Biden & the oil industry, from guns to butter, shrinking Korea, Pax Economica & bitcoin's mad power consumption
Great links, reading and images from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze
Nakamura Hiroshi, The Base, 1957.
Yesterday’s art represented one aspect of Japan’s twentieth century — its inclusion in the American orbit after 1945 — so today we cover the art of resistance to that orientation, which gripped so many in Japan. The country has been home at some points to the largest non-governing Communist Party in the world, as well as a massive and vibrant New Left and a series of anti-imperialist struggles:
Nakamura Hiroshi (1932– ) was trained as a reportage painter by the Japan Art Alliance, a postwar art group that advocated politically-themed realist painting. As he recalled:
“In the early 1950s, socialist realism was spreading throughout the world as an art movement and many art students were influenced by it. The Alliance’s basic premise was that our paintings had to be readily understood by anyone who saw them. We were encouraged to persuade the viewer.”
In the mid 1950s, Nakamura became deeply involved in depicting the protests against U.S. military bases that were beginning to rise to a crescendo. One such locale was Sunagawa, where farmers were protesting plans to confiscate their land to extend the runways at Tachikawa Air Force Base. The farmers, whose ancestors had cultivated their land for centuries, were vociferously opposed, and their demonstrations became a magnet for members of student groups and labor unions from nearby Tokyo. In his own mind, Nakamura was a “reporter at the frontlines” of these confrontations, brandishing not a camera but a sketchbook and pencil. Several of these sketches now belong to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.
Source: Visualizing Cultures
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The Biden years have been good years for US oil
Profits for the biggest US oil and gas producers have almost tripled under President Joe Biden, even as the industry berates his administration’s “hostile” policies and warns that a second term would be “disastrous” for the sector. The country’s top-10 listed operators by value, which will finish reporting their 2023 earnings this week, are on track to have amassed combined net income of $313bn in the first three years of the Biden administration, up from $112bn during the same period under Donald Trump. The collective market capitalisation of the group — comprising ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, EOG, Pioneer Natural Resources, Occidental Petroleum, Hess, Devon Energy, Diamondback Energy and Coterra Energy — jumped 132 per cent over the period to more than $1.1tn, compared with a 12 per cent drop in Trump’s first three years. The outperformance under Biden underlines the limited role of the White House in dictating the sector’s fortunes. The recent profit bonanza was driven in part by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which pushed up oil and gas prices. A strong rebound in global energy demand from the depths of the Covid-19 shock in 2020 also supported prices. West Texas Intermediate, the US crude benchmark, averaged about $80 a barrel during Biden’s first three years compared with $58/b in Trump’s.
Source: FT
From Guns to Butter: How Europe took the peace dividend
Source: The Economist
A phrase that sums up American politics…
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The birth rate tumble
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Nakamura Hiroshi, Sunagawa 5, 1955
Degrees of diversity
Far more people from all backgrounds go to university in Britain than in the 1980s. But non-whites have rushed in faster, going from 23% to 35% of all Britons accepted as undergraduates over the past 12 years. Some universities, especially former technical colleges and polytechnics in big cities, have grown exceptionally diverse. Last year just 16% of the undergraduates admitted to Aston University in Birmingham were white…
One reason is simply that Britain has grown more ethnically diverse, cities like Birmingham much more so. The 2021 census showed that 32% of 17-year-olds in the city were white. Another reason is that black and Asian pupils do far better in exams than they did in the 1980s. In last year’s GCSE exams (normally taken at 16) larger proportions of Asian, black and mixed-race pupils in England got at least a grade five in English and maths than of white pupils. Teenagers from some ethnic groups, such as Bangladeshis and black Africans, have pulled well ahead of the national average despite high poverty rates.
Source: The Economist
Nakamura Hiroshi, Gunned Down, 1957
Crypto mining consumes the USA
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Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World
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Poetry with and against solitude
Ed Pavlić, in the Boston Review, on Adrienne Rich:
In her lyrical essay “Permeable Membrane” (2006), Rich scripted a concise and expansive description of the “connector” she had found herself coming into somewhat foggy possession of as a teenager in the years following World War II: “The medium is language intensified, intensifying our sense of possible reality.” Thus equipped and mobilized, the “poetic imagination,” Rich wrote, is “radical, meaning root-tangled in the grit of human arrangements and relationships: how we are with each other.” From the first, Rich’s poems evince an awareness that “human arrangements and relationships” are bracketed and policed by complex systems. Those systems operate within, between, and around people…
During the first half of her career, Rich’s poems betray, in my view, shifts at the core of what is known as lyrical, shifts away from the introspective (focused within a person) to what I term the “interspective” (focused between people). Setting up the trajectory of her later career, as they play out across the decades, these moves profoundly alter the nature of creative solitude, an alteration that radiates through Rich’s career as she sought ways to grow more radical with each decade. More radical? What might that mean? Rich’s later work answers that question in waves of left-verging and delving images across decades, images that seek and salvage living connections between people while thwarting the evolving means of quarantining and dividing people’s lives. So doing, Rich offers an ever-shifting, subversive, and socially engaged sense of creative “solitude.”
Nakamura Hiroshi, Civil War Era, 1958