Xi's crackdown on bankers, the world's most polluting power plants, on book-buying, flatscapes, the Kaiser on future ships & Oswald's swan.
Great links, reading and images from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
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Kiyoshi Saitō, Shop Girl Cardin Paris, 1960.
Born in 1907 in Japan, Kiyoshi Saito’s career — with its monumental success — complements American stories of pop art for its Cold War cultural lessons. Initially an apprentice sign painter, he turned to woodblock printing: an ancient Chinese method of working with textiles and paper. His work was then sponsored by Japan’s changing postwar entanglements:
Saito’s printmaking career was put on hold due to the war. During the occupation, he sold his first woodblock print in an exhibit with fellow artists Un’ichi Hiratsuka and Hide Kawanishi. In 1948, Saito exhibited at the Salon Printemps, an event sponsored by Americans for Japanese artists. At the Sao Paulo Biennale of 1951, Saito won first prize for his print Steady Gaze. In competition with Japanese oil painting and sculpture, this honor marked a turning point for Japanese print artists: for the first time in Japanese history, prints overtook painting. This achievement roused the Japanese art establishment and shifted the perception of the print medium. In 1956, Saito was sponsored by the State Department and the Asia Foundation to travel and exhibit around the United States and Europe. His work became particularly popular among Western collectors during the 1950s and 1960s. Saito moved to Yanaizu in 1987, where he lived until until his death in 1997.
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Israel’s economic shock
Israel’s economy shrank in the fourth quarter of 2023 from the third by 5.2 percent. And even with that end-of-the-year drop, for all of 2023, GDP was up a reasonable 2 percent (although after counting for population growth, the per capita figure was down 0.1 percent)… Both the building and agriculture sectors are facing severe labor shortages because the cabinet has refused to allow the West Bank Palestinians to return to their jobs in Israel. In the building sector alone, that amounts to some 90,000 workers, or about a third of the total labor force. Close to half of all construction has ground to a halt. In the farm sector, another 10,000-20,000 Palestinians have been barred from working in Israel, making it hard to complete harvests. The cabinet's far-right ministers refuse to budge on the issue of Palestinian workers, saying they would present a security risk (although for their constituency, they have approved Palestinian workers in settlements). Instead of Palestinians, the plan is to bring in tens of thousands of workers from India, Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan. To date the numbers to arrive have been paltry.
Source: Haaretz
Hungry chip firms
Advanced semiconductor companies have requested more than double the amount of available federal funds for projects in the US, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said, referring to a program designed to bring chip manufacturing back to American soil. Leading-edge firms — which include Intel Corp., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. — are seeking more than $70 billion from the 2022 Chips Act, Raimondo said Monday in remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.vThe legislation set aside $39 billion in grants — plus loans and loan guarantees valued at $75 billion — to revitalize US semiconductor manufacturing after decades of production abroad. The Commerce Department plans to spend $28 billion of that $39 billion pool on leading-edge facilities, Raimondo said. Intel is in talks with President Joe Biden’s administration for more than $10 billion in incentives spread across grants and loans, Bloomberg reported earlier this month. US officials aim to announce major awards, including Intel’s, by the end of March.
Source: Bloomberg
UAE swoops on prime Egyptian real estate
Egypt has agreed to a $35bn deal with the United Arab Emirates to develop the area of Ras el-Hekma on its northwestern coast, Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly announced on Friday after weeks of speculations. Madbouly said at a news conference, which was attended by Egyptian and Emirati officials, that Egypt will receive an advance amount of $15bn in the coming week, and another $20bn within two months. The deal is the largest foreign direct investment in an urban development project in the country's modern history, the prime minister said. It is a partnership between the Egyptian government and an Emirati consortium led by ADQ, he said. News about the sale has triggered condemnation by critics of the government, who said the land is one of Egypt's most valuable coastal locations and that it should be developed by local investors. But Madbouly said that the Egyptian state will have a 35 percent share of the profits from this project, although it is a private investment with the majority of shares held by the UAE consortium.
Source: Middle East Eye
Where are the 15 most polluting power plants in the world?
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A lot changing in China — Xi Crackdown on Bankers
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Kiyoshi Saitō, Signal (B), 1962
Marx and bookshop radicalism
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Revolution or ruin?
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Native resources
In America the majority of resources—97% of nickel, 89% of copper and 79% of lithium—are either on Native American reservations or within 35 miles (56km) of them. One example is the Resolution Copper project near Phoenix, Arizona. The site, jointly owned by bhp and Rio Tinto, could meet a quarter of America’s current copper needs, but has encountered stiff resistance from the Native American community. In 2020 the former chief executive of Rio Tinto was forced to step down after the company blew up two ancient Aboriginal rock shelters in Australia, sparking public outrage. The chairman also resigned the next year.
Source: The Economist
Great speed and future ships
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Container capitalism
The first person to describe an open field with randomly stacked containers as a symbol of radical modern space must have been Reyner Banham, in his 1967 article ‘Flatscape with containers’. Banham, at the time a disciple of Archigram and Cedric Price, was a passionate critic who wanted to complete the modernist project and liberate it from all formal determinism. In the ‘dock design’ in vogue at the time, developed by engineers who were not compromised by architecture, he found support for the vision of the future he advocated: ‘fit environments for human activities’, minimally equipped sites that imposed no straightjacket of form whatsoever on the development of the programme. There would be no buildings anymore, only temporary, moveable and expendable receptacles for industry: containers. The field of containers was an apt spatial paradigm for consumer capitalism.
It comes as no surprise that it should be Banham, of all people, who was susceptible to the ideological significance of this utilitarian arrangement born of postindustrial economics. As a historian, he was familiar with the inspirational impact that American factories and grain elevators had had on the modernist avant-garde, a subject to which he would later devote the intriguing study A Concrete Atlantis. In an analogous way, variable stacks of containers could become the visual germ of the sprawling territory. It must be said that the image identified and defined by Banham turned out to be more robust, more multifaceted, more ambiguous and consequently more inspiring than Archigram’s tiresome science-fiction. Banham opened ‘des yeux qui ne voient pas’. Those who saw through those eyes what Banham was pointing out subsequently saw its essence. Just as the aura of factories and grain elevators had previously proved viable beyond the avant-garde, there was more to the containers arranged according to the ebb and flow of logistics than a hard ideological core. They had an aesthetic, even romantic quality, allowing the image to nestle and take root in the imagination of late-capitalist society.
Source: Paul Vermeulen
Click the hyperlink above for a stunning poem from Alice Oswald.
Kiyoshi Saitō, Nude B, 1950