Whose Streets?

The corporate media tried to ignore the Occupy Wall Street movement. Lord knows it tried. Over the past three weeks, as protests filled the streets of New York and started springing up in cities all over the country, the TV news at first played blind, deaf and dumb.

They tried to distract the public with the usual meaningless faux-controversies. But the Equinoctial transits were so powerful that even these non-issues came with  subtexts that were inadvertently on-the-mark. Consider the pertinence of Rosanne Barr’s “tasteless” behead-the-rich joke.

Even the hoopla about Obama backing a failed solar energy firm fell right into step with OWS’s message. As many pointed out, when you compare the amount of taxpayer money that went into bailing out companies like AIG, the amount lost to Solyndra is infinitesimal.

When OWS became too big to ignore, the media pundits reacted, en masse, with a resounding “But it’s not clear what they want” (a non-response, patterned after Sigmund Freud’s notorious “But what do women want?” Both questions reveal nothing about the spoken-about, and everything about the unconsciousness of the speaker.) “They’re protesting about so many things,” fretted the journalists.

Why, yes, we are.

As astrologers had foreseen, all the various manifestations of the key transit of our era, the square between Uranus and Pluto, have leaped, flaming, into the American public discussion. There is an understanding among the new activists (Uranus in Aries) that the world’s richest 1% (Pluto in Capricorn) use more than one mechanism to keep themselves in power.

One of them is the war machine. The march last night down the main drag in San Francisco marked the tenth anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan; but the chants and placards drew a link between the war and myriad other injustices afflicting  human beings everywhere. “Money for jobs and education; not for war and occupation”.  “Tax their a$$ets.” “It is a class war.”

Each of the battle cries illustrates the same essential issue: the conflict between the interests of ordinary people (Uranus) and the interests of a tiny elite that controls global operations (Pluto) through money, munitions and media.

The march in San Francisco made this point through the route it took. We marched from the Federal Building, headquarters of a government that spends $3 billion every day for war and surveillance, up to a luxury hotel where service workers were picketing for a living wage. We continued down to the bay, where Occupy SF has been encamped — in front of the Federal Reserve building. When the march reached the encampment, from the joyous whoop that arose you’d have thought the thirteen lost tribes had reunited on Market Street.

Poor, beleaguered Obama. No doubt realizing that a failure to exploit this latest American drama would win him the biggest booby prize in his four-year collection, he tried to strike the right tone in his statement about the OWS. The “American people feel frustrated,” he said, “[because] Wall Street doesn’t always follow the rules.”

“Doesn’t always follow the rules“??

The truth is that whatever he said would have come off as lame. It isn’t possible to transform a plutocracy while being its figurehead. No matter how much more intelligent and humane this president may be than his predecessor, Obama embodies a system in which “following the rules” apparently means rewarding the very swindlers whose deregulation of the financial industry caused it to implode, and assassinating the evil-guy-of-the-week with goon squads and targeted drone strikes.

The Occupy Wall Street phenomenon sprang into life on September 17, 2011, when Mars, patron of warriors both righteous and unrighteous, was opposing Pluto (powers-that-be) in the chart of the USA (see Mary Plumb’s detailed analysis). This stunning chart says it all.  Any entity born under this symbolism would be a blow to the jugular of the US power structure.

But Wall Street itself is a symbol; and by putting it at the center of their crusade, the movement is transcending the American narrative. It is transcending the ugly infighting of national politics. It is going all the way, addressing the skewed state of power in the postmillennial world. The Longest Arm of the Cross, which will peak seven times between now and 2015, presides everywhere on Earth under a shared sky.

Under the waxing Moon, the energy of last night’s march was nothing short of joyous. A sense of vitality filled the air; vitality and relief. At last, the crowd seemed to say, our benumbed country is shaking itself awake.

It was a great reminder that being awake is more fun than anything.