At this writing, the gargantuan Wall Street “bail-out” has proven itself to be anything but the panacea its proponents claimed. Washington’s attempt to cut interest rates in tandem with international central banks has been revealed as too little too late. Whether the US government’s partial nationalization plan will do anything to slow the downward spiral remains unclear, while the prospect of putting bank ownerships into the hands of a government as corrupt as this one are ominous indeed.
What is clear as a bell is that Uranus, the planet of thrills-and-chills, is commandeering the daily twists and turns that astrologers everywhere predicted. The world financial markets have turned into a roller coaster, with humanity strapped into its seats riding the swoops and plunges.
Uranus and Saturn move closer to exact opposition every day. Uranus speeds up whatever it touches, an acceleration we can all feel in the air. But the sense of urgency the transit is triggering in the collective mind goes deeper than what the pundits are discussing. On a cellular level all living creatures feel the impending sense of ecological crisis and systems collapse that inform our times.
Urgency and Fear
As soon as the titans of Wall Street went belly-up at the Full Moon in September,immediacy was pressed into service as a coercive political device. Absent any understanding of the full picture, public policy caved in to a sense of emergency (Uranus) that was fueled by the fear (Saturn) buzzing through the mass mind.
Saturn opposed to Uranus is the ideal climate for ultimatums. As every scam artist knows, there is no better way to play a mark than to insist “If you don’t do this right now, all will be lost.” Bush & Paulson convinced Congress that no discussion or vetting of their bail-out measure was possible. The approach exactly mirrored the ploy used to begin the Iraq war, as Jon Stewart made hilariously clear by screening juxtaposed clips of speeches Bush gave then and now.
But the White House’s catering to Wall Street does not address the core cause of the meltdown and will only exacerbate the trajectory in play. As Ralph Nader has pointed out, the Federal Reserve is not accountable to the public, nor to Congress: only to bankers. The “bail-out” does nothing to address the acute criminality of the lending industry, nor does it lift a finger to empower shareholders. The USA has already been in a recession, the worst in 25 years; and its cause is the housing market crash — not the crumbling of banks “too big to fail”. Lehman’s assets did not suddenly become qualitatively more lethal on the day the firm filed for bankruptcy than they had been the week before.
Official story
But that was the official story, and like all societal myths this story had its root in a more general cultural truth. What was different on Full Moon Monday was that the financial industry had run out of credibility. The evaporation of the trust which had been placed in Lehman et al by their creditors and customers symbolized a wake-up call that the whole financial industry is based on an illusion. The idea of a treasury printing money with no gold –or anything else of value — to back it up is now starting to sound equally fantastical to those citizens who are beginning to give it a thought.
Ultimately, the credibility that is evaporating is that of the US government itself, now sweating with a desperation one can almost smell. The various ideas that are being tossed around in Washington to stave off the crisis are, by the experts’ own admission, nothing more or less than psychological devices. It is remarkable indeed to see these hard-as-nails policymakers and number-crunchers of high finance concede that the whole financial industry depends not upon actual material mechanisms but upon restoring the public’s “trust”.
Trust, along with all manner of leaps of faith, is governed by Neptune, the ruler ofPisces –the sign Uranus is in.
The astounding match-up of activities in the sky with recent headlines should remind us of the fundamental reason why we watch planetary cycles: it gives us the distance we need to avoid getting swept away in the chaos generated by each new earthly drama. This distance derives from the fact that transits do not predict literal events but rather archetypal themes.
The over-arching theme we are looking at right now is that of Pluto in Capricornleading up to the Grand Cross years upcoming. Since the beginning of this calendar year, when Pluto (breakdown) entered Capricorn (monetary systems), the American economy has been falling apart at the seams. This transit is about confronting the truth behind what is officially designated as reality. The American public is waking up to fact that they have been given the shaft by the moneyed classes who manage their tax dollars.
Pluto has been nicknamed The Destroyer. But we need to remember that this planet does not cause death; it simply exposes decay. It has been an open secret for some time that the USA was buried in debt; that a no-money-down approach to financing made no sense; that the stock market was playing with Monopoly money and that the lending industry was gambling like drunks at a casino. But somehow the American mass mind, lost in its consumer stupor, seemed to feel that no piper would ever have to be paid.
Until now.
Meltdown at the Equinox
Pluto, the planet of secrets and taboos, is associated with disturbing topics that provoke a curious mechanism in the human mind. Consider the dazed abdication of power expressed by those American workers who vote against their own interests time and time again. It is a phenomenon that goes beyond denial (Saturn) to something on the order of magical thinking, not unlike the belief in many non-modern societies that to utter the name of the god of death brings him forth. Thus no matter how commonplace or well-documented a Plutocratic scenario may be, for many Americans it remains shrouded in unspeakability.
It is hardly a secret, for example, that U.S. corporations get out of paying taxes. The San Francisco Chronicle reported a few months ago that two-thirds of them paid no taxes at all between 1998 and 2005. Far from being hidden away in the bowels of the paper, this report was on the front page. But with that 2nd house Pluto governing the nation’s financial life, facts like these provoke as little outrage in the general public as if they were literal secrets.
Bankers’ coup d’état
Pluto governs thugs so powerful they are barely containable by law. It is associated with the mafia, warlords and protection rackets. In every era, gangs such as these use extortion to overpower and undermine the official agencies by means of which a group defines itself as civilized (Saturn). The placement of this planet in the house ofmoney in the (Sibly) chart of the USA spells out the potential for financial interests to become amoral cartels. It was this face of Pluto that prompted Wall Street’s ultimatum, at the Equinox, to US taxpayers: “If you don’t give us your money, we’ll go down and take y’all with us.”
At this writing the FBI is investigating key figures in the lending industry for shenanigans for which the Enron boys provided the template seven years ago (a quarter cycle of Saturn). But the dark heart of this debacle resides far deeper than any one group of individuals. There is evidence that the US federal government itself, unaudited for years, has engaged in securities fraud on a massive scale.5
As the week of the Equinox drew to its breathless close, George W. Bush earned himself the prize for the most grotesquely tone-deaf line ever uttered by an American president in a time of crisis. On September 16th as a devastated nation struggled to absorb the fact that they might be spiraling towards another Great Depression, Dubya cast any pretense of sincerity or dignity aside and combined his frat-boy persona with his action-movie vocabulary to communicate at a formal, high-level meeting that if he didn’t get his way with the banker-bail-out proposal, “This sucker could go down.” Presumably alluding to the nation’s economy, his perversely appropriate choice of words – “sucker” –could be construed as applying equally well to John and Jane Q. Taxpayer.
On October 9th Congress finally buckled, passing a bailout bill sweetened with tax breaks, and — notwithstanding all their recent righteous denunciations of pork-barrel politics — bloated with lobbyist lard. (in a surreal detail worthy of Monty Python at its best, the manufacturers of wooden arrows were deemed by the legislators to be deserving of special favor). This “compromise” bill, weighing in at more than 800 billion dollars, is being trumpeted in the US mass media as a historic return to regulation.
Meanwhile, the ripples have spread throughout global financial markets. European leaders are cutting interest rates will-nilly and putting safeguards in place to guarantee their citizens’ savings. At the moment, it’s not working. The market continues to tumble. Uranus, the planet of the wild, unpredictable swings, is keeping investors on the edge of their seats.
Uranus at its highest represents the human impulse towards liberty. Saturn at its darkest is fascism. This is the crossroads being spelled out in the collective.
Things are happening very fast. The Full Moon of October 14th will occur when the presidential campaign is at fever pitch, and on November 4th Uranus and Saturn will culminate in an exact 180º angle in the sky. The former is the planet of shock; the latter, the planet of business-as-usual. One can almost hear the gods chuckling up there in the heavens, as the date approaches of the transit’s tensest geometrical equipoise: election day in the USA.6
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1 The phrase “bail-out” in this context deserves quotation marks. No one knows the extent of the troubled loans that are floating around; no one has been regulating them. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the 700-billion-plus figure was chosen basically at random: not even the bankers themselves know the value of these junk assets. Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff, formerly of the IMF, says relieving banks of their most distressed mortgage assets could cost as much as $2 trillion. This is triple the cost of the Iraq war so far.
2 Washington’s proposal amounted to changing the nation’s operation at its most essential level: giving the White House’s political appointees in the Treasury Department the absolute right to take the public’s money and hand it over — without any oversight from elected officials, from the courts or from the citizenry — to the self-same US banks and corporations that created the fiasco. The 10/2 “compromise” bail-out seeks to assure proper oversight of the spending of this unimaginable amount of money by means of a conflict of interest so egregious one wonders how these people can discuss it with a straight face: Apparently the intention is to place Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his cronies on the oversight board. In other words, these record-breakingly incompetent gentlemen will be overseeing themselves. With no one else in Washington familiar enough with the complicated shenanigans that have evolved in the unrestricted banking world, it is to these dudes that Congress is turning for answers: captains of the same agencies that have been allowed to run amok in the frenzy of deregulation promoted by the last five administrations in Washington, crippling the foundations of a world economy already derailed by globalization.
3 While millions of Americans try to keep a roof over their heads in a proto-Depression economy, Lehman Brothers bankers will receive $2.5 billion in bonuses from their company’s bankruptcy.
4 As Gary Caton (http://www.dreamastrologer.com/) has pointed out, the worst economic downturns in the previous century arose when Pluto was in a cardinal sign, and squared by Saturn or Uranus. All three of these features pertain in the Grand Cross of 2010.
5 For the inside scoop, see http://solari.com/blog/?p=1407. A renegade Republican from the first Bush administration, Catherine Austin Fitts knows what she’s talking about.
6 The opposition will peak five times over the next couple of years (astrologers who favor a wide orb allowance see its influence as continuing for as long as four years. See Bill Herbst, “Empire or Community,” The Mountain Astrologer Magazine June/July 2007).
