Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard
Americans have trouble understanding that what comes up must come down. The collective entity that is the USA has Jupiter (inflation, increase) conjunct the Sun.
Everyone surely realizes, at this point, that what was happening before the housing bubble burst last fall was crazy and fraudulent; yet the media is still talking about “prices returning to normal.” What standard of normalcy are they referring to?
Where I live, the out-of-control upward spiral in housing prices dates only from the early 1980s; recently enough that I, for one, don’t think of it as “normal.” It was then that the concept of speculation real estate blew into town, replacing the previously normal concept — of buying a house to live in and stay in.
The economy continues to unravel as Pluto wends its way back to the first degree of Capricorn, where it was in November. Things are going to get very dramatic as the Autumn Equinox approaches and Saturn begins its square to Pluto. I propose that we begin, now, to step back from the conventional wisdom about the economy. It’s not that there isn’t a crisis happening; it’s that the interpretations of the crisis that we’re getting from the talking heads need to be viewed with supreme caution.
When I’m listening to reports of a crisis, I like to know whose point of view I’m hearing. For example, a headline in yesterday’s paper read, “Median home prices rise in May – not clear if it’s good news.” I wondered, good news for whom? With the low rates and incentives now available for buyers, wouldn’t higher prices be bad news for the guy who never could’ve dreamed of buying a house before and now can?
Pluto’s opposition to America’s Venus is offering us plenty of answers if we just ask the right questions. Pluto, the detective of the solar system, is heading towards its return in the US chart’s second house (money). If we want to know how the economy really works, all we have to do wait for Pluto to hand us clues.
Such as the fact that when the Dow falls, newspapers illustrate the event with photos of anguished stockbrokers on the trading floor. The inference we’re to draw is that something very bad happened; and that the Wall Street professional in the picture represents Everyman, reacting to that bad thing.
But what have we just learned about this guy on the trading floor? Is he really our alter ego? Is Wall Street’s reality the same as yours and mine?
Why is it supposed to be of overweening interest to folks watching the evening news that the markets reacted this way or that way to Obama’s latest speech? Why are we persuaded that the most important thing about the GM bankruptcy is what the markets did when they heard the rumor?
I remember watching the stock quotes crawling across the bottom of the TV screen in the Spring of 2003 while newsmen were reporting the bombs falling on Baghdad. I thought, This is the most obscene juxtaposition I’ve ever seen. And yet, how perversely fitting.
Somebody was making big money off the war.
It was probably not you or me, but somebody was. I wouldn’t want to be in the karmic shoes of the death-mongers who were, that’s for sure. Yet why on Earth were the rest of us presumed to be more interested in the effect the invasion was having on the stock market than we were in the fate of the human beings being bombed?
Whose point of view was behind this morally bereft reportage?
The same line of inquiry might be applied to the bailouts and all the other sweetheart deals being made between Congress and the financial industry. It doesn’t take an economist to figure out why the Dow jumps for joy when Geithner pours hundreds of billions of dollars into the market. Or why Wall Street rallied after the defeat in the Senate of the Durbin bill, which would have protected homeowners from foreclosure. Or why the markets “respond so well” to the failure of all attempts to regulate the financial industry.
Is it a surprise that the banking industry approves of operations that benefit itself? The question is whether we, the public, will figure out what benefits us.
As Pluto in Capricorn is met by Uranus and Saturn in the Grand Cross upcoming, it becomes more and more important to recognize the forces at play in our world. It is time to make the distinction between the class of international elites (Pluto) and the rest of us (Uranus). One doesn’t want to come off as polarizing (the latest accusatory term –replacing “politically correct” — deployed to intimidate social critics), but the bald truth is that 40% of the world’s wealth is owned by 1% of the global adult population. So let’s define “the rest of us” as the remaining 99%.
The Rest of Us does not include those agencies for whom American wars create windfall profits; e.g. contractors like KBR, who have reaped nearly $32 billion since 2001. Nor the billionaire bondholders who are getting stealth payments, even as we speak, while the economy tanks. Nor the CEOs who make an unbelievable 275 times the amount of money that the workers in their industries make. Nor the G20 powers, assembling in Olympian summits to divvy up global financial control.
The Rest of Us means the people of the world, symbolized by Uranus in valiant Aries. Time to know the players and pledge our allegiance accordingly.