of than Humphries’ Zestimate, an algorithmic home pricing feature launched 12 years ago, when “big data” was a term rarely heard beyond the campus lawns of Silicon Valley.

The Zestimate is calculated using millions of points of publicly available and privately submitted data, like square footage, sales comps and property tax data. It awakened the residential real estate industry to the possibilities of big data and armed potential buyers with a wealth of information — much to the chagrin of some brokers who have long argued that the Zestimate can be wildly off-target, projecting values that can be over or under a home’s actual market value by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But like it or not, the Zestimate had a huge impact on the market. “It’s a topic of conversation in nine out of 10 meetings,” said Los Angeles-area Pacific Union International agent Sonia Cabrera, who said she saw an immediate impact on the L.A. market when the Zestimate came out in 2006. “Before, it was based on postcards and phone calls from agents.”

The man behind the formula had zero experience in real estate prior to Zillow — something Humphries admitted to Spencer Rascoff when the CEO first asked him to come aboard to “figure out what every house in the country was worth” in 2005.

At that time, Humphries had fairly recently gotten his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia’s government program and was running analytics at the travel website Expedia, where he met Rascoff. The CEO said in an interview last year that he shrugged off Humphries’ concerns about knowing nothing about real estate. “This is a math problem,” Rascoff said he told Humphries. “It has nothing to do with real estate.”

At Expedia, Humphries was creating models to better decide what products to show customers, as well as forecasting supply and demand at hotels. He was also interested in public policy, earning a master’s degree in foreign service at Georgetown University and working as a presidential fellow for the science adviser in the Clinton administration. He showed an early interest in using data to inform public policy, which proved crucial for Zillow a few years down the road.

“He wanted to get into big data before it was popular; he was one of the innovators,” said Humphries’ Ph.D. supervisor, Steve Finkel, who is department chair of political science at the University of Pittsburgh.

After launching Zestimate, Humphries continued to develop algorithms and frequently shared market reports and analyses on Zillow’s blog, Porchlight. The algorithms he helped build allowed him to quickly tailor data to spotlight interesting trends in local markets around the country — something that only the largest national brokerages could do at the time. He frequently highlighted Zillow’s products in those analyses, like the Zillow Home Value Index, the calculation of which is a mystery to those outside the company. 

Media in local markets across the country often picked up reports targeted to their regions, and Humphries made himself available to them, which helped spread Zillow’s name and attract users, said his friend Susan Athey, an economics of technology professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

“It was impressive that [Humphries] was able to build models and also talk to the media,” Athey said. “A standard data scientist might have a harder time talking to an economics reporter at a newspaper, but people like Stan are able to also bridge that gap.”

Athey teaches the mechanics behind online marketplaces and online advertising. As part of the first wave of tech economists on the scene during the internet explosion at the turn of the century, she has advised companies including Microsoft, where she is the consulting chief economist today.

Historically, economists had mostly been concerned with the macroeconomics of the business, the so-called “big picture,” and provided useful forecasts and analysis to decision-makers, but Athey and other economists at Silicon Valley pioneers like Google began carving out new paths in the field.

“In the early 2000s, starting with Hal [Varian, chief economist] at Google and myself at Microsoft, we saw the growth of a new type of chief economist who focused more on microeconomics issues — data-driven business decision-making as well as marketplace issues, marketplace design and policy,” she said. That’s exactly the position Humphries created at Zillow, which from his example eventually became popular industrywide.

The company kicked its public outreach up a notch in 2008, and that’s when Humphries’ star really began rising. Amid the housing crisis, leadership at Zillow saw what Rascoff later called in a Washington Post interview the “massive void in academia, government and in the media” for ���unbiased data” in real estate. He said that data from trade associations like the National Association of Realtors failed to reflect the reality of the declining market.

By making the data held dear by real estate professionals as transparent as possible — with the notable exception of sharing the proprietary Zestimate algorithm — Zillow aimed to captivate U.S. homebuyers and sellers. And of course, the more people who logged in curious about their Zestimate, the more eyes on the ads Zillow sold.

Humphries was promoted from vice president of data and analytics to chief economist in 2009. He and Zillow went to Washington, D.C., and presented data from tools like the Zillow Home Value Index to public policy groups and lawmakers, hoping to be their new go-to data source.

Establishing a presence in the capital was a canny move. In 2011, Humphries was called to testify before a congressional committee about ways to address the 1.5 million homes in foreclosure at the time. Likewise, in 2012, Rascoff moderated a Google Hangout with then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan and a group of homeowners.

Zillow’s public profile hit a peak in 2013 when Rascoff secured a one-on-one interview with then-President Barack Obama about the latter’s housing policy plans. The announcement of the interview caused Zillow’s stock value to spike by around $7.29 per share, or $250 million total, which brought the valuation of the company’s 34.5 million outstanding shares to upwards of $3.3 billion.

“It was absolutely part of our marketing plan,” Rascoff said in the Post interview of Zillow’s Washington outreach. “As a result of being the biggest real estate site on the Web, increasingly politicians are coming to us to say, ‘Hey, how can we get the word out, and how can we interact directly with homeowners?’”

Resurgence of an old-school role

Eyeing Zillow’s wall-to-wall media coverage, competitors in the last several years have been adding chief economists to their own rosters in the hopes of mirroring Zillow’s success.

News Corporation’s Realtor.com, a listings platform with close ties to frequent Zillow critics at the National Association of Realtors, hired Smoke as its first chief economist in July 2014.

Each chief economist at various entities could offer something unique to the market thanks to access to their company’s data sets, Smoke said. For example, he could provide more insight to the supply side of the market, because Realtor.com had access to “practically all of the inventory in the country,” Smoke said.

“We were all competing with each other in that arms race,” Smoke, who left the company in 2017, told TRD. “We were all very firmly encouraged by our organization to be thought leaders, producing insights that were relevant,” he said.

A brokerage with a listings platform similar to Zillow, Redfin, hired veteran economist Nela Richardson in 2014 as its first chief economist and based her in D.C. She developed public policy and interfaced with media outlets. Richardson left the company in June and her new employer, Edward Jones, said she could not comment for the story at the time of publication.

Redfin’s job posting for chief economist reads like Humphries’ job description. “The Redfin chief economist forms and communicates the Redfin point-of-view on the American housing market, as well as the company’s position on legislation and policy that affect housing and personal finance,” it states. “The charter of the position is to further Redfin’s thought leadership in the issues that matter to homeowners, aspiring homeowners, buyers, and sellers.”

But not everyone is 100 percent sold on the need for a data guru.

Rich Sarkis, CEO of Reonomy, which provides data tools for the commercial real estate industry, has a big tech and data team but no public-facing chief economist. The company recently closed a Series C round of fundraising, so he and his co-founders are thinking of bringing someone in, but it’s not a sure thing.

“There’s a different school [of thought] that says, ‘Hey, if you’ve got the data and you make it so easy to access, you empower the user to become the economist themselves,’” he said. “Then they can start to slice and dice your data. The end user becomes the evangelist.”

Investors hungry for proptech

The opportunities presented by harnessing big data in just the right ways have in recent years opened up a new revenue stream for real estate tech firms, but whether they’ll actually turn the efforts into profits largely remains to be seen. 

VCs sank $18.6 billion into real estate property technology — known as proptech — firms from 2015 to 2017, and more than 25 percent of that came in the fourth quarter of last year alone, according to a report from real estate tech research and marketing agency Re:Tech.

The Japanese firm Softbank poured $4.4 billion into WeWork last year, and Compass — which recently announced that it will begin licensing its technology to other firms — has raked in $550 million in funding ($450 million of which also came from Softbank). 

Commercial brokerages like JLL and Colliers International are also getting into the game, launching their own proptech accelerator labs in which engineers design specialized software products fueled by their respective mountains of market information. 

Sarkis said the idea is to create a product that’s “very heavyweight on the back end but intuitive, elegant and easy to use on the front end.”

“[Investors are] really looking for something that can bring the data monster to heel,” he said. 

Correction: an earlier version of this story said that Zillow’s stock value rose to $250 million following Spencer Rascoff’s interview with President Barack Obama. It went up by $7.29 per share, or $250 million in total, to around $3.3 billion.

Source: https://therealdeal.com/la/issues_articles/stan-humphries-zillow/

[topmixtrends]

THE FIRST-EVER Broadway revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America recently opened at the Neil Simon Theatre in New York City. The production, starring Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane, is as close to a perfect representation of the AIDS-era masterwork as any theatergoer could hope to see: the play’s alternately intimate and epic impulses are here happily aligned, and under Marianne Elliott’s direction, the two-part play more than lives up to its extravagant subtitle, “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” Twenty-five years have passed since Angels first came to Broadway, and though the play remains politically relevant today, such relevance registers as beside the point: its themes now feel not so much “national” as borderless. I saw the whole production — all seven-and-a-half hours of it — over the course of a single Saturday, and left the theater freshly awed by the play’s endless appetite for life in all its wonderful and terrifying variety. This new staging, more than any I’ve ever seen, matches the ambition and heart of Kushner’s text. It could hardly be better.

And yet, for all the production’s distinctiveness — for the electric field of feeling that seems to follow the performers; for the eerie, neon buzz of the design; for the sheer legibility of the script across the decades — it’s hardly the last word on Angels in America. No production is. That, at least, is the unspoken message of The World Only Spins Forward, a new oral history of Angels, written by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, who conducted, edited, and arranged the 250 interviews that constitute the guts of this propulsive, moving account.

So many books about the theater derive their power from the sentimental idea that the best productions and performances remain in the past, beyond the reach of the present-day reader. The World Only Spins Forward refuses to partake in such theatrical rubbernecking. Profiling a multitude of Angels productions — not just the original Broadway staging, but others that came both before and after — The World Only Spins Forward makes the case that Angels, like all truly great pieces of theater, transcends any individual production that might lay definitive claim to the play. In this way, though the book’s focus is on the past, it ultimately points to the future: even if you don’t get to see a production as wonderful as the current Broadway revival, you still haven’t missed out. With a work as great as Angels, there are no lost opportunities.

¤

Kushner’s play first appeared before the public in April 1989, in a staged reading produced by the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco. This was only one of countless developmental steps on Angels in America’s long road to Broadway. “There were eleven thousand workshops,” one of the play’s early stars tells Butler and Kois. “It was well developed.”

More than any piece of theater that preceded it, Angels both reflected and transcended contemporary concerns like AIDS, Reaganism, and gay rights. Audiences were ravenous for the play, and on the power of this enthusiasm, Angels quickly moved up the theatrical food chain. A host of theaters presented early versions of the play while Kushner was still writing and revising it; to read about these separate interpretations, some of which featured different creative teams and casts, is to marvel at the sturdiness of Angels. No matter the artistic context, the play thrived.

At the tiny Eureka Theatre, where Part One made its world premiere in 1991, director David Esbjornson staged the expansive play using the humblest of materials: a shower curtain, bungee cords, sawdust. “It was in some ways the most beautiful version of the play,” says actress Kathleen Chalfant, “and the most Poor Theater version of the play.” There was something deeply moving and oddly funny about the production’s handmade ethos. Critics loved it. Reviewing the show in the Bay Area Reporter, Deborah Peifer wrote, “To call this a brilliantly realized, profoundly funny, wickedly thoughtful piece of theater is to discover the severe limitations of language. I found myself wanting to say, simply, it’s more than I ever imagined.”

A swift, spare staging of Part One subsequently opened in 1992 at London’s Royal National Theatre. Directed by Declan Donnellan, this production unfolded on a mostly empty stage dominated by a huge American flag on the back wall. To increase the play’s tension, Donnellan overlapped the beginning and ends of scenes. Here, too, the response was rapturous. Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Kushner has created an original theatrical world of his own, poetic and churning, that, once entered by an open-minded viewer of any political or sexual persuasion, simply cannot be escaped.”

Other pre-Broadway productions also demonstrated the play’s multiplicity, its capacity to thrive under vastly different budgets and directorial visions. At the Juilliard School, Michael Stuhlbarg (Call Me by Your Name), Elizabeth Marvel (Homeland), and other students showed that the play could work in the hands of young actors. In Los Angeles, at the Mark Taper Forum, a difficult rehearsal process nonetheless produced a bigger staging that “sealed your sense that this was the play of its age,” according to San Francisco theater critic Robert Hurwitt. “This was a masterpiece.”

The complete, two-part play finally opened on Broadway in May and November 1993, respectively. Directed by George C. Wolfe, the New York production was far more elaborate than any that had preceded it; stagehands called it “the Money Store” because of all the overtime they earned. And yet, though many of the actors who appeared in the Broadway premiere — among them Stephen Spinella, Joe Mantello, and Marcia Gay Harden — gave performances that are now legendary, The World Only Spins Forward situates these actors among a vast ensemble of other performers who also worked on the play as it grew. Again, the book here emphasizes the play’s pluralism, and demonstrates how Angels was propelled forward by the labor of all the actors who worked on it, not just the ones who opened the show on Broadway.

Naturally, many of the actors who didn’t follow the show to New York had strong, complicated feelings about the whole matter, and The World Only Spins Forward makes quite a bit of hay from this unavoidable fact. Indeed, one of the book’s most interesting chapters bears the subtitle “Getting Fired From Angels in America.” Kathleen Chalfant, one of the performers who did make it to New York, says, “There was, in one way or another, quite a lot of blood on the sand, as there always is in a long development process.” Many actors who worked on the show were terrified of being replaced. Jeff King, who played one of the lead roles early on, says, “It felt like my neck was stretched over a stump and I was waiting for someone to chop my head off.” The axe fell, and King was cut.

Most painfully, Kushner opted not to bring Oskar Eustis, a close friend who had commissioned the play and co-directed the Los Angeles iteration, to Broadway. “There were a lot of hard phone calls,” says Kushner, “but nothing compared to talking to Oskar about the fact that he wasn’t going to go with it. There’s very few things I’ve ever had to do that were harder.” Kushner gave the job to George C. Wolfe, who’d had a recent success with Jelly’s Last Jam on Broadway, because he felt Wolfe could bring the right kind of razzle-dazzle sensibility to the project.

And yet, for some of the fired artists, their experience working on those early versions of Angels counted as extraordinary and life-changing. “Very few people have that chance, being involved in something that is truly grand and important,” says Michael Ornstein.

I never had the same joy as an actor after that. I lost my taste for doing these plays that I didn’t feel were important, that I didn’t feel as much for. I thought about how the gods took the life of the runner of Marathon, because they knew he would never feel that way again, after he ran to announce the victory of the battle.

This sentiment is also shared by those actors who did ride Angels to Broadway. “I stopped acting after Angels in America,” says David Marshall Grant. “I didn’t think there was anywhere else to go. I felt like it touched me — I’m getting emotional, I’m sorry. (Cries.) It touched me very deeply.” Carolyn Swift, from the national tour, recalls,

It kind of ruined me in a sense. When it was over and I went back to auditioning, I knew that it would never be the same for me. And I kind of began plotting my departure from the theater after that. It was like having a brilliant lover, and after that lover goes, you just know.

Angels was such a monumental experience that it made other projects feel insubstantial in comparison. Having worked on such a singular piece of theater, it became harder for the play’s alums to go back to more earthbound productions, whose shortcomings were rendered all the more apparent in the wake of Angels in America’s achievements.

¤

Still, Angels launched far more careers than it ended. Eustis would go on to become artistic director of the Public Theater, producing shows like Hamilton and Fun Home. Joe Mantello, who starred in Angels on Broadway, is now one of the best and most prolific directors in New York. (His many hits include Wicked and The Humans.) Stars like F. Murray Abraham, Cherry Jones, and Debra Messing all appeared in the play, whether in development or on Broadway. Indeed, to read The World Only Spins Forward is to marvel at how many theater artists currently working in the United States began their careers, in some way or another, on those early productions.

This is true of the later productions as well. Roughly half of The World Only Spins Forward is devoted to versions of Angels that followed in the wake of its Broadway debut. We learn not just about the national tour, but about an opera treatment, a controversial student production, auteur-driven productions from Ivo van Hove and David Cromer, and London’s 2017 National Theatre production (the production now playing on Broadway).

The book also traces the play’s winding journey to the small screen. Conversations about a film adaptation began as early as 1991, before Angels had even made it to Broadway. Robert Altman was Kushner’s first choice to direct, but budgetary problems and creative differences ultimately brought the project to HBO and Mike Nichols, whose theater background made him an ideal candidate for the gig. Legitimate quibbles can be made about the film — in literalizing the play, some of its imaginative magic is lost — but Kushner’s vision still comes through with force and clarity. Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Mary-Louise Parker, and the film’s other stars are excellent. As Frank Rich says in The World Only Spins Forward, “It’s one of the very, very few successful film adaptations of a major American play. Maybe one of three: Kazan’s Streetcar, and Nichols’s Virginia Woolf.”

The effect of reading about this interpretation, and the others brought to life in this book, is to make Angels appear all the more impressive and timeless an artistic achievement. It’s a play that can work whether it stars an Oscar winner or a high school student; whether it has a Broadway-sized budget or no money at all; whether it enjoys a Hollywood special effects team or little more than a shower curtain, a bungee cord, and a pile of sawdust. In illustrating this fact, The World Only Spins Forward makes Angels seem like an endlessly productive volcano, one that spits out productions of all shapes and sizes, each scorching with the desire for “more life,” a blessing the play’s hero gives the audience in the Epilogue for Part Two. Readers who know Angels will appreciate the effect of this overflow more than those who don’t, but even the uninitiated are sure to be moved by the play’s impact on the world.

“Here’s what I think might be the thing about Angels in America,” says director David Cromer. “It’s never been defined by a single production, and I don’t think it can be […] It’s like The Cherry Orchard. It’s not conquerable. It’s a mountain you can never totally climb.” It is this idea, as manifest in Butler and Kois’s kaleidoscopic and fabulously entertaining book, that firmly turns the book’s attention to the future. One leaves the narrative hungry not for productions past, but for productions yet to come. More life, the book seems to exclaim. More Angels.

¤

Harrison Hill’s writing has appeared in The Threepenny Review and American Theatre Magazine. He is an MFA candidate at Columbia University’s nonfiction writing program.

The post There Will Always Be More “Angels” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Why Harvey Weinstein can't redeem himself through charity alone

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Filmmaker Harvey Weinstein, shown attending a concert to raise money for the Robin Hood Foundation in 2013. Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP

As allegations of sexual harassment, abuse and rape topple his career and wipe out his clout, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein is apparently trying to contain the blaze with generosity. So far, he isn’t finding takers for this contrition cash.

Fast-tracking a plan he claimed was in the works for a year, Weinstein said in his initial public statement about his monstrous behavior that he would donate US$5 million to the University of Southern California in scholarship money for women directors. The school declined that gift. He also pledged to leverage his wealth and – what he expected would continue to be – his power to advance gun control, swearing to “give the NRA my full attention.”

As a political philosopher who studies the ethics of philanthropy, I see the Weinstein scandal as embodying an important question: Can the rich and powerful redeem their reputations through acts of generosity?

‘Blood money’

Offering money as a form of atonement is easier for Weinstein than finding someone who will accept it now that the source is so tainted. As the Change.org petition started by a USC student put it, these donations are “blood money” intended to distract the public and purchase forgiveness.

There’s nothing new about rich and powerful men who try to strip the tarnish off their reputations through philanthropy. For centuries, the Catholic Church encouraged rich people to purchase “indulgences” as tickets to heaven. Martin Luther’s disgust with this practice helped spark the Protestant Reformation.

“Robber baron” philanthropists like steelmaker Andrew Carnegie and oilman John D. Rockefeller still raise hackles for how they gave away money amassed through ruthless business tactics.

John D. Rockefeller (left) and John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave a large share of their fortune, made in the oil business, to charity. American Press Association

More recently, the Sackler family, which made its fortune in pharmaceuticals, has come under fire. Until news of their role in creating the opioid crisis through aggressive marketing emerged, the Sacklers were best known for major gifts to universities and museums.

A series of lawsuits is starting to change that reputation.

And the UCLA law school accepted a $10 million donation from Lowell Milken, who nearly went to jail with his brother Michael for their role in the junk bond scandal, in 2011. That move prompted Lynn A. Stout, a business law scholar, to leave the school.

Real philanthropy

Despite those precedents, philanthropy is about benefiting society, not repentance. Done well, it requires a thoughtfully selected worthy cause and a wise strategy to advance it, coupled with respect for all the stakeholders involved and compliance with the law.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether other characteristics also matter, how to rank these criteria and what constitutes a good cause. What about motives?

Donors who make big donations to advance their business interests appear to betray philanthropy’s main purposes. Conflicts of interest, or even their appearance, can make philanthropy morally dubious and even illegal.

And Weinstein’s gifts to support feminist causes – at least in the aftermath of revelations of sexual misconduct – reflect one giant conflict of interest. (New York state Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman was already investigating corporate governance at amfAR, a New York-based charity that works to cure AIDS, over concerns raised by its support from Weinstein before this scandal unfolded.)

At least two institutions – Rutgers University and the Clinton Foundation – have vowed to keep their Weinstein donations, arguing that they can do more good by using the money to advance good causes than by returning it.

Meanwhile, many politicians, including former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, are either returning money he gave their campaigns or donating those sums to charity.

It seems clear that his attempt to cover the cost of women seeking a degree in filmmaking, announced as his scandal broke, was a desperate attempt to deflect blame and salvage his reputation.

The German example

“Guys, I’m not doing OK but I’m trying. I got to get help. You know what, we all make mistakes,” Weinstein said a few days later, as more women spoke out about how the now-disgraced producer had demanded sexual favors in exchange for movie roles for decades.

Are there conditions under which the court of public opinion owes wrongdoers the “second chance” he said he hoped might be in store?

I suggest that Germany provides an instructive example. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the other horrors its Nazi government meted out, that country underwent a profound period of collective soul-searching.

In a nationwide attempt to atone for its crimes against humanity, West Germany honored the outcomes of the Nuremberg Trials, imposed by the Allies. But it also took numerous and considerable steps on its own accord to try to make amends.

West Germany held its own tribunals two decades after World War II, the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, to punish Holocaust conspirators not tried at Nuremburg. It made Holocaust denial a serious crime – and Germany continues to do so today, long after reunification.

The country is dotted with memorials and Jewish museums. Its educational curriculum includes frank historical accounts of the nation’s tarnished past. And it has voluntarily paid more than $70 billion in reparations to Israel and individual Jewish survivors.

Though none of these acts can excuse the Third Reich’s despicable behavior, many people perceive them as authentic displays of atonement. What���s more, these efforts made it possible for Germany gradually to resume its place as a member of the international community in good standing.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is located in the heart of Berlin. Jorge Royan, CC BY-SA

Applying the German model

Here is how I believe that disgraced rich and powerful people can learn from Germany’s example. Imagine that Weinstein had first issued an earnest apology, instead of rambling defensively after The New York Times first reported his protracted abuse.

Then imagine Weinstein welcoming and dutifully complying with the legal and professional investigations about his conduct that are in the works. And then picture him graciously accepting any verdicts and serving any sentences required of him for the crimes he has allegedly committed. Visualize, if you can, Weinstein keeping himself checked into rehabilitation clinics and enrolled in courses on gender inequality as long as he isn’t behind bars.

Now suppose that after all of this hypothetical behavior, Weinstein would then meet with victims of sexual abuse and experts in grantmaking. And that with their guidance, he would give away what’s left of his fortune – currently estimated to be in the neighborhood of $250 million – to advance gender justice and end workplace harassment and sexual abuse.

None of these efforts I have conjured up would excuse Weinstein’s behavior. But I contend that in such a case, it would make sense for charities and universities at least to consider taking his money.

Sensitive acts of this kind of compensatory philanthropy can be an acceptable part of a process of making amends for past crimes. To count as legitimate, however, acts of charity as penance cannot substitute for official punishment for civil and criminal misconduct and they must be closely related to the crimes.

No matter what, money can never replace genuine contrition and rehabilitation.

And such donors should cede control over how their money is spent. Germany, for instance, did not demand that recipients of reparations spend the money in specific ways. Rich and powerful wrongdoers should likewise not seek to micromanage or receive a seat on the board of organizations they fund.

It’s hard, in other words, to give large sums of money away as one of several steps toward atonement for heinous crimes. This is just as should it be.

Ted Lechterman ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son poste universitaire.