Filthy Lucre

There’s an unsavory aroma in the air. As Mercury meets up with Pluto (decay), both opposing the USA’s Jupiter (increase) and Venus (wealth), money’s on the mass mind..

As the conjunction opposed the USA’s Jupiter (increase) and Venus (money), the Fed announced a new scheme to buy up government debt that it has dubbed “Quantitative Easing”. It’s a trillion-dollar program that Ben Bernanke wants us to know is not what it looks like – i.e. printing money out of thin air. Jon Stewart had this to say: “Oh right, Ben. We’re not printing money; we’re imagineering money.”
It is not only the US that’s in trouble, of course. National borders mean nothing to Pluto, whose entry into Capricorn in 2008 inaugurated the financial crisis. The Uranus-Pluto square http://www.mothersky.com/lectures/#2012lectures, exact seven times between 2012 and 2016, is wreaking havoc everywhere on Earth, rooting out corrupt monetary systems and exposing Big Money’s smoke-and-mirror games wherever they are to be found.
The Eurozone’s currency crisis is spinning out of control. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/8158298/Germany-fuels-EMU-debt-crisis-with-haircut-demands.html The bailout of Ireland, only so recently the proud Celtic Tiger, has deepened suspicion worldwide that the Euro is crumbling. The dollar is in deeper trouble. America’s Saturn Return (stringent challenges) in the tenth house (international credibility) is peaking through 2011, giving credence to the predictions that the dollar will lose its status as the global reserve currency.
The International Monetary Fund is fully aware that the USA is broke, but seems to be hoping nobody reads its reports. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/neil-reynolds/the-scary-actual-us-government-debt/article1773879/ . And since any mention of taxes is career death for politicians, and the mass media only reports the nonsense they do mention, most Americans seem to have no idea that keeping taxes at their current level rate is fiscal suicide.
The global scenario is one of self-destructive debt (Pluto), un-tethered speculation (Uranus) and increasingly unavoidable austerity (Saturn) – all of it increasingly associated with banks. As far as profits are concerned, the bankers are coming out on top, as they always have; but in the collective mind they are coming to be seen as the villains. Hollywood, always a good indicator of the public mood, is once again putting out movies with evil Gordon Gecko characters. The difference is that, in the ‘80s, the anti-mantra ascribed to Wall Street — “greed is good” – was presented as a shocking fictional conceit, an outrageous bit of dark humor. Since Pluto entered Capricorn, it has been borne out by real-life events; and no one’s laughing.
As Mars gets ready to join Mercury in its opposition to the US Jupiter (exact Dec 13th and 14th), an outpouring of public outrage has erupted over the linking of unemployment benefits to tax cuts for the rich. The Republicans may have overplayed their hand this time; not just because the proposal flies in the face of ethical logic (Jupiter), but because the theory has been shown not to work – the first and last criterion under a Saturn Return. Since the Bush cuts went into effect in 2001, all that predicted trickling has gone up, not down. On the other hand, it did work in terms of its plutocratic intent: the richest 1% of the country has already scored about a trillion dollars since the breaks began
And it is working in terms of its cosmic intent, too: ordinary people (Uranus) all over the world are smartening up about where the power lies (Pluto). These transits will continue to strip off the veils.

Our terminology around money says a lot about our ambivalent feelings about it. Money is associated in vernacular English with pollution and corruption: we speak of people being “dirt poor,” for example, and “filthy rich)….

Dec 2010
Apocalypse Not

Apocalypse Not

 

In December we‘ll get a big blast of the Uranus-Pluto square, the transit I’ve been calling the longest arm of the Cross. The Cardinal Cross is the epochal configuration of planets that exploded this past summer, and will continue, with variations on the same themes, for about six more years.