On April 6^th, Pluto will station at 5 Capricorn (monetary systems), exactly opposite the US Jupiter. This should be a pivot point in Americans’ understanding of their depression-a.k.a-recession. But Pluto is still being squared by Saturn from the US midheaven (official agencies), an aspect that brings out fascistic tendencies in ruling elites; in this case, not so much our nominal authorities, but the power behind them: the bankers.

The Uranus piece of the transit picture is the wild card. This is the planet of The People. It is still opposed to Saturn and getting ready to explode into Aries. Uranus is showing up as citizen dissenters of every stripe, from the informed to the brainwashed, and we can expect the action to accelerate. The tea party folks will keep turning out in their clean white athletic shoes as long as Fox News keeps calling Obama a socialist; peace activists will keep filling the streets in their frayed jeans as long as most of our tax bill goes to the Pentagon.

The 16-year-long saga of Pluto in Capricorn is showing us what makes the money wheel go round; particularly in those countries whose Suns receive a hard hit (e.g. the USA, China and England). Each time there is a peak point along this trajectory — such as Pluto’s station next month, the Uranus ingress in May and the Grand Cross in June — those citizens who can stomach it will glimpse unsavory truths about the workings of money and power.

The US public has not, in the main, been quick to grasp the dark realities that their financial crisis has disclosed. In the American mind, a certain apple-pie nationalism (Cancer Sun cluster) is conflated with free market capitalism. But the years ahead will sorely challenge sentimental anachronisms. Americans who thought they were getting apple pie might find four-and-twenty dead blackbirds in there instead.

But the Cardinal Cross years will offer tantalizing material for those who like to ask questions. Such as: Who runs the Fed? What is the Fed? How many Congressfolk with the power to decide whether Wall Street should be regulated were/still are Wall Street insiders themselves? What happened to all that bailout money? And who comes up with the jobless figures they put on the news?

We are now hearing that the US economy is getting better, though the job situation is getting worse. Is this not a very odd pairing of ideas? It seems to mean that things are looking up for everybody except those who are out of work.

My guess is that the savvy spin-meisters who cook up gems like this for the newscasters to disseminate are all too aware that we, the rabble, don’t really know what “the economy” means. That is, we know in a general way; it has to do with the country’s money, right? But to declare that Things-are-getting-better-but-not-for-the-jobless presumes that “the economy” is a thing apart from each citizen’s material well-being. Whatever these “things” are that are “looking up,” they apparently don’t have anything to do with our job status.

So what does the economy refer to? Does it mean what the stock market is doing? Does it refer to something The Fed did — that arcane institution whose surreal powers and unfathomable purposes are unknown to all but insiders?

Propaganda, a dark expression of the only opposition in the US chart, is a curious thing. If it works, it’s invisible (Pluto): that is, it isn’t seen for what it is by its target audience. (Exception: advertising. The public cheerfully accepts attractive disinformation campaigns if they’re designed to sell products; all’s fair in the free-enterprise game. But even in this case, the law of propaganda prevails: the most effective ads seduce us into thinking they’re not lies. As in “Maybe if I buy that jar of goo I really will look ten years younger.”)

In the current cultural climate, if a public figure were to identify as propaganda the official pronouncements about the economy that we hear from news anchors and the White House, she’d risk being smeared as a conspiracy-theorist-wingnut-socialist-moonbeam [that last one is a slur from 40 years ago that the Right has resurrected to defeat Jerry Brown for governor of California]. And probably a traitor, to boot. This is because conventional wisdom dictates that one’s own country cannot, by definition, engage in propaganda (except in wartime; in which case it’s patriotic and called “intelligence”). Propaganda is what the Other Side does.

But the things-are-getting-better-but-not-for-the-jobless oxymoron is a classic example of in-house propaganda, designed to throw us off the scent and to deactivate our ability to think. By contrast, there is plenty of uncensored information to be had, if we look. Such as the studies that report the percentage of US unemployed to be closer to 20% than 10%.

We need to discern point-of-view in order to spot the difference between propaganda and clean information. And if we want transformation instead of power plays, we need to eschew the propaganda. These transits reward the courage to spurn easy lies. Pluto’s knife is cutting beneath the crust of appearances, giving us the power to turn breakdown into rebirth.

This is the part of the nursery rhyme where the birds begin to sing.