A decade ago when the millennium was freshly hatched, Pluto (dirty secrets) was on the Ascendant of the USA chart, opposite Saturn in Gemini (official stories). A major threshold for the country and the world, that period was when the worms started crawling out of the can. Information about the Enron scandal trickled out from the nooks and crannies of the world of finance into the headlines. Bush & Co’s many lies oozed out of their hiding places.

Now it’s too late for worms crawling out of cans. That’s too slow. It’s no longer about trickling and oozing. Revelations are coming out in geysers. (Did you see the video of the oil gushing out of that pipe in the Gulf? A violent blast of spewing black poison, the oil companies are delicately describing it as a “leak.”)

As the 2012 era takes shape, the configurations in the sky, and the worldly events that represent them, are growing increasingly urgent. With planets intersecting in angles this tense, their energies act like a pressure cooker. To get our attention the cosmos is pulling out all the stops.

Now we’ve got hurricanes, volcanoes and tornadoes, thousand-point-in-one-day stock market drops, riots in Greece and Thailand, regime change in England, and the most devastating oil spill perhaps of all time.

April 20th ‘s fatal blast in the Gulf of Mexico happened under a sky that featured Saturn (business as usual) exactly opposed to Uranus (explosions), which is moving into position with Pluto (hidden power) for their long-running square. Ceres, the asteroid of the Earth Mother, conjoined Pluto, the despoiler, in the sign Capricorn (corporations) within a degree.

The fact that this was no ordinary oil spill became clear right away as the disaster moved through several quick meaning changes in the public mind: from that of an accident brought on by the failure of a mechanical device, to that of an example of how government fails to regulate oil companies, to that of an entire system where corporate interests are allowed to commit travesties against Nature.

The rig explosion coincided with the entry of Chiron (wounding) into Pisces (oceans) that very day. Horrified TV viewers saw aerial photographs of the blue sea turning into a conflagration of toxic crude. According to a report cited by Al Gore, the sheer size of the befoulment amounts to an Exxon Valdez every four days. The mind reels. The heart recoils.

The negligence leading up to the accident appears to be so gross that one might expect the company in charge to be out of business in a New York minute … if that company were any other than Halliburton. But that’s whose careless work cementing the oil well is being blamed — by BP America (talk about the pot calling the kettle black) — for the disaster.

The rogues’ gallery on display during this latest phase of the Saturn-square-Pluto period include Big Oil and Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, who stand accused of environmental desecration; and, at the hearings in Washington, the Goldman Sachs boys, who stand accused of gaming the financial crisis for personal gain like weekend gamblers on a tear. Like all archetypal figures, these characters are a reflection of the group mind. They mirror back to us the toxic greed of the capitalist world.

At first the media tried to make hay out of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. The infotainment industry is, like our Wall Street gamblers, amoral. Their job is to focus on what viewers enjoy, and box office numbers tell them that the public enjoys fireballs. So the first response of the news programs was to milk the calamity for its sensationalist appeal. But the media bites its tongue when the dirty secrets percolate to the top. Such as the evidence unearthed by astrologer Eric Francis showing that the spill occurred in a marine dump area (Pluto governs dumps and garbage): a body of water whose secreted depths hid unexploded bombs and torpedoes.

This is the latest in a series of blistering scenarios whose cosmic intention is to wake us up to what’s at stake. As revelations about the cartels that pull the strings in our world percolate to the surface over the years ahead, it will be increasingly obvious that conventional media channels, while very good at framing a certain version of reality for their viewers, are very bad at revealing truth. To make sure we have the clear sight we will need, we must keep our distance from polluted information streams.

Just as we would recoil from taking a drink of the water around that oil rig right now, we should back away from the stream of disinformation presented by the corporate news.

If we look for it, there is plenty of clean information around; and when we read it and see it, our minds start to revert to our healthy instincts and natural ability to think clearly. What is particularly exciting is that, during the couple years that Saturn has been opposite Uranus (popular uprisings), the cultural climate has been favorable to groundswells of genuinely grassroots activism.

The bigger their numbers and the more aware they are of what’s going on, the more difficult to ignore ordinary people become. We can expect the Uranus-Jupiter conjunction this summer to inspire groups which express the zeitgeist so aptly that they are covered by the media in spite of itself. Such as the righteously appropriate and commonsense idea that Reuters picked up on at the New Moon in May: the Seize BP Campaign is demanding that the US government seize the assets of BP — a company that rakes in $93 million a day in profit — and use them for compensation and damages. Demonstrations took place on May 12th at the company’s offices across the USA.

I am putting together a CD lecture series on the milestone transits surrounding the year 2012, configurations that are too charged and complex to give justice to in a blog. The first of these discusses the Lunar Eclipse on June 26th, which features seven planets in a Grand Cross — all backed by the power of the summer solstice.

The planetary messages that occur between now and 2015 deserve all the attention we can give them. We do not need to know “what will happen,” on a literal level, over the years ahead; indeed, we cannot. But we can know what it will mean.