Reply To: Debt Rattle June 10 2026

[John Day]

Resource Wars, Then Famine https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/resource-wars-then-famine

Tim Morgan, Surplus Energy Economics, The Long Run, Adventures In Thermo-Economics
British people were drastically poorer back in the 1960s than they are today, a statistical story which also holds true for every other Western country. ​ Things must have been almost unbearably tough in those days.
What was it like, then, trying to cope with such extreme poverty?
​ Well – and as you may know, either anecdotally or through recollection – it was commonplace back in those “much poorer” 1960s for British couples to start families in their early twenties, either buying a home with a mortgage or renting a property from their local authority.​ Car ownership, though increasing rapidly, was a lot lower back then – but cars were actually owned…
..Median or “ordinary” people, then, could buy or rent a home, start a family, take holidays and run a car, and could do this with a modest mortgage, and with little or no other debt. Most remarkably, a majority did this on the income from a single wage-earner.
​ In the more prosperous United States, people probably started to enjoy the equivalent of these British experiences of the 1960s in the previous decade​…
..This ‘easy’ answer is that aggregate wealth has indeed improved dramatically over the decades, but the vast majority of these gains have been pocketed by a small minority, to the detriment of everyone else.
The snag with this ‘explanation’ is that almost all contemporary wealth exists only on paper. Even the wealthiest are only one market crash, one banking collapse or one currency failure away from losing almost everything…
..The world’s average person may have enjoyed a $26,000 (56%) real terms increase in his or her share of GDP since 2005. But this average person’s share of debt and broader claims have increased, respectively, by $59,000 and about $150,000…
..Gross domestic product is not a measure of the amount of material economic value – in the form of goods and services – supplied by the economy in any given period. Rather, GDP is a monetary measure of transactional activity in the system.
​ In essence, most of the growth reported since 2005 has been nothing more substantial than the spending of huge and growing amounts of borrowed money.​
​ We can calculate that fully 65% of all global “growth” reported over the past twenty years falls into this cosmetic category. On this basis, the material economic prosperity of the average person hasn’t increased at all since 2005 – but his or her burden of debts and quasi-debts undoubtedly has.​..
..Affluence, measured not just as GDP but as aggregate asset values as well, carries on growing until the economy slumps into the bankruptcy of having more debt than it can ever be expected to honour…​ We are, simply stated, likely to be at our point of maximum recorded affluence at the moment when the financial economy vanishes into a black hole.​..
..Ultimately, if money is a “claim on goods and services” it is, in reality, a claim on the energy required to make these things available. Likewise, debt, as ‘claim on future money’, is in fact a claim on future energy. This makes clear the need to think in terms of the parallel two economies of the material and the monetary…
..As depletion of the non-energy resource base gradually erodes conversion ratios, relentless rises in the proportionate Energy Cost of Energy have been driving a widening wedge between top-line economic output and ex-cost prosperity…
..What this demonstrates is that, in the years since 1980, growth in aggregate prosperity (+87%) has barely exceeded increases in world population numbers (+84%). This means that the average person was only about 1.4% materially more prosperous in 2025 than he or she had been back in 1980. With this statistic available to us, we can readily see why the imposition of a combination of worsening inequality, rapidly increasing debt burdens and rises in the real costs of necessities has led to a widening sense of hardship, insecurity and resentment…
..Had oil and gas not existed as successors to coal, the Great Depression might have become permanent, and recovery from the Wall Street Crash, which in any case took 25 years, might not have happened at all.
​ The big difference between now and then is that, despite outlandish claims made for renewables and nuclear power, no such ready-and-waiting successor to hydrocarbons exists today, and we’re about to discover that infinite, exponential economic growth on a finite planet really is the preserve of ‘madmen and economists’.
​ We’ve been trying – and, of necessity, failing – to reinvigorate the material economy using monetary tools. The result can only be a financial crash…
..The soundtrack to these processes is a cacophony of drivel about monetary innovation and technological miracles. Monetary “innovation” actually comes down to creating ever more credit, and embracing ever greater complexity risk…
..It also seems that technology advances in inverse proportion to the importance of the activity in question. Speed-of-light progress in digital communication doesn’t actually put more food on the table, and tends to use far more energy than any that it might help supply.
​ By contrast, the techniques used today in really important activities – like farming, extracting and refining ores, pumping water, producing oil and gas – would be readily recognisable to a time-traveller from 1926.​..
​..What this project does seem to show, at this early stage, are some drastic differences between two different eras of interest – the years between 1945 and 1970, and between 1980 and 2025.
​ In the earlier period, indications are that material economic prosperity expanded by about 170%, far out-stripping population growth of 55% to leave the world’s average person twice as prosperous in 1970 than he or she had been back in 1945.
​ In the (longer) period between 1980 and 2025, prosperity carried on increasing, but at a rate (+87%) barely ahead of growth in population numbers (+84%). Having seen his or her prosperity double between 1945 and 1970, our ‘average’ person has seen no progress at all in a latter period characterised by cosmetic “growth”, and a worsening of indicators such as housing accessibility, financial insecurity and the burden of debt.
​ It’s unlikely that we’ll be able to quantify pre-1980 trends at the national or regional level, but we do know that emerging market economies have out-performed the West in modern times. If, then, global average prosperity per person has barely improved at all, the likelihood is that Westerners have become materially poorer.​ https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2026/06/05/325-the-long-run/comment-page-1/

​ The Honest Sorcerer, on the things that induce human adaptation, time and war: On The Possibility of World War III… Decades of conflict instead of nuclear annihilation?
​ For many people world war three invokes images of a direct clash between nuclear powers, inevitably ending in a series of bright flashes over all major cities around the globe. The next big war, I argue, will be nothing of the sort. Instead of ending in a nuclear holocaust, the third world war—which is already in the making—will bring about decades of conflict, ending in a new world order. It will be much akin to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) fought in Western Europe over domination and coming with immense losses, but ultimately ending in the Treaty of Westphalia…
..Also… there are clear financial incentives to push the world into chaos, and to reap the immense profits to be made on war. After all, as Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler wrote in 1937 after fighting decades in servitude to US corporate interests in Latin America: “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.”…
..What we have seen so far in Europe and the Middle East is just the beginning. Many more years, if not decades, of conflict is still ahead of us and eventually every great power will be involved—either directly, or through proxies to avoid direct confrontation with each other. Old rules are slowly discarded, but the new rules haven’t emerged yet. This is why we see a controlled demolition of the globalized world economy, with all its “rules” upended and international law disregarded in the most blatant way. Not because a secret cabal in a smoked filled room want’s this to happen, but because that’s how a dying system behaves: it struggles to survive against all odds and tries everything it can to live just a day longer.​ https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/on-the-possibility-of-world-war-iii

​ Richard Revelstoke, The War Inside the Panopticon
There has never been a single all-seeing surveillance state — only rival ones. This is the story of how the West built the most complete surveillance machine in history, then broke it into warring pieces; how China built a second machine and put it up for sale; and why the result is not a panopticon but a quadropticon — four rival powers fighting over the controls of a machine.​..
​..On January 26, 2014, the German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk asked Edward Snowden in a TV interview: “What could you do if you would use XKeyscore?”
​ Snowden:
​ “You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information. … You can tag individuals … Let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a forum somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.”
​ For a solitary decade the Western grid operated as one integrated apparatus presenting itself as universal. It was the most consolidated panopticon ever built — and it was only half the planet.​..
​..China’s mass surveillance infrastructure evolved from the Skynet project (launched 2005, expanding to an estimated 600 million cameras) to the Sharp Eyes Project (Xueliang Project), which is a Chinese government surveillance launched a 2015 initiative that aimed to achieve 100% coverage of public spaces, particularly in rural and remote areas. The Social Credit System emerged in 2014 to regulate behavior through data fusion.
​ Xinjiang serves as the primary testing ground for these technologies, where the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) utilizes facial recognition and predictive policing algorithms to monitor and detain Uyghur populations. This regional “laboratory” allowed the state to refine AI-driven behavioral scoring and preemptive control mechanisms before scaling them nationwide.
​ Edward Snowden said China’s mass surveillance mechanisms and machinery of private communications was “utterly mind-boggling.” He was initially, “so impressed by the system’s sheer achievement and audacity that I almost forgot to be appalled by its totalitarian controls,” a statement he made in his memoirs, Permanent Record.​
​ Having perfected the machine at home, China began selling it.​ China is the world’s dominant exporter of physical surveillance infrastructure and AI-driven control systems.​..
..These systems integrate facial recognition, license plate readers, predictive policing algorithms, and centralized command centers. Often funded through subsidized loans from Chinese state lenders such as China Eximbank and the China Development Bank as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, creating long-term dependency on Chinese maintenance and upgrades…
​..The Panopticon Eats Itself
​ The 2013 rupture didn’t kill the grid; it killed the consensus that it served only one master. The post-Snowden question wasn’t “should this exist” but “whose is it now?” Three diverging surveillance models formed inside the Western bloc, concurrent with the split within the Transnational Capitalist Class.
​ Three factions, one server. To see the war, let’s take a look at the data sitting on a hyperscaler’s machine — Facebook. Three Western factions want three incompatible things from it, and none can have its way without defeating the others.
​ Silicon Valley owns the data. It is Facebook’s asset, its leverage, its business.
​ The Imperial state wants to use it. In 2018, Congress passed the CLOUD Act, which asserts a simple, sweeping claim: if a company is American, U.S. authorities can force Facebook to surrender its data wherever on earth the servers physically sit. A Microsoft server in Dublin is, legally, within Washington’s reach. This is the Imperial Nationalist faction annexing the Silicon Valley layer by declaring legal dominion over it.
​ Davos wants to wall it off — and here the mechanism matters, because it is not a conspiracy theory and no faction recruited an agent. Max Schrems, an Austrian law student, brought a private complaint against Facebook out of genuine conviction; he has spent his career suing European regulators too, for enforcing too little. He was never anyone’s instrument. What turned his grievance into a faction weapon was the institution it landed in. The Court of Justice of the European Union chose — twice — to strike down the transatlantic data agreements not on narrow privacy grounds but on the broadest possible one: that U.S. surveillance law rendered American jurisdiction categorically unsafe for Europeans’ data. Safe Harbor fell in 2015; Privacy Shield in 2020. That is not a privacy holding. It is a sovereignty holding — a border drawn against another faction’s reach, using a private lawsuit as the pretext.
​ This is what it means to call Brussels a Davos organ rather than an independent power.​.. its instrument is the regulatory machine, and that machine works by converting whatever enters it — a student’s complaint, a merger filing, a market-access request — into binding rules that bind other factions’ systems.​..
..The CLOUD Act commands American firms: hand us your data, wherever it lives. Schrems and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) command the same firms: then you may not hold Europeans’ data at all. These are not different rules in different rooms — they are contradictory directives issued to the same companies about the same servers, by two factions of the same broken grid. Silicon Valley cannot obey both: it is legally American, and therefore exposed to Washington’s subpoena, but commercially captive to Europe, and therefore bound by Brussels’s wall…
..The Western surveillance apparatus never won, never unified the world under a single control grid; after Snowden’s revelations in 2013 it shattered into three, each faction seizing the layer it could hold. The Eastern faction didn’t collapse; its Chinese half went digital and put itself up for sale, while Moscow was demoted into the junior partner that can disrupt but not deny…​..So we don’t live under a panopticon. We live under a quadropticon — four surveillance powers, no longer answering to any single master, each using its piece of the apparatus to wall off, reach into, or escape the others. The war inside the machine is four factions fighting over the infrastructure, with humanity as the ground they fight on.
​ The four of them never argue about the one thing that matters. Every grid points the same direction. The camera always faces down — state to citizen, platform to user, capital to crowd. Not one of them points up. They fight relentlessly over who holds the controls. They have never once disagreed about who is being watched.​ That is you. Not the subject of one all-seeing state, but the ground four rival powers are enclosing at once. They all watch you.​ https://www.themargins.ca/p/the-war-inside-the-panopticon

​ Catherine Austin Fitts: “We don’t have a financial problem – we have a bank robbery.” 55 trillion stolen by Washington DC since 2008, 21 trillion of that funneled into DUMBs​ [Deep Underground Military Bases, the real real-estate boom]​ https://x.com/iluminatibot/status/2062821798543266278