tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74810848282240394762024-02-20T02:36:48.481-05:00Economic & Planetary CyclesRobert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-89487328250867660852012-12-11T13:49:00.001-05:002012-12-11T13:49:23.901-05:00 <div style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;color:black;font-size:10pt;"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0in">Job Creators </div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0in"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Some systems that developed over centuries are suddenly (Uranus) being questioned and discarded or radically changed (Pluto). I was reminded of this the other day while talking politics with my auto mechanic.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>"Words," he said, "don't matter.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What matters are deeds."<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">We're weary of being bombarded with the words of politicians. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Once elected, all they seem to do is raise money for their next election. They raise money from the wealthy in exchange for doing the bidding of the wealthy, which shortchanges the people who vote them into office. This breakdown is in process under the present long-lasting Uranus-Pluto square, due to be within a potently tight orb from 2012 through 2015. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Of course words matter, for words enable us to figure out what's really going on and decide what needs to be changed.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Take, for instance, two words that are currently very fashionable: "job creators," meaning the people who hire workers. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What most of those workers do is make stuff that the job creators sell for profit.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>So the job doers are also wealth creators, and the job creators are also wealth confiscators—they pay the job doers as little as possible and sell the products made for as much as possible.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Many job creators then send the profits they confiscate to offshore banks in order to evade paying taxes, another reflection of the Uranus-Pluto square.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They try to justify this by proclaiming that the "private sector" creates jobs, not the government. </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Yet when you investigate the private sector, you discover that it needs the infrastructure built by government, and often derives profits from government—by making contracts with government to provide stuff the government wants, like information, weapons, cars, furniture, paper, the list goes on.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">It's the law that the job creators legally own what the job doers create. That's a law the present Uranus-Pluto square is addressing and is destined to redefine.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There is a difference between being paid for eight hours on the job, and being paid from the profits created by the work.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Example: In a unionized West Virginia coal mine, a typical miner works for pay ranging from $24.75 to $26.41 per hour. Using the higher rate, our miner receives $211.28 pay per eight-hour shift. (1)<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The miner can extract 67.63 tons of coal per hour, 541 tons per day. The miner's job creator sells coal for $59.17 per ton.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What the miner is paid $211.28 for makes the job creator $32,020.97. (1) </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">When they retire, the miner scrapes by on Social Security, Medicare, and maybe a pension—if he hasn't invested his pension money in Wall Street and lost it in a stock market crash.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The retired owner winds up a millionaire, or maybe a billionaire from investing his profits in other job creators who confiscate the wealth created by their job doers, then hide their profits from the government in offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">In reality, job creators need wealth creators, and the private sector needs the government.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The wealth creators need the job creators and the government needs the private sector.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The Solar System needs all the bodies it has to be what it is.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">I need my auto mechanic to keep my old car humming—its odometer just turned 200,500 miles—and my mechanic needs to be adequately paid; if he's shortchanged, he'll turn to another way of generating income and I'll lose his service.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And the way we figure out and communicate what's fair is by words.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">But the deal your mechanic and you strike is very different from the deal you make with your corporate employer. The mechanic shows you what the auto parts cost and what he's charging for his labor. The corporation doesn't give you a metric for the wealth your labor creates, it merely pays you for your time on the job. </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">The modern economy thrives on willing and able consumers.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Yet the most profitable corporations are those that get away with paying the least for workers, who spend as consumers. Some workers are now paid so poorly, they depend on food stamps and homeless shelters to survive.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Unemployed workers can't buy anything.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This erodes the health of the overall economy.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Eventually, it causes the big corporations to fail.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Unemployment<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>compensation and other "safety net" programs save the whole economy from complete collapse. </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">If we use words skillfully to figure out what needs to change to revitalize the economy, the Uranus-Pluto square will benefit us. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If we try to preserve a system that needs to change—i.e., job creators who confiscate wealth and hide it from the tax man in offshore accounts, thus disabling government safety-net programs—the result becomes a form of plundering that makes the shade of Genghis Khan green with envy.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">Yet, job creators focused on their own immediate need to increase profits, want government<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>to "tighten its belt" by cutting the social programs that keep workers alive and thus prolong the viability of job creators. </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">It's like the Hindu myth of the blind men groping the elephant, each proclaiming the whole to be the part they can feel.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In this case, the elephant is the whole economy, and the gropers are all of us who depend upon it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Money is the blood that sustains the whole-economy elephant. When all the gropers are trying to suck as much blood from the economy elephant as they can…</span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">This metaphor applies to any number of activities considered economically necessary today. Take fracking, for instance. That's presently the most efficient method of extracting gas from the ground, and this gas can save us from going broke buying oil to power electricity, vehicles, etc, and poisoning our atmosphere with carbon monoxide.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But fracking is also poisoning our water and food, bleeding the whole economic elephant in this new way.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">Here's another way to look at our present economic conundrum: </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">Ancient astrologers believed the planets were the realm of the gods, and that the gods imposed their will on humans via such harsh aspects as this Uranus-Pluto square. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>We moderns are educated to find such a notion laughable.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Maybe we should stop laughing and reconsider it. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">What if we "scientificate" the gods as aspects of the rainbow range of energy that is all at various rates of vibration.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That would bring us to about half a step away from returning soul to our perception of reality. If we perceive everything in our reality as possessed of ever-evolving and interdependent souls, we would have good reason to take care of our environment and each other.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">As it is, our perception of reality is shaped by our scientifically-oriented education, and educated people do not believe anything has soul.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If there is such a thing as soul, educated people believe, science would have discovered it. But science, until the discovery of subatomic particles, dealt only with what can be weighed and/or measured. </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">The good news, under this present Uranus-Pluto square, is that scientists are finding that subatomic particles behave in mysterious ways. Some of these miniscule mites act like they have minds of their own—or souls, destinies, karma.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">Seems this phenomenal turn of perception is heading us back to the beginning of a cycle that began two Neptune-Pluto conjunctions ago with what we now call the Reformation. Our reformatted concept of the reality we're all part of, did not include anything as non-physical as soul. This freed us from the restrains our mismanagement of religion had imposed, enabling us to discover many more dimensions of our physical reality.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">This focus on our material reality—to the exclusion of the invisible, immaterial world of soul—appears to be completing its cycle, and thus ready for a new end/beginning.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>We have found that there is just too much going on to be fully explained by materially-oriented science and rational logic.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Or what we have come to think of as rational logic.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">Perhaps as we morph into this new cycle, we will re-establish the universally religious ideal, captured in the Biblical line, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you," and in other traditions expressed as, "Do no harm."<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This would enable us to stop trying to suck blood from our own little piece of the whole economic elephant.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For we would then realize the whole economic elephant needs blood/money to circulate, not clot into private fortunes, depriving other parts of itself. </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">If something bangs us over our collective head, say, changing our perception of this vast reality we are tiny units within, maybe we will again see our world as infused with soul, and this soul-dimension of our reality as shared by everyone of us and everything else too, and a new logical rationality will demand that we stop killing each other and other things, for we'll know that their death means they will reincarnate into entities bent on rebalancing, and rebalancing means pain and suffering for all. We'll realize we cannot go on playing economic Whac-A-Mole without losing everything.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; text-indent:0in"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">Endnote:</span></div> <div class="MsoListParagraph" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto;mso-add-space:auto;text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1"><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;mso-fareast-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family: Arial"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">1.<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman""> </span></span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-font-family:Arial">"Romney Unaware Who Creates Wealth" by Gene Grabiner, Truthout web site, October 26, 2012.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></div> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> 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gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; text-indent:.25in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--></div> <div> <br> </div> <div style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;color:black;font-size:10pt;clear:both;">http://robert-gover.blogspot.com/<br> </div> Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-77201169678019917962011-11-25T12:00:00.000-05:002011-11-25T12:01:03.117-05:00DreamingThe American Dream<p>About the American dream, comedian George Carlin said, "You have to be <br>asleep to believe it."<p>What began as the Occupy Wall Street movement was the awakening of <br>masses of people to an obvious, dream-shattering fact:<p>The government will never get out of debt to the banks until the <br>government takes back its duty to create our money and lend it to the <br>banks. As long as the central bank, the Federal Reserve, creates, <br>controls and lends money, the government—and we the people—will be <br>debtors, with the heavy foot of the bankers on our necks.<p>To get that heavy foot off our necks, we will have to awaken from <br>another dream: As surely as God is up in the sky, the Bank is where the <br>money is. Just as you have to go to the priest to get holy water, you <br>have to go to the bank to get money.<p>This Bank Dream is over five hundred years old. Back in medieval <br>times, the folks we now call bankers were called moneychangers. What <br>did moneychangers do? They locked your gold and other precious metals <br>in their vaults and gave you a paper receipt you could use as money. <br>This they did so no one else could rob you of these trinkets of wealth. <p><br>No one else, that is, except the moneychangers, for alter all, <br>possession is nine-tenths of the law, as is famously said by lawyers <br>representing those in possession of the trinkets of wealth—which have <br>evolved from gold and precious metals into paper bills and numbers in <br>cyberspace. Back in medieval times, moneychangers discovered they could <br>lend paper money for many more times the amount of gold they had in <br>their vaults. This grew into our present fractional reserve banking <br>system, whereby when one bank lends $1M, that amount ripples through <br>the system into something like $9M, all loaned out at ever-compounding <br>interest.<p>But as Aristotle pointed out a couple of millennia ago, money's <br>function is to facilitate commerce as a means of exchange. When some <br>decide to make money sort of fornicate and reproduce itself (lending at <br>interest) an unnatural act occurs that distorts money and destroys its <br>real function. In ancient times when cattle were used as money, money <br>could copulate and reproduce. But try getting two nickels to have sex. <p><br>Some astrologers say that Pluto signifies plutocrats and thus also <br>oligarchs and all those to whom the rest of us owe money, and by whom <br>the rest of us are controlled. What is the real object of governance? <br>Is it to create a sane and sensible society so that all can prosper and <br>be free of debt and degradation? Or is the real purpose of <br>government—as compared to the stated purpose—to facilitate the <br>plundering of debtors by creditors?<p>Pluto, that mysterious little body way out on the edge of our solar <br>system that has been downgraded by astronomers to a so-called "dwarf <br>planet," is as mysterious as some of our concepts of God. As comedian <br>George Carlin points out, the God most of us are raised to worship and <br>petition in prayers, this God tells us—according to the Bible—that if <br>we don't obey his Commandments, he'll dispatch us to the fiery tortures <br>of Hell. That's because God loves us! Each and everyone one of us. <br>Why, if God loves us, would he consign us to Hell for disobeying rules <br>and regulations that benefit the few at the expense of the many? <br>Indeed, this God works in mysterious ways.<p>Our modern money system is as counter-intuitive and illogical as the <br>American Dream, which demands that we borrow from bankers to "own" a <br>home that they, the bankers, hold title to. And if we can't make the <br>monthly payments on our ownership delusion, they will foreclose, kick <br>us out of our home, and sell the home to someone else who can make <br>payments—payments which, after 30 years, mean they will have paid the <br>price of the home three, four, maybe six times over. The icing on the <br>banker cake is, the bankers did not lend us the cash to buy the <br>home—they loaned us the credit, which they conjured from thin air. We <br>repay them for their shamanism with cash and look down our noses at the <br>superstitions of primitive people.<p>Today, the bankers will foreclose even if they lost the title to a home <br>by reselling the debt on the so-called "securities" market when they <br>"bundled" batches of loans into debt-obligation bonds so "investors" <br>can share in the interest paid on all those home loans. Did they forget <br>that you cannot legally sell a car or a house without a transfer of the <br>paper title that says who owns the thing? Or did they assume their <br>good buddies the judges would overlook the lack of titles when they <br>kicked people out of their foreclosed homes?<p>Chances are they did not know that the lingering Uranus-Pluto square <br>we're all under during this decade is famous for burning down systems <br>that no long work and raising phoenix-like out of the ashes of the old, <br>new systems that do work. Work for the benefit of all, not just for <br>the few.<p>For the slumbering American dreamer, the system that puts the 1% in <br>control of the 99% is what God intended, just as God intended to send <br>you to eternal torture in some CIA black ops station in the outback of <br>Somalia if you break the rules.<p>Well, there have been zillions of concepts of God over the centuries, <br>probably as many concepts as there have been human minds doing the <br>conceiving. Of course we generalize these, saying there is the Santa <br>Claus God, the Wrathful God, the Loving God, etc., yet each and every <br>individual's notion of any of these Gods is his or her very own. Each <br>and every one of us is unique.<p>There have been comparatively few minds watching celestial activities <br>and noting that certain cyclical angles made by certain planets <br>coincide with the cyclical breakdown of social systems that no longer <br>work as advertised. And the cycle that really kicks ass is the <br>Uranus-Pluto pair forming a 90-degree square from Aries to Capricorn.<p>Thus it is no wonder that there is now a worldwide movement afoot that <br>promises big trouble for the few who have used the medieval, debt-based <br>money system to dominate us. We are awakening from our American Dream.Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-21542449880422984472011-10-01T10:00:00.000-04:002011-10-01T10:01:07.292-04:00Black Swans and Uranus<p>By Robert Gover<p>The term "Black Swan" is used to describe events which are <br>unpredictable, have a tremendous impact, and are rationalized only <br>after the fact.<p>In economics, great depressions and stock market panics are viewed as <br>Black Swan events. For instance, at the time of the stock market crash <br>of October 1929, there was no known logical reason why stocks should <br>crash and keep going down and down and down and then lead into the <br>greatest depression to that point in history. It was a Black Swan <br>event because nothing in the past pointed to its possibility.<p>"Go ask your portfolio manager for his definition of risk, and odds are <br>that he will supply you with a measure that excludes the possibility of <br>the Black Swan—hence one that has no better predictive value for <br>assessing the total risks than astrology…" (1)<p>Actually, astrology may offer the clearest and most incisive way to <br>explain Black Swan events in the economic realm, as I will show in this <br>article. Western astrologers will recognize in Black Swan events the <br>influence of Uranus.<p>The term is believed to have been coined by the Roman poet Juvenal and <br>used in 16th Century London to describe an impossibility. All swans <br>were believed to have white feathers until swans with black feathers <br>were discovered in the outback of Australia, a Black Swan discovery <br>that happened in 1697. Still, the term continues to be used for the <br>unpredictable and unprecedented, especially in economics and finance.<p>Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions are <br>Black Swan events in the natural realm. The 2011 Japanese Tohoku <br>earthquake and tsunami and resulting nuclear plant meltdowns hit with <br>astounding surprise. We know that San Francisco is located on a <br>dangerous fault line but we cannot predict when another earthquake may <br>hit, nor if it will devastate that city. Tornadoes "come out of <br>nowhere," it seems, although later we can piece together the <br>meteorological factors that created one. We know the East Coast and <br>Gulf Coast are likely to be hit by hurricanes during the late summer <br>and early autumn, and we can track tropical depressions moving across <br>the Atlantic and note when they reach hurricane proportions but we <br>cannot predict where exactly they will hit and with precisely what <br>devastation. Seismic sensors can detect volcanic activity but we cannot <br>predict exactly when another Mount St. Helens will blow and wipe out <br>forests and towns.<p>Amazing artistic creations and scientific discoveries that come "like a <br>bolt from the blue" are also categorized as Black Swan events. In this <br>essay, I focus on Black Swan economic events. Such events are beyond <br>any logical risk assessment. The famous economist John Maynard Keynes <br>pointed out that there is no scientific basis on which to form any <br>calculable probability for such events. They come as total surprises <br>and are rationalized only after the fact.<p>In the 1990s a couple of brilliant mathematicians came up with a <br>formula for consistently profiting from options trading. They won a <br>Nobel Prize. Their formula led to the creation of what was then a <br>unique investment firm, Long Term Capital Management. But the crash of <br>LTCM and the Federal Reserve's rush to prop up the wrecked banking <br>system thereafter became a Black Swan event. The professors' formula <br>addressed known risk, but not unpredictable, unprecedented Black Swan <br>events. (2)<p>Long Term Capital Management's crash was triggered by Russia's allowing <br>its currency to fail—something the best financial minds deemed an <br>impossibility—on August 17, 1998 with Uranus at 10 degrees Aquarius <br>forming a grand cross pattern with Saturn at 3 degrees Taurus, Venus at <br>9 degrees Leo and Chiron at 13 degrees Scorpio. Taurus is opposite <br>Scorpio and square Leo and Aquarius. Uranus was thus within orb of 90 <br>degrees square Saturn and Venus, and 180 degrees opposite Chiron. <br>Astrologers call this a grand cross pattern because it creates an X <br>inside a square box pattern.<p>The financial meltdown of 2008 was another Black Swan event, for <br>although there was a bubble in real estate prices, there was no known <br>reason why the puncturing of that bubble would create such chaos in the <br>world's financial system and economy. After the fact, reasons abound in <br>the hidden transactions involving trillions of dollars of unfunded <br>credit default swaps and the marketing of mortgage securities without <br>legal transference of property titles. The full story of how this <br>happened has not yet came to light. (See <br><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Dm9ISwQt8">www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Dm9ISwQt8</a>. for some details about the credit <br>default swap scandal that has yet to be cogently covered by the mass <br>media.)<p>Uranus, in primary aspect to other planets, brings the unpredictable <br>and unprecedented to individuals and whole societies. These Uranian <br>surprises impact our world in ways that we can only rationalize later, <br>after the fact, when we look back and try to fit them into some <br>logical, cause-effect paradigm.<p>Yet seven decades after the great depression of the 1930s, economists <br>still debate why it happened, and what can be done to prevent it ever <br>happening again. Economists who say they have logically solved the <br>riddle are vulnerable to looking foolish when the next economic Black <br>Swan event hits.<p>Given Uranus' role in Black Swan events, if economists were able to <br>overcome their prejudice against astrology, a whole new realm of <br>cause-effect relationships would open to them.<p>The crashes of 1929 and 2008 both occurred under a T square formed by <br>Uranus, Saturn and Pluto. The way to foresee the possibility of Black <br>Swan events is by charting the astrology involved. And the key to <br>analyzing is the position of Uranus and the aspects it makes at the <br>time, especially to the other three outermost planets—Saturn, Neptune <br>and Pluto—and to the natal chart of whomever or whatever is affected. <br>(Refer to Charts 1. 2, 3 and 4 delineated below).<p>After a Black Swan event, we are usually able to define a chain of <br>causes and effects that led to it, even though there is likely to be <br>disagreement on precisely which precipitated it. What can we say for <br>sure about the crash of 1929 and the great depression that followed? <br>Suddenly, within a few months, the national mood changed from optimism <br>to pessimism. Was it that change of mood that precipitated the crash <br>and depression? Or was the pessimism caused by the crash and <br>depression?<p>Astrologically, the answer is that both occurred simultaneously. The <br>1930s unfolded as Uranus inched into Arises, forming a square with <br>Saturn in Capricorn and Pluto opposite in Cancer, with all three <br>creating a grand cross pattern with the USA's Sun-Saturn square.<p>That T square repeated early in this millennium when Uranus in Pisces <br>moved opposite Saturn in Virgo with Pluto square both from Sagittarius, <br>afflicting the USA's natal Mars-Neptune square. The orbs are not exact <br>and the Signs aren't the same but the planetary angles and <br>transit-to-natal impact are unmistakable.<p>This is not to say that there are never rational reasons for Black Swan <br>economic events. It's just that those reasons are hidden or ignored <br>till it's too late. As Robert Reich (3) has pointed out, "It's no mere <br>coincidence that over the last century the top earners' share of the <br>nation's total income peaked in 1928 and 2007—the two years just <br>preceding the biggest downturns."<p>But who tracked this growing disparity back then? The few who worried <br>about it were accused of fomenting class warfare. Now, in the wake of <br>the 2008 crash, more and more people are becoming aware of the huge <br>disparity between the few super rich and the rest of humanity, although <br>how this disparity developed is still debated, as no single explanation <br>satisfies all.<p>Hard angles formed by the outermost planets coincide with highlighting <br>what has gotten out of balance. What is now out of balance economically <br>is this huge disparity of wealth. What to do about it is another and <br>more vexing question.<p>We must make a distinction between stock market crashes and great <br>depressions, though, for one rarely leads to the other. Stocks have <br>crashed when the overall economy remained robust, and great depressions <br>have preceded sinking stock markets.<p>Looking back through history, we find that every time the USA's <br>Sun-Saturn square has been afflicted by a grand cross formed by the <br>outermost planets the national economy has fallen into a great <br>depression. Great depressions are not to be confused with recessions, <br>corrections or depressions without the adjective "great." Economist <br>Ravi Batra (4) defined great depression this way:<p>"A recession usually lasts for one to three years, during which the <br>rate of unemployment, while rising, is generally below 12 percent. <br>When a recession lasts for more than three years, and/or the rate of <br>unemployment lies between 12 percent and 20 percent, the economy may be <br>said to be suffering from a depression. When unemployment remains high <br>and business stagnates for six or more years, the nation's plight may <br>be called a great depression. Thus, depending on its severity in depth <br>and length, the downswing of the business cycle may be defined as a <br>recession, depression, or great depression."<br>By that definition, there have been four great depressions so far in <br>the history of the USA. Each has occurred under afflictions to the <br>USA's Sun-Saturn square, with Saturn in Capricorn and Uranus prominent <br>in every instance. (5)<p>1780s with Saturn in Capricorn opposite the US Sun in Cancer and square <br>the US Saturn in Libra, Uranus conjunct the US Sun square Neptune in <br>Libra conjunct the US Saturn.<p>1840s with Saturn in Capricorn opposite the US Sun in Cancer, square <br>Pluto opposite the US Saturn from Aries, and Uranus opposite the US <br>Neptune from Pisces, square the US Mars in Gemini.<p>1870s with Saturn in Capricorn opposite the US Sun in Cancer, Uranus <br>conjunct Jupiter and the US Sun in Cancer, and Neptune in Aries <br>opposite the US Saturn in Libra.<p>1930s (by Christmas 1930) Saturn in Capricorn opposite the US Sun in <br>Cancer, which was conjoined by Jupiter and Pluto, and Uranus in Aries <br>opposite the US Saturn.<p>Other periods have been economically difficult and often called <br>depressions, but those four fit the metrics defining great depressions, <br>which were Black Swan events because they were unpredicted and <br>unprecedented.<p>By 2025, we may look back on the 2000-teens as a fifth great <br>depression, although as of this writing, our travail is still described <br>as a "great recession." Euphemisms are little comfort to those whose <br>lives have been devastated by the meltdown of 2008, however—today's <br>unemployment statistics have been "politicized," so that 9% really <br>means closer to 18% or 20% when all the unemployed are taken into <br>account. Given the desire of most politicians to put a smiley face on <br>our economic situation, the economists they hire obligingly fudge the <br>numbers.<p>We may look back on this period as the most difficult in our history, <br>for this time it is Pluto in Capricorn, not Saturn, and Pluto is square <br>Uranus in Aries. All previous great depressions since the Industrial <br>Revolution have occurred under Saturn in Capricorn. Tiny little Pluto <br>takes an average of 248 years to orbit the Sun, and hasn't been in <br>Capricorn since colonial times and the American Revolution. From 1755 <br>to 1758, Uranus in Pisces squared Pluto in Sagittarius, making seven <br>direct hits. These were the years leading up to the American <br>Revolution, which manifested in warfare when Pluto went into Capricorn. <p><br>Uranus-Pluto squares from Aries to Capricorn are exceedingly rare: <br>Prior to the one we're presently under, there were only two going back <br>to the year 1. In 258-259, a killer smallpox pandemic ravaged the <br>Roman Empire. In 1676 to 1678, an uprising called Bacon's Rebellion <br>unfolded in the Virginia Colony when English indentured servants and <br>African slaves united against the colony's aristrocracy, killed Indians <br>and burned Jamestown to the ground, sending landowners fleeing to the <br>Eastern Shore; the outcome was the legal color coding of the working <br>class into separate races called black and white.<p>Stock market crashes are another category of Black Swan events. A <br>distinction must be made between the overall economy and the stock <br>market. The stock market is part of the economy but by no means the <br>leading indicator of overall economic health or illness. That leading <br>indicator is employment/unemployment.<p>Almost every time there has been a surprising stock market crash that <br>has come with such surprise it has caused panic, the USA's natal <br>Mars-Neptune square has been afflicted by transiting planets, <br>especially the outermost four. (See "An Astrological History of Stock <br>Market Crashes" by Robert Gover.) Not all panic crashes lead into <br>great depressions.<p>A few especially intuitive investors may anticipate a crash. These <br>anticipators are usually called "doom and gloomers" before the crash. <br>Cassandra has never been popular. After each crash, a variety of <br>explanations are put forward as to why it happened. Still, the only <br>way to really explain this type of Black Swan event is to understand <br>the astrology involved.<p>The crash of October 19, 1987 was a shocker, and many an analyst at the <br>time predicted that it would lead into another great depression. But <br>it did not. Why? Again, astrology holds the explanation. For this <br>crash, the USA's Mars-Neptune square was afflicted by Saturn and Uranus <br>in Sagittarius, and Chiron in Gemini. Great Depression occur when the <br>USA's Sun-Saturn square is afflicted by outermost planets in the <br>Cardinal Signs of Capricorn, Aries, Cancer and Libra. In 1987 the <br>affliction was to the natal Mars-Neptune square. By the early 1990s <br>when Saturn had moved into Capricorn, there was a recession but not a <br>great depression because there was no outermost planetary affliction to <br>the US Sun-Saturn square.<p>As an economic astrologer I rely on the primary angles formed by the <br>outermost four planets, plus the Moon's Nodes and Chiron, to ascertain <br>what to expect in the stock market and economy. However, the cosmic <br>environment our Earth lives within is in constant motion, so no two <br>moments in cosmic time are the same astrologically. Primary planetary <br>angles repeat—the Sun-Moon conjunction repeats every 28 days at the New <br>Moon, the Neptune-Pluto conjunction every 496 years—but always within a <br>changed cosmic environment.<p>This ever changing phenomenon reflects how we perceive earthbound <br>history as ever repeating but never duplicating. So there is no <br>guarantee that these planetary patterns which have brought Black Swan <br>crashes and great depressions in the past will bring the same in the <br>future. It may be that we are influenced by celestial bodies so far <br>distant that we have not yet seen and identified them. Yet the <br>astrology of past Black Swan events remains the best way to ascertain <br>when another will hit, with hard angles from Uranus the most indicative <br>pattern to look for.<p>Anyone with an astrological computer program can quickly erect the <br>following charts to see the patterns described.<p>Chart 1:<p>On the inner wheel is the natal chart for the USA, July 4, 1776. I use <br>the Gemini Rising version of this chart. Most astrologers use the <br>Sibley version. On the outer wheel is a chart for October 28, 1929 when <br>the stock market plunged in a way that signaled this wasn't to be just <br>another bear market, but something more devastating.<p>The two most economically sensitive points in the USA's chart are two <br>squares: Sun in Cancer square Saturn in Libra and Mars in Gemini square <br>Neptune in Virgo. Afflictions to the Sun-Saturn square impact the <br>overall economy. Afflictions to the Mars-Neptune square bring down the <br>stock markets. On Black Monday 1929, a stock market crash was indicated <br>by the opposition of T Saturn and Jupiter hitting the natal <br>Mars-Neptune square. Moon conjunct natal Neptune apparently triggered <br>the panic. A few months later, trouble for the overall economy was <br>indicated by T Uranus opposite the US Saturn, square T Pluto conjunct <br>the US Sun.<p>Chart 2:<p>On the outer wheel of this comparative chart is Christmas Day, 1930, by <br>which point it was clear that the nation was sinking into another <br>depression, although no one knew yet how bad it would become.<p>Biwheel Chart 2 shows the T square formed by Uranus, Saturn and Pluto <br>about a year after the Crash of 1929 as people were realizing that this <br>crash was unlike any previous, and was leading the nation into what we <br>now call "The Great Depression." When the Crash of '29 occurred in late <br>October, the T square had not yet formed but was applying. A biwhell <br>chart for Christmas 1930 show how the Uranus-Saturn-Pluto T square <br>afflicts the USA's natal Sun-Saturn square. It's this square that has <br>always been afflicted when great depressions have hit the USA.<p>Chart 3:<p>By mid-September 2008, it was clear that another Black Swan market <br>event was unfolding. A T square formed by Uranus, Saturn and Pluto this <br>time hit the USA's natal Mars-Neptune square—indicating that this was <br>strictly a stock market and/or financial catastrophe. As Uranus then <br>moved into Aries, it opposed Saturn in Libra conjunct the US Saturn and <br>square the US Sun, with Pluto applying to an opposition to the US Sun. <br>This indicated another great depression, although few were willing to <br>call it that by 2011. Every time the USA's Sun-Saturn square has been <br>hit by the outermost planets from Capricorn and Aries, the nation has <br>gone into a great depression. Logical reasons why each happened are <br>found later, although there is rarely agreement among economists <br>regarding the primary reasons.<p>Chart 4:<p>In a biwheel chart for March 5, 2015 the US Saturn is opposed by <br>Uranus, Mars and Venus in Aries, square Pluto in Capricorn opposition <br>the US Sun. On this particular day the Full Moon is conjunct and <br>opposite the US Neptune square the US Mars in Gemini. What this <br>indicates is that the nation, and probably the whole world, is very <br>likely to be in the pits of another great depression, with the strong <br>possibility of another finanacial crash around this time making things <br>even more difficult. What is likely to be different about this great <br>depression is a militant mood, indicated by Pluto's position. Pluto's <br>arrival in Capricorn—every 248 years on average—has a history of <br>coinciding with revolutions. Its previous sojourn through Capricorn <br>coincided with the American Revolution. The one before that coincided <br>with the decimation of Native American populations from diseases <br>imported by Spanish conquistadors, to which the Indians had no <br>immunity, and the shipment of tons of gold and sliver back to Europe, <br>setting off inflation and a series of wars. In effect, both Hemispheres <br>underwent cultural and economic transformations as Europeans invaded <br>the New World in search of gold and silver.<p>Chart 5:<p>It was the USA's financially-sensitive Mars-Neptune square that was hit <br>when stocks suddenly crashed to a new one-day record October 19, 1987. <br>Uranus at 23 Sagittarius was opposite the US Mars, conjoined at this <br>time by Chiron, and square the US Neptune, conjoined by the Moon. <br>Although Jupiter was in Aries opposite the US Saturn, its trine to <br>Uranus apparently saved the overall economy, for the stock market <br>rebounded in the coming months. A couple of years later, with Saturn, <br>Uranus and Neptune all clustered together in Capricorn, the Berlin Wall <br>came down and major restructuring occurred in economies around the <br>world—the Old Soviet Union disbanded and the USA ramped up <br>laissez-faire capitalism—but no great depression occurred.<p>Two rules of thumb emerge from these and other chart studies: No grand <br>cross hitting the USA's Sun-Saturn square, no great depression. And <br>when the USA's Mars-Neptune square is afflicted, there is danger of <br>another stock market crash.<p>The tremendous impact on humanity of Black Swan events is best <br>appreciated in retrospect. At the time of each, people are baffled.<p>Judging by the increased incidence of Black Swan events since the <br>Uranus-Pluto square began tightening toward exact in 2008—first from <br>Pisces to Sagittarius and then from Aries to Capricorn—the world as we <br>know it will soon be transformed, presenting us with a variety of new <br>challenges. That much we can deduce from the astrology involved. What <br>we cannot yet know is exactly how the world will be transformed, and <br>how we will respond to the challenges of change.<p>In Western culture, we have been imbued with the belief that it's up to <br>each individual to find ways to survive and prosper. Intuitively <br>anticipating hard times, some people talk of storing up gold for a day <br>when our money becomes useless; or moving to a tropical island and <br>living a self-sustaining life; or turning homes into fortresses to <br>defend against marauding mobs, and so forth. But such preparations are <br>iffy at best because Black Swan events are unpredictable and bring the <br>unprecedented. Those two key words—unpredictable and unprecedented—have <br>long been used to describe the effects of hard angles to Uranus. <p><br>Endnotes:<p>1. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Influence of <br>the Highly Improbable, published April 22, 2007, TatePublishing.com.<p>2. In his book The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson has a cogent <br>explanation of this Black Swan event from page 320 to 330. In brief, <br>if the Nobel Prize winning mathematicians had known more about economic <br>history and Black Swan events, they would not have been so sure of <br>their risk-assessment formula guaranteeing profits from options and <br>derivatives trades. Investors put so much faith in this formula that <br>big banks bet billions of dollars—and lost.<p>3. Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the <br>University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national <br>administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President <br>Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of <br>Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent <br>book, Aftershock.<p>4. See Great Depression 1990 by Ravi Batra, published by Dell, 1998. <br>Although no great depression hit the USA in 1990, the Japanese economy <br>slumped into a prolonged depression. From Wikipedia: "Batra continued <br>to publish books with the main thesis that financial capitalism breeds <br>excessive inequality and political corruption which inevitably succumbs <br>to financial crisis and economic depression." Great depressions in the <br>USA have occurred when Saturn in Capricorn combined with Uranus, <br>Neptune and/or Pluto to create a grand cross pattern with the USA's <br>natal Sun-Saturn square. In 1990, Saturn in Capricorn made no such <br>pattern with the other outermost planets. No grand cross, no great <br>depression. But American jobs were steadily eroded by automation and <br>corporate outsourcing to cheap labor markets overseas.<p>5. Economists do not agree on the specific dates when each great <br>depression began, so it is impossible to pinpoint a specific date for <br>precise astrological calculation. But the outermost planets move <br>slowly, so the aspects they form are within orb for extended periods. <br>These extended periods encompass disagreements among economists. In <br>retrospect, it is clear that it's impossible to pinpoint a specific <br>date and time when any great depression began. The relevant economic <br>factors involved usually develop in a zigzag pattern of fits and <br>starts. Given our human proclivity to hope for the best, these fits and <br>starts are often misread at the time, and corrected after the fact. As <br>I write this, there is great disagreement concerning the true <br>unemployment figures. What we know for sure is that unemployment and <br>under-employment are enough to curtail demand for goods and services, <br>which in turn curtails the production to supply goods and services, and <br>the bank credit needed to restore normal buying and selling. By the <br>time you read this, the government may or may not have stimulated <br>enough demand to reverse this downward cycle.<p><p><a href="http://robert-gover.blogspot.com/">http://robert-gover.blogspot.com/</a>Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-80915562065508699162011-08-03T10:00:00.000-04:002011-08-03T10:01:43.819-04:00Astrology and MoneyAstrology and Money have a lot in common. Both are highly visible in what we call "the real world" of the tangible and precisely measureable, yet both are mysterious in their origins and theories. What we call astrology includes a spectrum from simplified Sun Sign fortune-cookie blurbs to complex transit-to-natal and progression studies based on past history. And what we call money ranges from the dollar bills and coins we carry in our pockets to vast amounts of credit whirling about in cyberspace and tracked on computer screens. Metaphorically, both Astrology and Money are like magnificent mansions that appear distant from each other yet are invisibly linked. The two-mansion image sprang to my mind as I contemplated the December 21, 2010 Winter Solstice simultaneous with the Lunar Eclipse, aligned with the Galactic Center of the Milky Way, what the Maya mythologized as the universal mother's vagina from whence came our planet and us. Transiting conjunct this latest Solstice was Pluto, Mercury, Mars and the Moon's North Node. All these heavenly events hit the US Federal Reserve's natal Sun opposition Pluto. Since the Fed is the source of our money—and increasingly controversial as an institution—the 2010 Winter Solstice suggests an opportune time to change the Fed, and thus change how our money is distributed. (1) Growing controversy about the Fed also indicates it is ripe for some kind of major transformation. But about 99% of the population, including Congress, does not comprehend how the Fed operates, how money is created and distributed into our society and the world economy. If people did understand it, as Henry Ford quipped decades ago, there would be a revolution before morning. I checked out the previous Winter Solstice/Lunar Eclipse, which occurred in 1638. What was happening then? For Europeans, it was the Age of Discovery. Newly arrived colonists in the Western Hemisphere were exploring their new environment. A natural canal connecting the Amazon and Orincoco Rivers was discovered in Brazil. The first printing press began operating in the Massachusetts colony. The British established their first colony in India at Madras. Russian Cossacks explored beyond the Urals to the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese adopted a "closed country" policy. The Ottoman Empire and Persia agreed on borders separating what are now Turkey, Iran and Iraq. The world as we know it today was, it seems, about midway in the process of being discovered and mapped, mainly by European Christians with a drive to bring their religion and culture to the rest of humanity—and not so incidentally discover new money in the primary form of those times: Gold and silver. What is the driving force today? From a purely economic perspective, it is still money, but specifically what money has become, compared to what it has been in the past. Like astrology, money is an amazing human invention with a long history, sometimes dismal, sometimes wonderful. Our Cro-Magnon ancestors had a life expectancy of 18 years; we now average close to 80 years. Money enables us to trade with each other rather than plunder each other. Astrology enables us to know when times of opportunity for improvement are nigh. The USA's Federal Reserve was enacted into being on December 23, 1913, based on the privatized central bank of medieval times, the Bank of England, founded in 1694. The Fed has grown during the 20th Century into the world's prototypical independent-of-government central bank. The other kind of central bank is public, under government control and responsive to the whole society. That's the kind of central bank favored by Ben Franklin, Abe Lincoln and Sun Yat-Sen, who brought the concept to China. Both money and astrology are human inventions. Money developed as a means of exchanging goods and services, and astrology as a means of forecasting times of opportunities and times of difficulties. Millennia ago, before money became what it is today, astrology was used to guesstimate harvests; if this year's harvest was abundant, a portion could be stored for future times when harvests would be curtailed by bad weather. Astrologers in ancient times found that aspects to the 20-year conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn were good indicators of future abundance or lack. Today, the most economically-meaningful planets are the outermost four: Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Both of these human inventions, money and astrology, are valiant attempts to improve our lot, yet vulnerable to misuses that can lead to quite the opposite. The Banker can misuse money to create poverty for the many and uncouth wealth for the few. The Astrologer can misuse the art of interpreting planetary patterns to influence people for selfish, evil purposes. J. P. Morgan combined the two, using astrology to accumulate a fortune at the expense of the masses. By the Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse of 2010, a growing number of people saw the Fed's control of money as being the heart and soul of economic hardship that commenced with the crash of 2008 and threatened to extend into the foreseeable future. What is now called the "housing bubble" arose under a Saturn-Neptune opposition 2006-2007 (the Fed had lowered interest rates inviting speculation) and the inevitable crash came in 2008 under a Saturn-Uranus opposition square Pluto to form a grand cross with the USA's natal Mars-Neptune square, bringing us to the present time of economic malaise. Since the Fed lends money to government at ever-compounding interest, with the taxpayers legally obliged to repay that debt, the present malaise is all about what's called "the national debt," and resulting federal government budget deficit. In the USA, the ripple effect is that states and municipalities are forced to cut social services for lack of money. The European Union has its Fed-like central bank, too, so its member states are in the same predicament. The news in 2010 was full of hand-wringing concern over how Greece and Ireland would repay their debts, and in the USA how New York, California and other states would survive this period when bank-originated credit money is in such short supply. (Actually, the multinational banks have trillions of dollars and euros, but prefer to maximize profits by derivatives trades rather than loans to stimulate economies.) Meanwhile, the economies of nations such as China and India with public central banks are booming. Why is there no shortage of money in China? Why is it that China can launch a huge infrastructure building program and enjoy around 10% annual increase in Goss Domestic Product while the USA and EU are suffering? And the most crucial question for Americans and Europeans: How can there be such a shortage of money for the people when the banks are sitting on trillions of dollars and euros? I've addressed this last question in a series of articles and in my book Time and Money: the Economy and the Planets (second edition due out in February 2011). It's complicated as it takes us into the question of who owes whom for the national debt, which has been divided into Treasury Bonds and Bills and sold to investors all over the world. But reduced it to its simplest terms, the answer is this: China's government lends money to banks, the USA's central bank lends money to both banks and government. In other words, it's a question of who creates and controls money. In the USA, the idea that government should lend to banks has become unthinkable. In China, government borrowing from private banks is unthinkable. The USA has been a money laboratory since it was 13 British colonies strung along the East Coast four centuries ago. The British decreed that the colonists had to use British money and forbad them from creating their own media-of-exchange to trade among themselves. But British money went back and forth across the Atlantic without touching the hands of most colonists. So they defied the law and developed a variety of currencies: Wampum, tobacco, chickens and pigs, Spanish coins, and various ways of keeping track of who owed whom how much. Plus what Ben Franklin called "colonial scrip." When the King raised the taxes of colonists to repay the Bank of England for the French and Indian War, the seeds of rebellion were planted under a Uranus-Pluto square that formed a grand cross with what would soon become the USA's natal Uranus and then its Mars-Neptune square. The colonists had struggled for about a century and a half to create some prosperity for themselves, and by the mid-1700s were doing better than their counterparts across the Atlantic. In an attempt to defuse what threatened to become a bloody conflagration, Ben Franklin went to London as a lobbyist. When Britain's rulers asked him to account for the amazing prosperity in the American colonies, he replied: "That is simple. In the colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to anyone."<br /><br />Almost a hundred years later when President Abe Lincoln needed money to mount the Civil War, instead of borrowing from European banks at around 36% interest and sticking taxpayers with the bill, his government issued so-called "greenbacks." The Confederacy borrowed from bankers and its money wound up worthless. By creating its own money the Union caused consternation among conservatives. Cried the London <i>Times</i>: <i>"If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic should become indurate down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without a debt. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe." <br /></i><br /><i></i>Sun Yat-Sen became fascinated with American history as a kid growing up in an older brother's house in Hawaii. Decades later when the Chinese were mounting their own revolt against British rule, Sun brought what I call the Ben Franklin and Abe Lincoln concept of money to China. His import led eventually to the establishment of the Peoples Bank of China as an agency of the modern Chinese government. Since the establishment of the Fed in 1913, the US dollar has inflated tremendously so that what cost $1.00 then now costs $100 or more. This inflation developed so slowly that people barely noticed it. The idea that grandpa paid $10,000 in 1900 for the house that sold in 2000 for $10 million was taken for granted. "Real estate is your best investment," it was often said during the 20th Century. And owning your own home was "the American dream." Dramatic rises of stock prices were cheered and the role played by inflation ignored. (Neptune conjunct Mars and opposite Jupiter in the Fed's natal chart). Meanwhile, the US economy overall gained until the 1970s when "trickle-down" theory gained ascendance and "free trade" policy advocates captured control of the government. The financial sector grew from less than 4% of GDP to over 40% now. What the financial sector does, essentially, is move money for a fee. So paying over 40% for this service has become one of the absurd spinoffs of the Fed. It's like the Mafia owning 40% of a neighborhood's income. (Saturn transiting conjunct the Fed's Pluto opposite the Fed's Sun and the Moon's North Node, indicating a time of change.) Wall Street is the headquarters of the nation's and the world's financial industry. And the big banks of Wall Street are the Fed's most cherished customers. To restart the economy after the slump of 2001-2002, the Fed cut interest rates way down. This stimulated buying and selling of real estate, which soon became such a moneymaker (as compared to real wealth generator) that the smart guys on Wall Street sliced and diced mortgages into bonds and sold them worldwide, enabling bankers to make more real estate loans. To insure these bonds against default without government oversight, Wall Street developed credit default swaps, a black market where you could buy insurance for real estate bonds. Just about everyone was making so much money in this game that few noticed it was a variation on the classical Ponzi scheme and destined to implode. The bubble peaked in 2007 under the most recent Saturn-Neptune opposition, and crashed with amazing suddenness under the 2008-2009 Saturn-Uranus opposition which simultaneously hit the USA's natal Mars-Neptune square. Since 1857, every major stock market crash has occurred when that Mars-Neptune square was afflicted by transits. Not every time the square has been afflicted has there been a crash, but every time there's been a crash, the square has been afflicted. The smart guys on Wall Street made big money as the real estate bubble was being inflated, and then made even more money when the bubble burst. The smart money sold the bubble and captured the losses via "short selling" of unsustainable mortgages when it burst.—until the bursting got out of hand because more credit default swaps had been sold than there was money to pay the insurance. The big banks then persuaded government that they were "too big to fail" and thus captured the billions politicians threw at their most generous campaign contributors, under a legislative plundering of American taxpayers called TARP. The bankers who run the Fed are "birds of a feather" with the bankers who run Wall Street, so it's no surprise that these birds would stick together to weather economic storms. And since they are in the business of making money by moving money, it's no surprise that they would engineer the massive money movements that create economic storms. Most of us moderns have come to love money so much, we have forgotten the old cliché, "Love of money is the root of all evil." Many have forgotten the love part of that saying and have shortened it to "Money is the root of all evil," which of course it's not. Money is neither good nor evil. It's a human invention we can use for good or evil, and quite often what seems good today turns out to have evil consequences tomorrow. Money is like water. It can save someone dying of thirst, or drown another in too much. Money is also the life blood of any society's economy. Bad circulation of it has been the downfall of many a society in the past. Bad circulation used to be called usury. Today, usury is how our economy functions: Every buyer and reseller of credit money needs to take a piece of the action to stay in business. Money has also shape-shifted over the centuries. Time was when cowry shells and dried cow dung were used as money, then gold and silver coins. Then came paper money and checks based on deposits of gold and silver in banks to back the paper. Today, most of what we call money exists in cyberspace, denominated on computer screens. It's now possible to buy everything you need without ever touching paper bills or coins. And at the center of this vast spider web of cyberspace credit money is the USA's Federal Reserve. Which returns us to the question of whether it is best for government to buy money from banks, or sell money to banks. And the Lunar Eclipse of the Winter Solstice of 2010 and the growing movement to change the Fed or even abolish it completely. Ellen Brown, author of Web of Debt, stated the problem this way: Our money system is not what we have been led to believe. The creation of money has been "privatized," or taken over by private money lenders. Thomas Jefferson called them "bold and bankrupt adventurers just pretending to have money." Except for coins, <em>all</em> of our money is now created as loans advanced by private banking institutions — including the <em>privately-owned</em> Federal Reserve. Banks create the principal but not the interest to service their loans. To find the interest, new loans must continually be taken out, expanding the money supply, inflating prices — and robbing you of the value of your money. Since 1914 the Fed has operated as a supposed quasi governmental agency but actually as a private group of bankers with no responsibility to the public. An amendment tucked into the Wall Street reform bill last May by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont mandated an audit of the Fed, which had hitherto done its own audits in secret. With the Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse of 2010, an independent audit brought an amazing fact to light: The Fed, since the collapse of 2008, has secretly dished up to its most cherished customers, at taxpayer expense, $12.8 trillion, trillion with a T. Wrote Sanders on his blog: "The $700 billion Wall Street bailout signed into law by President George W. Bush turned out to be pocket change compared to the trillions and trillions of dollars in near-zero interest loans and other financial arrangements the Federal Reserve doled out to every major financial institution in this country…The Fed said that this bailout was necessary to prevent the world economy from going over a cliff. But three years after the start of the recession, millions of Americans remain unemployed and have lost their homes, life savings and ability to send their kids to college. Meanwhile, big banks and corporations have returned to making huge profits and paying their executives record-breaking compensation packages as if the financial crisis they started never happened." One of the most astounding things the Fed and its favorite customers have done is convince a majority of Americans that spending tax money on the people is absurd. What's right and proper is that the people subsidize big banks and corporations. While agonizing over the Social Security Fund, we ignore the trillions thrown at banks and multinational corporations. This cognitive dissonance has been accomplished by control of information in the mass media. With the Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse the American people are getting the jaw-dropping news that Fed bankers stuck them with the bill for their generosity to bankers. No, correct that: Most people are not getting the news. "What if the greatest scam ever perpetrated was blatantly exposed, and the US media didn't cover it? Does that mean the scam could keep going? That's what we are about to find out." (Poorrichard's blog) "Even if WikiLeaks reveals documents from inside a large American bank, as huge as that could be, it will most likely pale in comparison to what we just found out from the one-time peek we got into the inner-workings of the Federal Reserve." The move to change or abolish the Fed is not a Conservative v. Progressive issue. Its two main advocates in Congress are Senator Ron Paul, Conservative Republican from Texas, and Representative Dennis Kucinich, Progressive Democrat from Ohio. Ron Paul believes we should return to the gold standard to control inflation. Dennis Kucinich's proposed bill, HR6550, was timed with the Winter Solstice. His bill is lengthy but, for anyone who is interested in the future of the US money system, worth reading for its lucid list of reasons why it's needed. (See http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-6550) Ironically, the most radical proposal comes from a former employee of NASA and the Treasury Department, retired after 32 years, Richard C. Cook. He published a book in 2009 titled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform (Tendril Press, Aurora, CO) in which he advocates a guaranteed income for all citizens. A summary of his reasoning can be found on pages 200 and 201. Here's a brief sampling: "The number one cause of war (and poverty) in the modern world is the debt-based monetary system run by the banks." "The present system is just as harmful to the wealthy who hold their fellow human beings in bondage as it is to the debtors they oppress, for the rich as well are deprived of the benefits of living in a world where human beings are free and happy, generous and productive." "The 13 original colonies built a dynamic economy without the presence of a single bank. Throughout the 19th Century, we developed the most powerful economy on earth without a large national bank." "We should abolish the Federal Reserve as a bank of issue and re-establish Constitutional control of credit as a public utility." To those who advocate a return to the gold standard, Cook clarifies a confusion about "fiat" money (declared the national currency by government) and "commodity" money (valuable in and of itself, i.e. gold and silver). He calls the bills now issued by the Fed "not money at all…It is simply temporary credit with a lien against it for repayment with interest." Real "fiat" money, says Cook, was the Civil War greenbacks issued by Abe Lincoln—"true democratic money that was spent into circulation by government and was not inflationary. Rather, it allowed commerce to expand and people to prosper. This type of money is actually the key to economic democracy." As our Founders decreed in the Constitution, we have a natural-born right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and this cannot be curtailed by any government that is of, for and by the people. What the Founders didn't foresee was that Congress would turn the creation and control of our credit money over to private bankers, with a legal responsibility to maximize profits for their shareholders, at the expense of the rest of society. Transforming our credit money from the property of bankers into a public utility controlled by a government agency responsible to the electorate—this would be no easy accomplishment. The history of US money has been a tug-of-war between bankers and government, and presidents who have "dissed" the bankers have encountered assassins. Andrew Jackson's assassin missed because his bullets got wet in a Washington rain. But the assassins of Abe Lincoln and John Kennedy succeeded. There is no known evidence they were hired by kingpin bankers. Both assassins were assassinated before they could either confess or stand trial. And there are those who believe there is no such thing as meaningless coincidence. There is likewise no meaningless coincidence when it comes to such a rare and powerful pattern as that which formed on December 21, 2010. What will finally emerge from this rare pattern regarding the Fed and our money we have yet to discover. Astrology tells us when a time for change has ripened, but not what change we will collectively make. Endnotes: I am ignoring the difference here between tropical and sidereal, Western and Vedic systems of astrology, and emphasizing planetary angles and transit-to-natal aspects. Figured according to the Vedic system, transiting Pluto is in Sagittarius, not Capricorn, owing to a 26 degree difference in Western and Vedic systems. To map both the Fed's nativity and the Winter Solstice of 2010 according to the Vedic system would mean that there is no alignment with the Galactic Center because of the Precession of the Equinoxes. Why adhere to the Western system? Well, when we go to a lumber yard and order two-by-fours, we know they no longer measure two honest inches by four honest inches, yet we still call them two-by-fours and they still work for their intended purpose. Even though I admire the astronomical accuracy of the Sidereal Vedic ephemeris, the Tropical Western ephemeris works just as well to reveal the meaningful mundane and transit-to-natal aspects. For an in-depth Tropical analysis of the Fed's natal chart, I recommend "Funny Money and the Fed" by Kathy Allan, 2010 Libra Edition of The Mountain Astrologer. See Arlo Guthrie: "I'm Changing My Name To Fannie Mae' -<br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAG0XMRty5Y Why do I use the Uranus in Gemini Rising chart for the USA when prevailing opinion argues for the Sibley Chart's Sagittarius Rising? When we review the history of how the people of the 13 original colonies declared themselves a separate nation, it is revolutionary passion that dominates, and Uranus is the undisputed planet of revolutionary zeal. Establishing the exact time for the USA's "birth" is an exploration of subtle and not-so-subtle reasons for and against the July 4 date, and one exact time on July 4 verses others. This gives rise to endless debates based on endlessly debatable data. Rather than deal with the squabble of this debatable data, I view the USA as an entity and ask what Ascendant best describes the character and personality of this entity in the community of nations. That takes us to perceptions, viewpoints. Most Americans see the USA as possessing the qualities best described by the Sibley Chart's Sagittarius Rising. But if you travel to other lands and listen to people discuss the USA, the viewpoint you get is best described as Uranus Rising in Gemini. The USA is seen by turns as the world community's innovative genius and feared outcast. Above all, from the viewpoint of other nations, the USA is unpredictable. Our government ostracizes Cuba and North Korea as communist, yet establishes interdependent relationships with the world's leading communist nation, China. While we as a nation vigorously deliver charity to some, we just as vigorously bomb others to rubble. Stripped of our own homegrown rationales, this behavior also describes an entity with Uranus in Gemini Rising, one who "marches to his own drummer." So my choice of Uranus in Gemini Rising is based on our behavior as a nation and the conflicted history of our founding. In the transit-to-natal studies I do, what matters most are natal and transit-to-natal planetary aspects within our tidy little Solar System, rather than our Solar System's ever-changing position in the vast and yet-to-be-discovered universe beyond.Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-87088074160100522382011-02-06T14:17:00.001-05:002011-02-06T14:17:26.661-05:00<font color='black' size='2' face='Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif'><font size="2" color="black" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id=ieooui></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> </font> <div class="MsoNormal">Morrison Arrest Memorial</div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <pre><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"><font size="2"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br> Jim Morrison Memorial<br> <br> </font></font><font size="2">This was originally run on <tt><span style="font-family: Arial;"><a href="mailto:newsletter@jymsbooks.com">newsletter@jymsbooks.com</a> in late January 2011.<span style=""> </span></span></tt></font></span></pre> <div class="MsoNormal"> <br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">What has stayed with me about Jim Morrison was his vision of a oneness that transcends our temporary, earthbound beliefs.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Back in the mid-sixties, I'd been hired to write an article about him for the New York Times Sunday Magazine. This was as The Doors first album was making a big hit. After lunch with the people who were then The Doors management, Jim suggested the two of us go for a walk in a nearby park. That's where he told me he was a poet. I wasn't sure what he meant by poet.<span style=""> </span>He pulled a notebook out of the back pocket of his leather pants and handed it to me.<span style=""> </span>Handwritten lines.<span style=""> </span>"I'd like to get this published," he said. The big commercial publishers were not hot to promote books of poetry, but I thought that with his rising rock star fame, maybe…<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">As I got to know him over the coming months, a second thing about him leaped out: It was like he saw the world from the perspective of an ancient pantheistic shaman.<span style=""> </span>For Jim, the gods and goddesses were everywhere around us and acting out hilariously and/or tragically through everyone and everything. </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">I soon realized that Jim wanted to share this vision.<span style=""> </span>That's what his lyrics and performances were really all about.<span style=""> </span>He talked about a rock concert being a shamanic ceremony to lift everyone's consciousness into the ecstatic transcendent.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">His detractors—which were many back then, the Times rejected my article—said he was not for real. "He don't wear saffron robes, he's just another grungy hippie." But I knew otherwise. It was like he was born with the certainty that he was an eternal soul passing though another temporary lifetime, and had absolutely no fear of death.<span style=""> </span>He lived fully in that lifetime but mentally and spiritually was separate from it, seeing it as though he'd been abruptly dropped into it, and was sometimes disoriented by it. That vision is what made him such a fascinating enigma to so many.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">After hearing news of his death in Paris, I realized that what he was not able to do was live as his real self in our modern reality of mechanistic and supposedly logical cause-effect.<span style=""> </span>He was as uncomfortable in our ordinary reality as Vincent Van Gogh, for he saw beyond it, into the realm of primary causes, the realm of the gods, and tried to share this with us. <span style=""> </span></div> <font size="2" color="black" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <div> <br> </div> <div style="clear: both;"><br> </div> </font></font>Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-89883726991762340942011-01-22T18:15:00.000-05:002011-01-22T18:16:09.360-05:00<font color='black' size='2' face='Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif'><font size="2" color="black" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> <div> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id=ieooui></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">CONGRESSMAN KUCINICH: REVOLUTIONIZING MONEY<span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio is proposing to return control of our money system to government, as provided for in the Constitution. This would revolutionize the American monetary system for a second time, the first being when the Constitution was written at the end of the Revolutionary War.<span style=""> </span><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">In the political atmosphere of 2011, Representative Kucinich, Democrat, is viewed by some conservatives as a communist.<span style=""> </span>Conversely liberals and progressives generally see him as a courageous advocate for what is desperately needed—returning control of our money to democratically elected lawmakers.<span style=""> </span>And there are, ironically enough, sophisticated conservatives who see his proposed bill as benefitting the private sector by making investment money available to a much wider range of enterprises, which in turn would increase prosperity and spread it broadly.<span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">He introduced his monetary reform bill, HR6550, on December 17, 2010, under a rare astrological alignment, two days before the simultaneous Full Moon and Lunar Eclipse conjunct the dark rift in the Milky Way (according to Tropical calculation).<span style=""> </span>With the Sun and Moon conjunct and opposite Pluto which was square Jupiter and Uranus, both widely opposite Saturn, major changes are definitely indicated. </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Changing the monetary system is certainly major, for money is the life blood of any economy, and how money is crated and distributed determines how that economy and society will faire in the long run.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Kucinich's bill would have a direct impact on the Federal Reserve, which now creates and distributes US money. <span style=""> </span>This impact is best shown in a biwheel chart showing the Fed's establishment by Congress December 23, 1913.<span style=""> </span>By putting the Fed's natal chart on the inner wheel, and the date for Kucinich's HR6550 on the outer wheel, we can see how the planetary energies of both align for the likely success or failure of the bill.<span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">What leaps out as most potent in this biwheel chart is a cluster of planets in late Sagittarius and early Capricorn.<span style=""> </span>This cluster brackets the Fed's natal Sun-Pluto opposition and indicates that Kucinich's bill will at first be squashed, presumably by powerful people in the financial sector, operating behind the scenes.<span style=""> </span>Don't expect to hear or read much about Kucinich's bill in the mass media, for the cartel that now owns and operates most of the mass media benefits greatly from the present monetary system. </div> <div class="MsoNormal">But given the planetary energies involved, this squashing is likely to eventually backfire. The Fed's heavily hit Sun-Pluto opposition indicates the Fed is due for a thorough change of some kind. Not only do the planetary energies indicate this but so does the accumulated debt, especially what is called the national debt.<span style=""> </span>The economy is in such dire straights with public and private debt so overwhelming that some economists expect the US Government to be forced to default because the taxpayer population of overwhelmed with private debt as well.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">The "traditional" alternative to a sovereign government default is to create inflation so that cheaper tax dollars can be used to pay national debts. But in today's integrated world economy, that presents the danger of inflation becoming hyperinflation, which would destroy the existing monetary system for most of the world.<span style=""> </span>Kucinich's bill would reconstitute it before a collapse, returning control of money to Congress as set forth in the US Constitution, before Congress privatized it in December 1913 by handing it over to the private bankers of the Federal Reserve.<span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">There are several pervading fears about this. One is that our present monetary system is due to collapse of its own weight if nothing is done.<span style=""> </span>Another is that about 99% of the population does not understand how the syestem works and thus is fearful of any change.<span style=""> </span>A third worry is that Congress has become so corrupted that power over the nation's money would be worse than the present privatized system.<span style=""> </span>Most members of Congress are primarily concerned not with such macro social issues as the money system, but with their own little micro issue of how to get enough money to mount effective reelection campaigns.<span style=""> </span>So Kucinich's bill is presently crunched between public ignorance, Congressional intransigence, and an increasingly likely collapse of the present money system.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Here's a summary of how such a collapse can happen: <br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"><br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>"As the privately-owned medium of exchange is withheld from circulation, unemployment rises and wages fall; collaborative ventures and investments cease; businesses wither for lack of customers; and family homes and farms are foreclosed. Private owners of the medium of exchange confiscate the land and tangible assets of society for repayment of debt and poverty spreads throughout the culture. Historically, collapse of the marketplace has been followed by famine, disease, illiteracy, extremely limited opportunity and primitive barter." (Nikki Alexander, Fourwinds10.com)<span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Kucinich's bill would change the present drift toward "famine, disease, illiteracy, extremely limited opportunity and primitive barter."<span style=""> </span>What follows is a sampling of quotes from the bill setting forth why HR6550 is needed and what it proposes to do.<span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">"To create a full employment economy as a matter of national economic defense; to provide for public investment in capital infrastructure; to provide for reducing the cost of public investment; to retire public debt; to stabilize the Social Security retirement system; to restore the authority of Congress to create and regulate money, modernize and provide stability for the monetary system of the United States, retire public debt and reduce the cost of public investment, and for other public purposes."<span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">The need for it is summarized this way:</div> <div class="MsoNormal"><br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">"The conduct of United States monetary policy by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and specifically the failure of Board members to safeguard the financial system against wholesale fraud and abuse of citizens, demonstrates the risks of maintaining a system wherein the power to create and regulate money has been delegated to private individuals who are unaccountable to the People of the United States in any way, even through their representatives in Congress." <br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"><br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">"The country is stymied by competing forces: a desire to put people to work and an aversion to borrowing money to create programs to do so."</div> <div class="MsoNormal"><br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">"A debt-based monetary system, where money comes into existence primarily through private bank lending, can neither create, nor sustain, a stable economic environment, but has proven to be a source of chronic financial instability and frequent crisis, as evidenced by the near collapse of the financial system in 2008.</div> <div class="MsoNormal"><br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>"Banks pyramided their value by spending money into existence, greatly inflating the value of bank holdings, inflating the value of their asset bases, enticing unknowing investors to participate in financing schemes like the bundling of subprime mortgages, and ultimately bringing undercapitalized banks and the entire financial system to the edge of ruin, creating circumstances where the taxpayers of the United States were called upon to save the banks from their own imprudent money-issuing practices, misspending and mis-investments. The banks' ability to create money out of nothing ultimately became the taxpayers' liability, and raises a fundamental question about a practice of money creation which threatens the wealth of the American people."</div> <div class="MsoNormal"><br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">How the bill would bring about the desired results is summarized this way: <br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"><br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">"Reclaiming the power of the Federal Government to create money, and to spend or lend money into circulation as needed, eliminates the need to treat money as a Federal liability or to pay interest charges on the Nation's money supply to financial institutions; it also renders unnecessary the undue influence of private financial institutions over public policy."</div> <div class="MsoNormal"><br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Undue influence of private financial institutions on Congress is certainly a problem. It's presumed by many that we now have a government "of, for and by the big banks and multinational corporations."<span style=""> </span>But with a new government agency in charge of the creation and distribution of our money, Congress would be much less vulnerable to the present system of lobbying and "bribe-ocracy."<span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">While big financial institutions have greatly benefited from the Fed-run debt-based monetary system, American society has suffered. In effect, these big financial institutions have plundered American society and are now investing overseas, notably in China, which has the kind of state-owned and operated central bank that Ben Franklin and Abe Lincoln advocated, and which Kucinich's bill would restore in the USA.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Ironically, there are meanwhile right-wing conservatives who are lobbying Congress to force China to adopt a privatized central bank based on the Fed prototype.<span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">The original prototype for the Fed was the Bank of England, founded in 1694.<span style=""> </span>The American Revolution was fought by colonists who objected to the "taxation without representation" this monetary system created.<span style=""> </span>Now, one cycle of Pluto-in-Capricorn later, American right-wing conservatives are leading the resistance to Kucinich's bill, which would restore government control of US money as the Constitution prescribed.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">What the battle is really all about is distribution of wealth throughout society. A "redistribution of wealth" is what right-wingers object to in Kucinich's proposed legislation, and why they label him a communist.<span style=""> </span>But his bill would merely restore the intentions of the nation's founders, and thus also restore the kind of free enterprise that Americans used in the 1800s to create the wealthiest economy on the planet—until Congress privatized control of money by establishing the Fed and the Internal Revenue Service to collect taxes to repay money loaned by the Fed to the Federal Government. <br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"><br> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Although today's economy is a lot more complex, Kucinich's cause is the same today as Ben Franklin's cause was in the 1770s.<span style=""> </span><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">If HR6550 is finally adopted, it would not immediately redistribute wealth.<span style=""> </span>Any monetary system takes time to have its effect.<span style=""> </span>What money the US Government (i.e. taxpayers) owes on today's national debt (denominated in Treasury Bonds and Bills) would be repaid over time, but it would be repaid with debt-free money issued by the US Government.<span style=""> </span>Thus we Americans would stop digging ourselves an ever-deeper hole of debt and return to the debt-free system envisioned by the nation's founders. Inflation would be controlled by adjusting the money supply to economic needs, as it was in the nation's early years.<span style=""> </span><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span><span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">For the past approximately 3,000 years money's primary purpose has been to provide a means of exchange, thus facilitating commerce, which in turn creates prosperity.<span style=""> </span>Since the creation of the Fed, money's secondary purpose—a store of value—has taken over.<span style=""> </span>Yet in whatever form—gold coins or digits on computer screens—money's highest and best use continues to a means of exchange.<span style=""> </span>Those who have stored enough money to be classified as millionaires, billionaires or trillionaires cannot buy the trappings of the super-wealthy lifestyle if the money system collapses.<span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Since money is now so ubiquitous, a collapse of the money system is hard to imagine.<span style=""> </span>Thus, many among the newly wealthy can be expected to cling to the present system and throw money at Congress members to maintain present system. <span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">On the other hand, the potent alignment of planetary energies due to form from late 2012 through 2015 will manifest events in our earthbound reality that necessitate change.<span style=""> </span>Kucinich's bill rides this mounting wave of needed change.<span style=""> </span>But that doesn't mean it won't be defeated by protectors of the status quo.<span style=""> </span>Planetary patterns indicate periods of crisis, but do not determine how we will respond.<span style=""> <br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">And finally there is the distrust of government that has been created by the corporate-owned media in recent decades. "You can't trust government to do anything right. Government is the problem, not the solution." Or so goes the presumed public opinion created by this propaganda—even as we all depend on a huge number of government agencies to enable our society to function, from Air Traffic Controllers to the Postal Service workers who deliver our mail. Whatever individual or group would be put in charge of our money system could hardly do a worse job than Fed and Wall Street bankers have done.<span style=""> </span>Bankers have a legal responsibility to maximize profits for their shareholders; government employees are responsible to the public.<span style=""> </span>You can hardly jail a banker for wrecking a society when he can claim he was only doing his best to fulfill his legal responsibilities to his shareholders. <span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><br> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">For deeper insight into how the present system works, and other proposals to change it, search the internet for "web of debt." <span style=""> </span></div> </div> <div> <br> </div> <div style="clear: both;"><br> </div> </font></font>Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-281830136098974412010-11-12T11:06:00.001-05:002010-11-12T11:06:15.855-05:00Petard<font color='black' size='2' face='Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif'><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id=ieooui></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;">His Own Petard </span></div> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;">Robert Gover, USA<font size="2"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br> </font></font></span></div> <div><br> <span style="font-family: Arial;"><font size="2"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"></font></font></span></div> <div><span style="font-family: Arial;">The developing conflict over foreclosures is an amazing example of being "hoisted by his own petard," a phrase from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act III, scene IV. <br> <br> A petard is a bucket of gunpowder used to blow down enemy fortifications. Being hoisted by one's own petard means that the explosives went off and "hoisted" the handler rather than the target. <br> <br> And that is what happened to a lot of big banks during the ballooning of the real estate bubble that crashed in 2008 bringing down the whole economy, under the Saturn-Uranus opposition that hit the USA's Mars square Neptune. <br> <br> The mortgage system that was developed in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s is a lot different from the one in the movie "It's a Wonderful Life." The banker that sells you the home loan today bundles your loan with a lot of others and resells them as mortgage backed securities (MBS) to investors around the world. <br> <br> This Uranian variation on the old Saturnian way of doing loans worked so well it became a wondrous money-maker for bankers and loan brokers—and seemed an equally wondrous deal for buyers of MBS. Lenders scrambled to sell any home loan they could. As real estate prices zoomed up, people bought homes or refinanced, investors bought rental real estate at an amazing pace, and lenders flipped those loans into MBS and investors collected the monthly mortgage money and everybody danced and drank Champaign. <br> <br> The real estate industry created a thing called MERS, Mortgage Electronic Registration System, to record the conversion of home loans into MBS. MERS did not, however, retain title to properties.<br> <br> Inevitably this wondrous scheme collapsed and a lot of homeowners lost jobs or discovered they'd signed a mortgage that suddenly popped their monthly payments beyond their means. So the foreclosure "industry," as its being called now, went into action, foreclosing on failed mortgage payers, and reselling their homes, then reselling new bundles of MBS. <br> <br> It was around this time that Pluto became involved, creating a T square with the Saturn-Uranus opposition. Pluto's involvement suggested there was something unsavory going on behind the scenes. <br> <br> That hidden something is now coming to light in a most dramatic way. A judge in California may have triggered this new angst when he noted that one cannot transfer a real estate title one does not have. Titles to homes had been sliced and diced like ingredients in a huge MBS gumbo and could not now be extracted from the bubbling gumbo and restored to their previous condition. <br> <br> Buyers of MBS securities were as distressed as foreclosed homeowners and frustrated bankers and foreclosure specialists who'd smelled fresh meat in the bloody waters of the housing market, who are now huddling with armies of lawyers, trying to figure out what can be done to get those deadbeats out of their homes so the homes can be resold fast and cheap, as the system was designed to do. <br> <br> To the foreclosure specialists, it's a legal technicality that should be smoothed over by a judge friendly to the big money. But the foreclosed homeowners have their lawyers, too, and Pluto's participation in the Saturn-Uranus T square probably has more secrets to reveal.<br> <br> Congress persons will soon become stressed as they are caught between the devil of distressed homeowners and the deep blue sea of profit-hungry bankers—their voters v. their campaign funders. The Wall Streeters who created this trap are now caught in it and screaming as the Uranus-Pluto square tightens and we head into what is likely to become the most revolutionary time in US history. </span></div> <font color="black" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> <div> <br> </div> <br> </font></font>Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-2169164262749941932010-11-11T16:57:00.001-05:002010-11-11T16:57:52.621-05:00Python and Pig<font color='black' size='2' face='Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif'><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id=ieooui></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal">The Pig Through the Python</div> <div class="MsoNormal">Robert Gover, USA, <a href="mailto:gocycles@aol.com">gocycles@aol.com</a></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">"Get this pig through the python" is a metaphor that is catching on among big bankers and financiers who are losing money because of the present foreclosure crisis. </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">The 18.6 year cycle of the Moon's North Node has correlated with the real estate cycle when charted over centuries.<span style=""> </span>During the 20<sup>th</sup> Century this correlation was distorted by the Fed's ability to impose interest rates rather than allowing the "free market" to do so. </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">On November 27 this year, at 8:59 AM, the North Node will precisely conjoin Pluto at 4 Capricorn 07.<span style=""> </span>With the North Node's role in real estate prices and Pluto's role in major transformations, the current foreclosure crisis appears to be headed for some kind of resolution.<span style=""> </span>It may not happen on November 27, though, for Pluto's effects are notorious for manifesting like births months after conceptions. But this coincidence tempts me to suggest Pluto is the python and the North Node is the pig.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">The cause of the foreclosure crisis is that the financial sector python swallowed a pig that was way too big.<span style=""> </span>The pig grew too big when mortgages were sliced and diced into securities and sold all over the world—without due diligence to the deeds to each property thus sold.<span style=""> </span>In other words, in Wall Street's enthusiasm to reap big profits from this python, the pig got stuck in the python's throat.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Millions of foreclosures across the country are stalled as the Wall Street python appeals to government to help it digest this pig. Caught between the devil (big campaign contributors) and the deep blue sea (voter reaction) politicians are stumped. Temporarily, at least.<span style=""> </span>Legal precedent going back to the invention of the printing press calls for written deeds to prove ownership of properties.<span style=""> </span>Without a deed, a bank cannot foreclose on a property—you cannot take back something you cannot prove you own.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Another interesting astrological fact is that, as the North Node and Pluto make their exact conjunction, Saturn will be conjunct within 1 degree of the USA's natal Saturn at 14 Libra, square the USA's Sun.<span style=""> </span>The Pluto-Node conjunction will be opposite the USA's money planets Venus and Jupiter in Cancer, and applying to an opposition to the USA's Sun.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">What we may be moving into is a change in the present makeup of our government, from "of, by and for big banks and corporations" to of, by and for the voters—a return of the democracy we like to believe we have.<span style=""> </span>I'm not suggesting we hold our breaths till this change manifests in our daily lives, though, for where billions of profits are concerned, wealthy campaign contributors and their political beneficiaries get panicky.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Judges across the land who are involved in foreclosure cases have tended to side with the foreclosure industry. If a distressed homeowner was legally savvy enough, he or she could throw sand in the foreclosure machinery by hiring a lawyer to demand the bank involved show title to the property. Since so many titles have been put into the mortgage backed securities blender, there is no longer any way to un-blend and retrieve them.<span style=""> </span>That Humpty Dumpy had a great fall.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">What's to be done?<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">A Legal Aid attorney in Jacksonville, Florida, April Chamey, pioneered saving homeowners from foreclosure back in 2004 by demanding banks prove ownership by producing titles.<span style=""> </span>She then filed "quiet title" actions on behalf of her homeowner clients.<span style=""> </span>A quiet title action quiets all other claims, giving homeowners a fresh new title to their properties. </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Thus may the python of justice digest both the Wall Street python and its pig.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <font color="black" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> <div> <br> </div> <div> <br> </div> <div style="clear: both;">http://robert-gover.blogspot.com/<br> </div> </font></font>Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-80246642170247160192010-10-16T10:14:00.001-04:002010-10-16T10:14:24.092-04:00Foreclosures<font color='black' size='2' face='Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif'><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id=ieooui></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal">Foreclosures </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Robert Gover, USA, <a href="mailto:gocycles@aol.com">gocycles@aol.com</a> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Lately, the news has carried stories of foreclosures put on hold. This is</div> <div class="MsoNormal">another sign of the presently tightening Uranus-Pluto square—a surprising development in the established foreclosure business. It emerged out of a California court ruling that may enable thousands of foreclosed homeowners to save their homes.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Let's say you bought a home by obtaining a mortgage from a bank for $250,000.<span style=""> </span>That bank sold another 1,000 mortgages to your neighbors, then "bundled" those mortgages and sold them as securities (bonds called mortgage credit obligations) to investors around the world.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Then came the crash of 2008 and you lost your job and could not make the mortgage payments. The bank wants to foreclose and resell your property.<span style=""> </span>But it no longer holds the paper showing that it owns the loan you took out.<span style=""> </span>That paper departed when your bank bundled its mortgages and sold them. Without proving that it owns your loan, how can your bank foreclose?<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">The real estate industry believed it had solved that problem by creating MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration System).<span style=""> </span>Although your bank no longer holds the deed to your house, by relying on MERS it can claim it has the right to foreclose, kick you out and conjure a new loan.<span style=""> </span>Then bundle the new mortgage with others and sell that bundle to investors far and wide.<span style=""> </span>And, if new borrowers can't pay their mortgages, repeat this wondrous profit-generator ad infinitum.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">However, on May 10, 2010, a California bankruptcy court held that MERS could not enable foreclosure. (See <i>In re Walker</i>, Case no. 10-21656-E–11)<span style=""> </span>The judge said that since MERS did not own the underlying Deed of Trust note, it could not transfer it to another entity. <span style="">Any attempt to transfer a trust deed without ownership of the underlying note is void under California law</span>. You can't transfer something you don't have.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">The creation of a worldwide debt derivatives market in effect means that trust deeds have disappeared as surely as if they'd been shredded. <span style=""> </span>MERS kept records of sales but not trust deed titles proving ownership.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">An article in Mother Jones Magazine put the problem this way: "With so many loans having been bought, sold, <a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/securitize.asp" target="_blank">securitized</a>, and traded, establishing who owns the mortgage is hardly a trivial matter. It frequently requires months of sleuthing in order to untangle the web of banks, brokers, and investors, among others."<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Until the California court decision in May, judges overlooked this legal technicality and sided with the foreclosure companies against distressed homeowners.<span style=""> </span>Mortgage foreclosures have so far cost $7 Trillion in lost real estate equity and untold suffering by unwitting victims of the Wall Street scheme that crashed the economy.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Concurrently, the foreclosure business has netted tremendous profits for those who have used MERS to obtain "ghost" titles to distressed properties and resell them.<span style=""> </span>If the California court ruling holds up, it will mean a surprising stroke of true justice for many a victimized homeowner.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Uranus in hard angles to Pluto has a way of turning established systems upside down, as events in the1930s and 1960s attests. <span style=""> </span>If the California court ruling catches on around the country, sixty-two million homes could become foreclosure-proof, hanging a lot of financial sharpies by their own petard.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">This is upsetting to people in the foreclosure business who'd been counting on the crashed economy to make another killing.<span style=""> </span>But it's an unanticipated stimulant to the overall economy, for it halts the avalanche of lost home equity and homeless families.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Notes:<span style=""> </span>For more details see a <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i> article by attorney <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/09/IN5BTNJ2V.DTL">Sean Olender</a>.<span style=""> </span>Also see <a href="http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/homeowners.php">http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/homeowners.php</a>.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <font color="black" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> <div> <br> </div> <div> <br> </div> <div style="clear: both;">http://robert-gover.blogspot.com/<br> </div> </font></font>Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-12053699290394590912010-09-22T16:24:00.000-04:002010-09-22T16:25:13.449-04:00Money System<font color='black' size='2' face='Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif'><font color="black" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> <div> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id=ieooui></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal">The Mysterious Madness of the USA's Money System </div> <div class="MsoNormal">By Robert Gover </div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"><span style=""> </span>A monetary system is not about your money or my money, it's about our </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">money, the stuff we use to buy and sell and keep track of who owes whom how </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">much. Today, everybody needs money to live. If everybody has enough money to buy necessities, nobody starves or goes homeless and the whole society </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">prospers.<span style=""> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">Money became everybody's business with the industrial revolution and </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">massive population shift from farms to cities. Before this migration, most people, other than the aristocracy, grew their own food, made their own clothes, built their own homes, bartered, and had little need for money. Now money extends its tentacles into every facet of our lives, from conception to casket.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">When gold and silver and other precious metals were used as money, money was a form of wealth itself. But modern paper currencies are based on our faith in them as means of exchange, measure of value, and symbol of wealth. Modern money is not wealth itself, but just as the flag is often equated with the patriotism it symbolizes, money is often equated with the real wealth it symbolizes. </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">Since money is now as necessary to our lives as air and water, it's amazing </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">that most of us know more about air and water than we know about money. In this and other ways, money is comparable to the great mystery we call God, the mystery from which we came into this life and into which we disappear when we die. </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">Control of money bestows God-like powers. <span style=""> </span>"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws," said Mayer Amschel Rothschild a couple hundred years ago as he was pioneering what we now call "the new world order."<span style=""> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">Lending and borrowing money is as old as money itself. What's new is public debt: Government borrowing from bankers to be repaid by an unwitting third party called "we the people." Public debt is not to be confused with private debt, all those corporate, mortgage and credit card loans.<span style=""> </span>Murray Rothbard (1) explains public debt this way: </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">"The public debt transaction...is very different from private debt...the </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">government receives money from creditors, both parties realizing that the </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">money will be paid back not out of the pockets or the hides of the politicians and </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">bureaucrats (who borrowed it), but out of the looted wallets and purses of the hapless taxpayers, the subjects of the state. The government gets the money by tax-coercion; and the public creditors, far from being innocents, know full well that their proceeds will come out of that selfsame coercion. In short, public creditors are willing to hand over money to the government now in order to receive a share of tax loot in the future. This is the opposite of a free market, or a genuinely voluntary transaction. Both parties are immorally contracting to participate in the violation of the property rights of citizens in the future. Both parties, therefore, are making agreements about other people's property, and both deserve the back of our hand." </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">This money borrowed by government is then sliced and diced and sold as Treasury Bonds and Bills. It cannot be completely repaid without leaving the American population money-less. All our money—currency and credit—has been borrowed from the banks of the Federal Reserve, the USA's privatized central bank. If everyone were to suddenly repay all debts in full, we'd be without the means-of-exchange money we need to function as a society. That's at once utterly illogical and literary true.<span style=""> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">About 99 percent of the American population believes government creates our money.<span style=""> </span>Not so.<span style=""> </span>More than 97% of what we call money is actually credit, loaned by the bankers of the Federal Reserve.<span style=""> </span>In other words, the bankers of the Fed sell us the stuff we use as money. <span style=""> </span>Money is created when loans are made. So most of what we call money is actually debts to borrowers and credits to lenders.<span style=""> </span>These electronic transfers become paper bills and coin money if or when people cash checks rather than deposit them.<span style=""> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">Most people believe the <i style=""><u>Federal</u></i> Reserve is an agency of the US Government.<span style=""> </span>Why else would it be called "Federal"?<span style=""> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">A US senator and a few powerful bankers conceived what was to become the Federal Reserve System in secret during November 1910, at a retreat on Jekyll Island, Georgia.<span style=""> </span>"Their expressed purpose was to standardize the nation's banking system.<span style=""> </span>But they also intended to eliminate competition between banks and maximize profits by creating a central bank independent of government control. To do this, they would need to write the needed legislation and carefully navigate it though Congress in such a way as to not arouse fears by allowing the public to realize they were privatizing control of the nation's money.<span style=""> </span>If they could manage this they might expand and achieve their long-range goal: A cartel of independent central banks that would dominate the world." (2) <span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Even today some historians deny that this conspiratorial meeting ever happened. But the cat got out of the bag in 1916 when B. C. Forbes, who would later found <i>Forbes</i> Magazine, was a reporter for <i>Leslie's Weekly</i>, and wrote:<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">"Picture a party of the nation's greatest bankers stealing out of New York on a private railroad car under cover of darkness, stealthily hieing hundreds of miles South, embarking on a mysterious launch, sneaking on to an island deserted by all but a few servants, living there a full week under such rigid secrecy that the names of not one of them was once mentioned lest the servants learn the identity and disclose to the world the strangest, most secret expedition in the history of American finance…I am not romancing. I am giving to the world, for the first time, the real story of how the famous Aldrich currency report, the foundation of our new currency system, was written."<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">And in 1930 banker Paul Warburg wrote a book of 1,750 pages in which he described the meeting and its purpose without mentioning its location or the names of those who attended—except for Senator Aldrich. "I do not feel free to give a description of this most interesting conference concerning which Senator Aldrich pledged all participants to secrecy," wrote Warburg. "Even the fact that there had been a meeting was not permitted to become public." </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Ten years after signing off on the Federal Reserve Act, President Woodrow Wilson said: "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial Nation is controlled by a system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation, therefore, and all its activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be the worse ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world—no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote by the majority, but government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."</div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">In the 1920s, Congress asked one Fed member (Donald J. Winn, Assistant to the Board of Governors) if the Fed wasn't in fact a private corporation.<span style=""> </span>Winn replied, "The Federal Reserve System was established by an act of Congress and is not a private corporation."<span style=""> </span>He went on to explain: "The stock of the Federal Reserve Banks is held entirely by commercial banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System."<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Say what?<span style=""> </span>How can it NOT be privately held when in fact its stock is privately held by bankers?<span style=""> </span>If some homeless guy said he didn't rob that convenience store, he merely refreshed its cash register, he'd be declared criminal clown of the year.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Poet Ezra Pound got himself in a world of trouble by vociferously objecting to this heist we now affectionately call The Fed. He felt the need to flee the USA and go to Italy where he broadcast diatribes against those who had created it. The US Government finally locked him up in an insane asylum. While there, Pound was visited by a young poet, Eustace Mullins. In Mullins' forward to his book, <i style="">Secrets of the Federal Reserve</i>, he wrote:<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">"In 1949, while I was visiting Ezra Pound who was a political prisoner at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, D.C., Dr. Pound asked me if I had ever heard of the Federal Reserve System. I replied that I had not, as of the age of 25. He then showed me a ten dollar bill marked 'Federal Reserve Note' and asked me if I would do some research at the Library of Congress on the Federal Reserve System which had issued this bill. Pound was unable to go to the Library himself, as he was being held without trial as a political prisoner by the United States government. After he was denied broadcasting time in the U.S., Dr. Pound (had) broadcast from Italy in an effort to persuade people of the United States not to enter World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt had personally ordered Pound's indictment, spurred by the demands of his three personal assistants...I had no interest in money or banking as a subject, because I was working on a novel. Pound offered to supplement my income by ten dollars a week for a few weeks. My initial research revealed evidence of an international banking group which had secretly planned the writing of the Federal Reserve Act and Congress' enactment of the plan into law. These findings confirmed what Pound had long suspected. He said, 'You must work on it as a detective story.'"</div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">When Ezra Pound ran out of money and could no longer pay young Mullins $10 a week for his research, Mullins appealed to various foundations for money to complete his task.<span style=""> </span>All refused.<span style=""> </span>He then wrote a book based on what he'd found so far, but 19 New York publishers rejected his manuscript.<span style=""> </span>One editor, Devin Gerrity, president of Devin Adair Publishing Company, gave him some friendly advice: "I like your book but we can't print it.<span style=""> </span>Neither can anybody else in New York.<span style=""> </span>Why don't you bring in a prospectus for your novel, and I think we can give you an advance. You may as well forget about getting the Federal Reserve book published."<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Mullins eventually did publish a small edition in 1952 via two of Ezra Pound's disciples, under the simple title <i>Federal Reserve</i>.<span style=""> </span>A couple of years later an unauthorized edition was done by a New Jersey publisher under the tile <i>The Federal Reserve Conspiracy</i>.<span style=""> </span>In 1955, a German edition was put out by Guido Roeder but the entire edition of 10,000 copies were burned by "government agents," ordered to take this action by the US High Commissioner to Germany James B. Conant, who was President of Harvard University from 1933 to 1953.<span style=""> </span>This was the only book burning in Germany since the days of the Nazi Party.<span style=""> </span>In 1968 another pirated edition appeared in California and Mullins tried to get the FBI and Postal Inspectors to act, but they refused.<span style=""> </span>Then, in 1980, a second German edition came out and because the US Government no longer controlled the internal affairs of Germany, this edition survives.<span style=""> </span>It's a duplicate of the one that was burned in 1955. </div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Who owns the debt being repaid by American taxpayers for money borrowed from the Fed banks by the US Government?<span style=""> </span>In 1952, Mullins says, he traced those people to a group called the London Connection. The conclusion was obvious.<span style=""> </span>Although the USA gained its political independence during the Revolutionary War, we were resold into debt to British aristocrats by the creation of the Fed.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Today the general belief is that our money is printed by government…although simultaneously we are harangued about "the national debt" and how each of us owes an astounding share of it, and what a crime it is to pass this horrendous debt onto our children and grandchildren.<span style=""> </span>This cognitive dissonance is evidence that secrecy persists.<span style=""> </span>Even President John F. Kennedy got whacked shortly after he made a move to undermine the Fed's absolute money power. (Google Executive Order 11110. June 4, 1963 for details)<span style=""> </span>Remember that famous line, "Follow the money," in Oliver Stone's movie JFK?<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">This evening when you watch the TV news and see that handsome face under the perfectly coifed hairdo blathering on about "the national debt," know that this purveyor of information is grossly misinformed, and that if he were not misinformed, you would not be seeing him on TV.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">One final irony: the Peoples Republic of China adopted the monetary system advocated by Ben Franklin and Abe Lincoln. Their People's Bank of China is an agency of their government.<span style=""> </span>American and European financiers have lanbasted the Chinese system as "state control" in contrast to "free enterprise." Well, our system is free profits for a tiny minority—those who economist Thorstein Veblen called a parasitic leisure class—but a huge debt burden for the vast majority.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Notes:<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="1" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="">"Repudiating the National Debt" by Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), posted on the von Mises web site January 16, 2004. Rothbard was professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and vice-president for academic affairs at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. This article ran in the June 1992 issue of <a href="http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/">Chronicles</a> (pp. 49–52).<span style=""> </span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style="">G. Edward Griffin's <i>The Creature From Jekyll Island</i>, American Media, 2006.<span style=""> </span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style="">Also see <i style="">The Lost Science of Money—The Story of Power</i> by Stephen Zarlenga, American Monetary Institute, 2002; and <i style="">The Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System—The Slight of Hand That has Trapped Us in Debt And How We Can Break Free</i>, by Ellen Hodgson Brown, Third Millennium Press, 2007.<span style=""> </span>Ellen Brown's web page also has a blog with numerous articles and reader comments.<span style=""> </span></li><li class="MsoNormal" style="">For more information, including videos about this complicated subject, Google "debt based monetary system." </li></ol> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> </div> <br> </font></font>Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-14778897523762567032010-09-10T10:30:00.001-04:002010-09-10T10:30:19.366-04:00add<font color='black' size='2' face='Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif'><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id=ieooui></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal">Banksters and Gumbas </div> <div class="MsoNormal">From Robert Gover, USA, <a href="mailto:gocycles@aol.com">gocycles@aol.com</a> </div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Many Americans are wondering why it is that the US Government has unlimited amounts of money to spend on wars but little or no money to spend on its own needy citizens. <span style=""> </span>Instead of helping needy citizens, our government rewards the guys who caused the neediness—the Wall Streeters who created the casino that made the marketing of doomed mortgages such a gold mine.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Now when Joe Sixpack seeks a mortgage or small business loan from a banker, he's told, "You don't qualify." And Mr. Banker has a long list of "requirements" that "prove" Mr. Sixpack doesn't qualify.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Yet Mr. Banker has no problem qualifying his "gumbas" (to use the Italian American slang term) for investments to "aid the war effort" by siphoning off taxpayer dollars for any number of whacko enterprises such as selling lipstick in Afghanistan.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Mr. Bankster knows his gumbas will be repaid with taxpayer dollars provided by a bribed Congress.<span style=""> </span>Thus enriched, this gang is inspired to beat their chests, wave the flag, praise free enterprise and tell Joe Sixpack to get lost.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Another prevalent question: Why does our government give fistfuls of dollars to "tribal leaders" halfway around the world while telling our own needy people to "get a job at McDonalds"?<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Such questions are spreading throughout the population as the Cardinal T Square tightens its orb.<span style=""> </span>This exceedingly rare T square is formed, at present, by Saturn conjunct Mars and Venus in early Libra, opposite Jupiter and Uranus conjunct in early Aries, with all five of those planets square Pluto and the Moon's Nodes, the North Node in Capricorn, the South Node in Cancer.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">This transiting T square has the US Federal Reserve's Sun-Pluto opposition in a grand cross pattern. The Fed, original source of all our credit and cash, is now in a period from which it will emerge radically changed.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Ellen Brown, author of "Web of Debt" <a href="http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/">http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/</a> defines what needs to be changed this way:<span style=""> </span></div> <div><strong><span style="font-family: Arial; font-weight: normal;">"We no longer have a government 'of the people, by the people, for the people.' We have a government run by and for Big Business, and Big Business has gotten control because its affiliated banks have monopolized the business of issuing the national money supply…What hides behind the banner of 'free enterprise' today is a system in which giant corporate monopolies have used their affiliated banking trusts to generate unlimited funds to buy up competitors, the media, and the government itself, forcing truly independent private enterprise out…"</span></strong></div> <div><strong><span style="font-family: Arial; font-weight: normal;">The solution to this massive fraud:<span style=""> </span></span></strong></div> <div><strong><span style="font-family: Arial; font-weight: normal;">"These giant cartels can be brought to heel only by cutting off their source of power—the power to create money—and returning (this power) to its rightful sovereign owners, the people themselves." </span></strong></div> <div class="MsoNormal">The heart of the problem is how our money is created and distributed by a private company of bankers with the misleading name of "Federal" Reserve.<span style=""> </span><strong><span style="font-family: Arial; font-weight: normal;">To learn the history of the Fed, check out a 10-minute video found at:<span style=""> </span>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09NuAdKgqhI </span></strong></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">If we transform the Fed from banksters and their gumbas into a public institution responsible to the whole society, we will succeed the way the Tea Partiers of 1763 succeeded—by breaking free from an abusive central bank.<span style=""> </span>See <a href="http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/video-the-real-tea-party-begins-here/">http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/video-the-real-tea-party-begins-here/</a><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">Legislation to change the Fed has been written and is being circulated in Congress now.<span style=""> </span>You can access information about it by googling "American monetary institute."<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"> </div> <div class="MsoNormal">One thing is certain—we have maxed out our indebtedness and must now either suffer "austerity" (drastically reducing our standard of living) or change the way we create and distribute money, which means change the Fed.<span style=""> </span></div> <font color="black" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> <div> <br> </div> <div> <br> </div> <div style="clear: both;">http://robert-gover.blogspot.com/<br> </div> </font></font>Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-87597925990652696692010-08-21T07:59:00.001-04:002010-08-21T07:59:54.186-04:00Racism<font color='black' size='2' face='Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif'><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CRobert%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="City"></o:smarttagtype><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id=ieooui></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-update:auto; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Arial; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Courier New"; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal">Racism and Propaganda</div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">This is a Neptunian tale of old delusions and evil intentions gone awry.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Andrew Breitbart (Neptune trine Venus and Chiron, Sun in Aquarius opposite Moon, Sun trine Jupiter and Uranus) is a propagandist promoting rightwing causes.<span style=""> </span>He engineered the downfall of Acorn, a national organization devoted to helping the poor.<span style=""> </span>He scored this victory by publicizing a couple of provocateurs, costumed as a pimp and prostitute, visiting Acorn offices to ask workers there how they could get a mortgage and other financial resources.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">The firestorm resulting from mass media airing of those videos caused government funding to be withdrawn from Acorn—before it was revealed that Breitbart had created a lie. </div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Breitbart's most recent effort—an attempt to paint the NAACP as a racist organization—backfired.<span style=""> </span>Breitbart claims "someone" sent him a video of Shirley Sherrod, of the US Department of Agriculture, speaking at a small town NAACP meeting. Her father was murdered by a white racist. In a brief snippet of that speech, Ms. Sherrod described an incident in 1986 when she felt a jolt of prejudice against a white couple who were threatened with foreclosure.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">The point Sherrod was making is that she then had an epiphany and reversed herself, and helped the white couple save their farm.<span style=""> </span>She realized that poverty is the heart of the problem we call racism.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">By editing a snippet of the video in which Sherrod describes a momentary feeling of racial disdain, and publicizing this via TV news outlets, Breitbart managed to ignite another firestorm which resulted in Sherrod being fired from her job.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Seems everyone was ready to go with the old "seeing is believing" delusion and bought Breitbart's crude lie—before Sherrod and others protested, and the truth leaked out.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">If you compare the Fox News account of Breitbart's public relations effort with the MSNBC account, you'll get a strong sense of the Neptunian-ruled confusion and conflict racism causes.<span style=""> </span>Which brings me to the point I want to make.<br> <br> Racism is one form of xenophobia, defined as "<span style="">an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange." (dictionary.com.)<span style=""> </span>It surprises most contemporary people to learn that there was less xenophobia and/or racism is Colonial America, and more "mixed marriages" per capita than there are today. Back then, people of different races labored together, which quickly dissolved whatever xenophobia they originally felt toward one another.<span style=""> </span></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="">What engendered the stigma against African Americans was that they were expensive property, and their mixed-race children were legally the property of their owners.<span style=""> </span>English indentured servants were freed after their indenture period was up. Indians were so "disobedient" and headstrong they were soon discarded as laborers.<span style=""> </span>Many mixed marriages were broken up when the non-black partner moved away—although others were kept alive by runaway slaves and indentured servants joining Indian tribes.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="">"Ol' <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Massa</st1:city></st1:place>" paid a lot of money for those African slaves whose labors made him rich, and created laws to keep them separate from whites and Indians.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="">Today, "Ol' Massa" is reincarnate among the ruling elite, and the stigma against African Americans persists, kept alive after the Civil War by Jim Crow laws and customs, and despite the Supreme Court's reversal of a previous ruling declaring an African American to be one-fifth of a white man.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style="">The Sherrod scandal unfolded with <st1:place w:st="on">Neptune</st1:place> conjunct Chiron and both opposite Mercury.<span style=""> </span>By Winter Solstice 2012, <st1:place w:st="on">Neptune</st1:place> will still be conjunct Chiron with both in a T square to Mercury opposite Jupiter.<span style=""> </span>Neptunian taboos change slowly.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div> <font color="black" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><br> </font></font>Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-56308374089909309932010-08-09T17:03:00.001-04:002010-08-09T17:03:13.622-04:00Taboos<font color='black' size='2' face='arial'><font color="black" face="arial" size="2"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CRobert%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="country-region"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place"></o:smarttagtype><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id=ieooui></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-update:auto; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Arial; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Courier New"; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal">Taboos </div> <div class="MsoNormal">From: Robert Gover, USA</div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Under the Saturn-Uranus-Jupiter-Pluto T square, the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">USA</st1:country-region></st1:place> is rapidly approaching a time when we'll have to overturn some taboos or sacrifice ourselves on the altar of ignorance.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="">This isn't the first time a society faced such a choice.<span style=""> </span><span style="">In a book titled "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" Jared Diamond tells the fascinating story of the Norse people who lived in <st1:place w:st="on">Greenland</st1:place> hundreds of years ago. Their environment underwent changes that threatened their existence.<span style=""> </span>They had a taboo—much like our taboo against marijuana.<span style=""> </span>They refused to eat fish.<span style=""> </span>As the so-called "Little Ice Age" made their hitherto fertile green environment colder and colder, they had to flee or starve, for they would not violate their taboo.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style=""><span style=""> </span></span>We in the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">USA</st1:country-region></st1:place> have developed an abundance of taboos that are threatening our existence.<span style=""> </span>Skipping our addiction to oil, here's a brief list:</div> <div class="MsoNormal">1. A privatized central bank, The Fed.<span style=""> </span>If we would democratically create the stuff we use as money instead of having our Federal Government buy loans from the private bankers of the Fed and stick us with the ever-ballooning "national debt," there would soon be prosperity aplenty for everyone.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">2. Foreign Wars.<span style=""> </span>If our Federal Government would kick its addition to foreign wars and bring our soldiers home from <st1:country-region w:st="on">Iraq</st1:country-region>, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Afghanistan</st1:country-region></st1:place> and dozens of other foreign outposts, we would reduce our tax burden tremendously. It would cost billions of dollars less to BUY Iraqi oil.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">3. Cheap Chinese consumer products.<span style=""> </span>If we would impose tariffs on Chinese and other goods made by cheap foreign labor, and instead make the things we need at home, we would upgrade our lives and prosper with high quality goods and services—as we did before we shipped all those millions of jobs overseas, trading our own wellbeing for trans-national corporate profits.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">4. Prohibiting marijuana.<span style=""> </span>Our national drug, booze, causes more traffic deaths and injuries, more domestic violence and more festering health problems than marijuana ever could.<span style=""> </span>If the government would get out of the business of prohibitions and, instead, tell us what's safe and what's harmful to our health, we'd be a lot healthier, happier and wealthier as a society.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">5. Socialized medical care.<span style=""> </span>We already have a diluted version of this for a minority in the form of Medicare and Medicaid.<span style=""> </span>Our taboo against sharing the benefits of mainstream and alternative medicines is not only stupid, it's downright insane.<span style=""> </span>Medical procedures and pharmaceuticals have surpassed traffic accidents as the leading cause of death and injury in the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">USA</st1:country-region></st1:place> today—all because of the need to make dollar profits from illnesses.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal">We Americans waste more money on bribing politicians (called campaign contributions) and behavioral controls (i.e., the prohibition against marijuana) than we spend on things that would improve our lives.<span style=""> </span>We have become like those ancient Norse Greenlanders who refused to eat fish, even though they were surrounded by endless banquets of fish, and thus consigned themselves to extinction.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">A young lawyer named Robert R. Arthur recently wrote a book titled "You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos."<span style=""> </span>Since no major publisher would touch it, he produced hand-made copies at his kitchen table.<span style=""> </span>One amazon.com reviewer said, "…if you pee, poop, fart, pick your nose, or masturbate, you will undoubtedly find value in this book."<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">And if you're an astrologer who is interested in the presently unfolding changes promised by the long Uranus-Pluto square that will dominate this decade, you will derive a keener sense of the work this revolutionary pair faces—and the changes in store for us as a society.<span style=""> </span>If, that is, we have what it takes to kick our addiction to insane taboos.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><o:p> </o:p></span></div> <div> <br> </div> <div style="clear: both;"></div> </font></font>Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-88922427731278133632010-01-18T14:35:00.000-05:002010-01-18T14:36:16.594-05:00Hyperinflation 1<font color='black' size='2' face='arial'><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CRobert%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="country-region"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="PlaceName"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="PlaceType"></o:smarttagtype><o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place"></o:smarttagtype><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if !mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id=ieooui></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><style> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-update:auto; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Arial; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Courier New"; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {color:purple; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} </style> <![endif]--> <div class="MsoNormal">Hyperinflation Part 1</div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">As I pointed out in a previous newsletter, the worst periods of inflation, going back to the <st1:place w:st="on">Roman Empire</st1:place>, have occurred under Saturn-Uranus or Saturn-Neptune oppositions, and sometimes hard angles from Pluto have been involved.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Saturn-Neptune oppositions occur every 36 years on the average; Saturn-Uranus oppositions occur every 45 years. Planets are said to be in opposition when, from our perspective on Earth, they are 180 degrees apart, putting we earthlings between them.<span style=""> </span>The Saturn-Uranus opposition brings down whatever entrenched Saturnian structure is ripe to fall.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">What is called the Hyperinflation of the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Weimar</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Republic</st1:placetype></st1:place> 1923 began in 1915 under a conjunction of Saturn and Pluto.<span style=""> </span>It built up slowly but steadily during 1917 under a Saturn-Neptune opposition, and then gained momentum 1918 to 1921 under a series of Saturn-Uranus oppositions, to climax in 1923.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">An eyewitness said, "It was horrible.<span style=""> </span>Horrible!<span style=""> </span>Like lightening it struck.<span style=""> </span>No one was prepared.<span style=""> </span>You cannot imagine the rapidity with which the whole thing happened.<span style=""> </span>The shelves in grocery stores were empty.<span style=""> </span>You could buy nothing with your paper money."<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">From 2006-2007, Saturn opposed <st1:place w:st="on">Neptune</st1:place>, and from 2008 through 2010 we have a series of Saturn-Uranus oppositions moving to a T square to Pluto.<span style=""> </span>So economic predictions of hyperinflation is supported by the astrological history of past hyperinflations.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">If you've been doing your family's shopping for at least ten years, you have probably noticed that food prices have doubled or even tripled.<span style=""> </span>This slow inflation has been going on since the creation of the Federal Reserve in December 1913.<span style=""> </span>What you could buy then for a dollar costs around $100 today.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Hyperinflation would mean a 100 dollar bill quickly becomes worth more as toilet paper than money.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">What has me revisiting this depressing subject is an article online by economist John Williams (<a href="http://www.shadowstats.com/">www.shadowstats.com</a>)<span style=""> </span>Here's the opening paragraph of his article titled "Hyperinflation Special Report" dated April 8, 2008:<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">"The <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region></st1:place> economy is in an intensifying inflationary recession that eventually will evolve into a hyperinflationary great depression.<span style=""> </span>Hyperinflation could be experienced as early as 2010, if not before, and likely no more than a decade down the road.<span style=""> </span>The <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region></st1:place> government and Federal Reserve already have committed the system to this course through the easy politics and a bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, and gross mismanagement."<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">The last of five exact Saturn-Uranus oppositions will occur in July 2010.<span style=""> </span>If the past is prologue, we can expect hyperinflation to peak around the end of 2012.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">December 2012—famous for "end of the world" prophesies—marks the tightening of a Uranus-Pluto square that will dominate till at least 2018, and which, based on past history, can be expected to bring revolutionary transformations, as detailed in previous articles by me.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Economist John Williams' prediction of hyperinflation is supported by astrology but with a joker in the deck: Uranus, bringer of unprecedented surprises.<span style=""> </span>Around the end of May 2010 the national mood of public opposition to the ruling oligarchy will change as Uranus (conjunct Jupiter) moves from easy-going Pisces into Mars-ruled Aries, and with Pluto and Saturn forming a grand cross to the Fed's natal Sun-Pluto opposition.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">Economist, Henry C. K. Liu, defined the joker when he said, "What we will have going forward is not Weimar Republic type price inflation, but a financial profit inflation…inducing the public to invest what remaining wealth they still hold only to lose more of it at the next market meltdown which will come when the profit bubble bursts."<span style=""> </span>(1)</div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div class="MsoNormal">1. "Bogged Down at the Fed," September 11, 2009, Asian Times Online.<span style=""> </span>.<span style=""> </span></div> <div class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></div> <div> <br> </div> <div style="clear: both;"></div> </font> Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-50520305203960801002010-01-18T14:30:00.001-05:002010-01-24T23:04:31.033-05:00GRAND CROSS AND GREAT DEPRESSIONS<!--[if !mso]> <style> v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves>false</w:TrackMoves> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:drawinggridhorizontalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing> <w:drawinggridverticalspacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:dontautofitconstrainedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> </w:Compatibility> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:latentstyles deflockedstate="false" latentstylecount="276"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:WinstarTT; 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mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="">By Robert Gover<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:85%;">(Copyright 2006) </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;">My purpose here is to review the astrological history of past great depressions in order to show why the years 2008 through 2019 are likely to be the most difficult so far in US history—and, since the US economy is now so integrated into the world economy—for other nations as well.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">In ancient societies that developed astrology to high levels—Egyptian, Hindu, Babylonian, Greek, Mayan, Chinese, etc.—the study of planetary influences was confined to a priesthood.<span style=""> </span>No attempt was made to publicize how these priesthoods worked, knowing that the combination of mathematics and mythology they employed would baffle the masses.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Now, computer programs make astrology more accessible to more people than ever before. Computers have also made astrological research much easier and faster. Not many years ago it required months of work by astrologers to find data that computers now find in seconds.<span style=""> </span>The data presented here can be checked by anyone with an astrological program and access to historical information.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <h1 style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Great Depressions Defined</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p></o:p></span></h1> <p style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent2"><span style="font-size:100%;">There have been four great depressions in US history: the 1780s, 1840s, 1870s and 1930s.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Great depressions are not to be confused with periods of less hardship or shorter periods of hardship, often called depressions or recessions or downturns.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">There have been many periods called recessions or depressions in US history but only four that qualify as great depressions.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>How can we distinguish recessions and depressions from great depressions?<span style=""> </span>Dr. Ravi Batra provided this definition (<i>The Great Depression of 1990</i>, Simon and Schuster, 1987, page 106):<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><span style="font-size:100%;">“A recession usually lasts for one to three years, during which the rate of unemployment, while rising, is generally below 12 percent.<span style=""> </span>When a recession lasts for more than three years, and/or the rate of unemployment lies between 12 percent and 20 percent, the economy may be said to be suffering from a depression.<span style=""> </span>When unemployment remains high and business stagnates for six or more years, the nation’s plight may be called a great depression.<span style=""> </span>Thus, depending on its severity in depth and length, the downswing of the business cycle may be defined as a recession, depression, or great depression.”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>What looms ahead in the not-to-distant future is likely to combine the social upheavals of The Sixties with the angst of the 1930s Great Depression and the rebelliousness of the American Revolutionary period.<span style=""> </span>This prognostication is not certain, understand, but it is very likely.<span style=""> </span>I base the likeliness of it on two things: 1) correlations of past great depressions with a certain repeating planetary pattern, and 2) the thrust and momentum of current events.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>What makes astrology “unscientific” is that each repeating cyclical pattern formed by the planets of our solar system occurs in an ever-changing celestial environment.<span style=""> </span>For example, each New Moon, the most frequently recurring cycle, occurs within a solar system in which all the other planets are arranged differently in relation to the Lunation.<span style=""> </span>Moreover, our solar system has changed in relationship to the surrounding universe due to the Precession of the Equinoxes.<span style=""> </span>Thus, each moment in “cosmic time” is unique, never to duplicate again. Scientific verification depends on duplication. Astrologers are continually dealing with a changing universe and thus dogged by various degrees of uncertainty.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Nevertheless, astrology is the best predictive tool we humans have. It can tell us what periods will be difficult, what periods will be easy.<span style=""> </span>Combine astrological prediction with the trend of current events, and accuracy of prediction increases.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <h2 style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">History of Great Depressions<o:p></o:p></span></h2> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The single economic condition that has coincided with all great depressions of the past is a record gap between rich and poor.<span style=""> </span>By the beginning of the new millennia, the gap had never been greater.<span style=""> </span>This is so both inside the USA and throughout the world.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">But isn’t it possible to fix this problem and minimize another great depression?<span style=""> </span>Yes.<span style=""> </span>The stars do not compel, the future is not set in stone.<span style=""> </span>Even devout believers in laissez faire capitalism know something must be done to narrow this gap that eventually threatens all.<span style=""> </span>The problem is that there is no agreement concerning what must be done to solve the wealth disparity problem.<span style=""> </span>That’s why we are likely to be well into the 2000-teens before circumstances overcome ideological debate and dictate practical solutions.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I should add that as an unrepentant idealist, I believe we will emerge from the coming hard years better than before.<span style=""> </span>Crisis is opportunity.<span style=""> </span>My aim here is to show, first, astrologically why the years from 2008 through 2019 are likely to be the most trying in our history, and second, to stimulate thinking about long-range solutions.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">From a purely astrological perspective, every </span><span style="font-size:100%;">time the USA suffered through a great depression, Saturn </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">§</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> was found in mid-Capricorn forming a 90-degree square angle, as viewed from Earth, to one of the so-called malefic planets in mid-Aries.<span style=""> </span>These heavies have been Uranus </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">¨</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, Neptune </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">©</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, Pluto </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">À</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and Mars </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">¥</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;">. Understand that in the solar community, no planet by itself is good or bad.<span style=""> </span>It's when these planets move into certain angles to each other that their combined influence is experienced by us as good or bad.<span style=""> </span>And malefic angles or aspects formed by the slower-moving Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are notoriously the worst, with Mars a close runner-up.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Grand Cross in US History<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Never has a great depression occurred when Saturn has arrived in mid-Capricorn without forming a square to Pluto, Neptune, Uranus or Mars in mid-Aries.<span style=""> </span>And the grand cross pattern with Saturn in Capricorn has never formed without coinciding with a great depression.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Of all the various geometric patterns the planets form, the most difficult, demanding or malefic is the grand cross.<span style=""> </span>But the grand cross does not impact all nations equally.<span style=""> </span>To find out how the coming grand cross will impact one nation as compared to another, biwheel charts are used.<span style=""> </span>These show how a given aspect up there in the sky will affect one nation differently than another.<span style=""> </span>All nations may be swept up in the problems of the coming great depression, but not all will face the same challenges.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Combining the time of each great depression with the time of the USA’s birth shows what I call “the great depression grand cross.”<span style=""> </span>A biwheel shows two moments in time so they can be compared to one another.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>A word about 1893 to 1895, often called "one of the worst depressions in history," and indeed it was extremely difficult.<span style=""> </span>Crop failures were rife and prices were the lowest they'd ever been to that point in US history.<span style=""> </span>It was ushered in by what is now called "The Panic of 1893" when the primary economic measurement of that time, The Business Curve, dropped from 10 points above normal to 20 points below normal.<span style=""> </span>But it was too brief to qualify as a great depression.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Another example of a difficult but brief period was the Oil Embargo of the 1970s, when the price of gasoline was driven skyward by the OPEC oil cartel.<span style=""> </span>We had what was dubbed "stagflation," a combination of stagnant activity and inflationary prices.<span style=""> </span>But this didn't qualify as a great depression either.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">How to Verify<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Planetary positions and angles are astronomical measurements.<span style=""> </span>They can be verified by checking an Ephemeris (a table of daily planetary positions).<span style=""> </span>Comparisons of biwheel charts are best done by acquiring astrological software and erecting two charts: one for the USA's birth, July 4, 1776, Philadelphia, (or for the birth of any other nation) and the other for when a past great depression bottomed.<span style=""> </span>The two charts mapping planetary positions are then combined by putting the nation’s chart on the inner wheel and the event chart on the outer wheel, creating a symbolic freeze-frame of two moments in time.<span style=""> </span>This transit-to-natal method has enabled me to discover the repeating planetary pattern that has always coincided with repeating periods called great depressions.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Until the 1990s, America experienced great depressions in roughly 30- and/or 60-year cycles.<span style=""> </span>It takes Saturn 28 to 30 years to complete an orbit by transiting through each of the 12 constellations or Signs of the Zodiac.<span style=""> </span>When Saturn returns to mid-Capricorn each 28-30 years without squaring Pluto, Neptune, Uranus or Mars in mid-Aries, (for instance, in the 20th Century during the 1900s, 1960s and 1990s) the country has experienced economic or social upheavals or adjustments but no great depressions.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>When the USA was born on July 4, 1776, in Philadelphia, the Sun was at 12 degrees and 44 minutes of Cancer, forming a 90-degree square aspect to Saturn at 14 degrees and 47 minutes of Libra.<span style=""> </span>Rounding out to the nearest degree: Sun at 13 Cancer, Saturn at 15 Libra.<span style=""> </span>This Sun-Saturn square has proven to be economically sensitive down through American history.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Endless Argument<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>As for the precise time of the USA's birth or inception, there is endless argument.<span style=""> </span>The exact time of birth is important because it gives us the degree of the Ascendant or Rising Sign, the moment of dawn, around which the planets are then placed in "houses," signifying areas of activity.<span style=""> </span>The Ascendant indicates how an individual sees his world and is seen by it.<span style=""> </span>Some astrologers make a sound argument for using Scorpio Rising, which appeals to me personally because it puts my natal Sun conjunct the USA's Ascendant.<span style=""> </span>The most widely used is the Sibley chart, with Jupiter-ruled Sagittarius Rising.<span style=""> </span>We Americans may see ourselves as a Jupitarian-generous, Sagittarius “sage” philosophical nation but we are definitely not perceived that way by other nations.<span style=""> </span>Rather we are seen as original, unique, even eccentric and unpredictable, by turns genius and outcast—the qualities of Uranus in Gemini Rising.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I use the Gemini Rising chart with Uranus on the Ascendant because it gives a more accurate astrological reading of who the USA is in the community of nations.<span style=""> </span>Yes, it’s illogical that our Founders would sign the Declaration of Independence around 2 AM.<span style=""> </span>On the other hand, quite a few were Masons and concerned with the astrology involved, and one could hardly ask for a more prosperous indicator than Sun, Jupiter and Venus together in the 2<sup>nd</sup> house, indicating great material wealth.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>The 12 constellations are important to map our Solar System.<span style=""> </span>In effect, they each denote a different neighborhood within our Solar System and in the vast universe beyond.<span style=""> </span>For astrological purposes, they are mapped into 30-degree sections.<span style=""> </span>These sections are called Signs in astrology.<span style=""> </span>Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn are called Cardinal Signs.<span style=""> </span>They correspond to spring, summer, autumn and winter—the two Solstices and two Equinoxes.<span style=""> </span>Planets in Cardinal Signs, it is often said,<span style=""> </span>“make things happen.”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">X in a Box<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>The USA was born when the Sun was in Cancer.<span style=""> </span>The constellation Cancer is opposite Capricorn.<span style=""> </span>And Libra (wherein resides the USA's Saturn) is opposite Aries.<span style=""> </span>So by comparing the USA's birth chart with a second chart for a great depression, a grand cross pattern is shown by transiting Saturn in Capricorn 180 degrees opposite the US natal Sun in Cancer, while another malefic planet in Aries is 180 degrees opposite the US natal Saturn in Libra.<span style=""> </span>Since the planets involved are also thus 90-degrees square to each other, a box pattern is also formed.<span style=""> </span>It's this X-in-a-box pattern astrologers call a grand cross.<span style=""> </span>It puts the Earth in the middle of a crisscross of planets.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Another way to approach a biwheel chart is to imagine the US birth chart as a clock face.<span style=""> </span>In a biwheel chart, the clock face depicted as the inner wheel remains stationary.<span style=""> </span>The 12 planets depicted on the second chart, shown on the outer wheel, become the clock's moving hands.<span style=""> </span>The combination tells us what cosmic time it was for a certain event.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Most economic or financial astrologers use single charts, not transit-to-natal biwheels.<span style=""> </span>I chanced upon the value of using transits to the USA’s birth chart in the early 1980s and found, as I continued to work with this method, that it speaks eloquently about US economic history.<span style=""> </span>Great Depressions have arrived when the cosmic clock shows the x-in-a-box grand cross pattern made by transiting Saturn moving opposite the US natal Sun's position at 14 Cancer, while another "heavy" planet is transiting through Aries opposite the US natal Saturn's position at 15 Libra.<span style=""> </span>Every time this pattern has formed, the USA has gone through a great depression.<span style=""> </span>Never has it formed without coinciding with a great depression.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The worst wars in US history have occurred when transiting Uranus returned to its natal position in the US chart; other less destructive wars have occurred when planets “hit” the US Uranus from various other hard angles.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Stock market panics become likely when the US Mars-square-Neptune is “hit”—the subject of another paper.<span style=""> </span>The list of such “coincidents” expands as one continues to explore.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Am I saying the planets control our economy?<span style=""> </span>No.<span style=""> </span>I am saying astrology enables us to forecast difficult economic times.<span style=""> </span>How we collectively respond to difficulty times is what results in great depressions.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The grand cross anchored by Saturn has brought great depressions because we humans are creatures of habit.<span style=""> </span>We are not controlled by the stars but we tend to apply solutions that have worked in the past instead of finding new solutions to new problems.<span style=""> </span>I encapsulate this as “Belief trumps evidence.”<span style=""> </span>We find the evidence we seek and do not find evidence we do not seek.<span style=""> </span>Devotees of an economic ideology tend to become fanatical and apply solutions that worked in the past.<span style=""> </span>But— <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">“History repeats but does not rhyme,” as Mark Twain put it.<span style=""> </span>We can foresee future times that will resemble past times but we cannot predict exactly what specific events will manifest, and thus what innovations will be needed.<span style=""> </span>Planetary cyclical patterns repeat but always in an ever-changing context.<span style=""> </span>No two moments in cosmic time are ever the same.<span style=""> </span>Old economic ideologies must change with changing times.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Another Way to Visualize<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""><span style=""> </span></span></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Another way to visualize the grand cross pattern is to imagine the Solstice/Equinox chart, which has 0 degrees Aries (spring) Rising at 9 o’clock on the chart, 90 degrees from 0 degrees Cancer (summer) at 6 o’clock, Aries (autumn) at 3 o’clock, with Capricorn (winter) at 12 o’clock.<span style=""> </span>The great depression grand cross would then have Saturn up near noon in Capricorn, square another outer planet around 9 o’clock in Aries, with both opposite and square the US Sun in Cancer (6 o’clock) and Saturn in Libra (3 o’clock).<span style=""> </span>Visualizing this most basic of astrological charts emphasizes the Cardinality of the four Signs involved in the great depression grand cross.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>These oppositions and squares are measured by longitude only, and need not be precisely exact.<span style=""> </span>They are effective when they are "within orb"—that is, within 5, 7, 10 or even 15 degrees of exact.<span style=""> </span>I prefer to apply a 7 degree orb.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">When Saturn reaches 7 degrees of Capricorn, it has come within 7-degree orb of an opposition to the US Sun at 14 Cancer.<span style=""> </span>Planetary aspects have been found to be more powerful when "applying" than when "separating," much as ocean waves have more force when cresting to breakers.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Keep in mind, also, that the larger, outermost planets orbit slowly as measured in Earth years: Saturn averages 28-30 years, Uranus 84 years, Neptune 165 years, Pluto 248 years.<span style=""> </span>Pluto, the most distant from our Sun, has the most erratic orbit.<span style=""> </span>None of the planets move with the mechanical precision of our earthly clocks.<span style=""> </span>We use our human measurement of time to track the planets, although the planets cycle to their own celestial rhythm.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Great Depression of the 1780s<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>The first great depression in the new nation's history became an undeniable fact around December of 1783.<span style=""> </span>Saturn </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">§</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, Uranus </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">¨</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;">, Neptune </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">©</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and Mars </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">¥</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> were all involved in the 1780's grand cross, and this first great depression is viewed by some economic historians as being as severe as any in US history.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>On the biwheel chart for this one, Saturn was at 15 degrees Capricorn, which puts it opposite the US natal Sun at 13 Cancer; meanwhile, Mars at 21 Aries is opposite Uncle Sam's natal Saturn at 15 degrees of Libra.<span style=""> </span>Adding to this combination is Uranus conjunct Uncle Sam's Sun and thus also opposite transiting Saturn.<span style=""> </span>Neptune was conjunct Sam's Saturn, and thus also opposite transiting Mars.<span style=""> </span>Saturn, Neptune, Uranus and Mars--four of the five malefic bodies were involved in this grand cross.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>What was happening then?<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>“Even more than their civilian neighbors, the former soldiers nursed grievances that they could attribute to incompetent, if not dishonest, government.<span style=""> </span>They had left their farms and shops to fight the hated redcoats, but they could not even depend on the paltry sums their services had earned for them.<span style=""> </span>Inflation had made their Continental currency almost worthless, and now the government set up by the Articles of Confederation was delaying payment of overdue wages and retracting its promises of lifetime pensions for officers.”<span style=""> </span>(“Shay’s Rebellion” by Alden T. Vaughan, page 199, <i>Historical Viewpoints</i>.)<span style=""> </span>Thus a record gap between Haves and Have-nots existed.<span style=""> </span>The British had issued huge amounts of counterfeit Continentals into the new nation’s money system, using money as a weapon, in order to cause of the hyperinflation.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Great Depression of the 1840s<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>The second great depression in US history held the nation in its grip two cycles of Saturn or 60 years after the 1780s, during the 1840s when Saturn again arrived in mid-Capricorn, this time square to Pluto in mid-Aries.<span style=""> </span>Again the grand cross pattern was formed with Uncle Sam's Sun and Saturn.<span style=""> </span>Mars added to the stress by being at 14 degrees of Libra conjunct Sam's Saturn.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>While Saturn has "anchored" all four great depressions from mid-Capricorn, the planets occupying mid-Aries have been Mars (the 1780s), Pluto (the 1840s), Neptune (the 1870s) and Uranus (the 1930s).<span style=""> </span>When Saturn has opposed Uncle Sam's Sun without forming a grand cross with Uranus, Neptune, Pluto or Mars, no great depression has occurred.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Remember: astrologers speak of planets being "square" when they come within orb of 90 degrees to each other as seen from our perspective here on Earth.<span style=""> </span>To be within orb, I allow 7 degrees.<span style=""> </span>Thus, when Saturn reaches 7 degrees of Capricorn and Uranus reaches 9 degrees of Aries, they are within orb of an applying square to each other, and simultaneously within orb of oppositions to the USA's Sun and Saturn.<span style=""> </span>They are within orb but separating when Saturn reaches 21 Capricorn and Uranus reaches 22 Aries.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Astrologer Raymond A. Merriman analyzed this crash and depression in terms of it following the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1834-1835 (“The Implications of Saturn in Opposition to Pluto to World Economies and Financial Markets,” <i style="">The Mountain Astrologer </i>Magazine, November-December 2001 issue.)<span style=""> </span>“When the stock market began to fall, and the land development projects failed to materialize, and banks began to fail…a financial panic ensured in 1837, which resulted in a full-fledged depression by the early 1840s.”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>(Note that not all financial panics have led into great depressions.)<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Merriman continued, “The stock market tumbled approximately 80% off its highs of 1835, and it wasn’t until 22 years later—in 1857—that the financial markets began to recover.<span style=""> </span>In short, it was a 22-year economic downturn from the highs of 1835, coinciding with the first and only time the US government was forced to default on its bond (debt) obligations.”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>The profits of big companies have long been our primary economic indicator but I find this indicator very iffy.<span style=""> </span>We must not forget that the vast majority of Spain’s people did not benefit from the tons of gold shipped back from the New World by companies in the 1500s.<span style=""> </span>Nor did the vast majority of Americans benefit from the spectacular run-up of stocks during the 1990s.<span style=""> </span>There have been periods when corporations flourished while populations suffered.<span style=""> </span>I therefore focus on the overall society’s economic wellbeing.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Great Depression of the 1870s<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Thirty years (or one transit of Saturn) after the 1840s, the nation suffered it's third great depression during the 1870s, following the Civil War in the 1860s.<span style=""> </span>This time Saturn </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">§</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in Capricorn formed a square with Neptune </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">©</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> in Aries to create the grand cross with the US Sun and Saturn.<span style=""> </span>For this date, we expand the orb between Saturn and Neptune to 9 degrees but keep in mind that it’s difficult to pinpoint when the depths of any great depression was reached.<span style=""> </span>Economists endlessly debate rational causes and results, and statistics, presented months later, reflect conditions past.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Neptune’s influence contrasts with Saturn’s so distinctly that they are often considered opposites.<span style=""> </span>Saturn demands structure, systems, and practicality.<span style=""> </span>Neptune inspires searches into the unknown, promotes spirituality, poetry, the arts and new scientific undertakings.<span style=""> </span>Yet even the most Neptunian inspired artist must apply Saturnian order to render his explorations communicable.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Gr</span><span style="">eat Depression of the 1930s<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Sixty years and two transits of Saturn later, the USA went through what is arguably the worst great depression of its history.<span style=""> </span>I say arguably because historic data indicates the Post-American Revolutionary Great Depression of the 1780s was as bad or worse.<span style=""> </span>We contemporaries are more aware of the 1930s because we have haunting photos of that time, and some still alive to tell us about it.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Although economists are not likely to agree when the bottom of any great depression was reached, by January 1, 1931 it was clear that this crash was not going to rebound quickly.<span style=""> </span>Fear that the whole economy would be impacted had become widespread, despite efforts by important people to propagate optimism.<span style=""> </span>Since this great depression is the most recent, I will include a biwheel chart for it, and explain that chart.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype id="_x0000_t75" coordsize="21600,21600" spt="75" preferrelative="t" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" filled="f" stroked="f"> <v:stroke joinstyle="miter"> <v:formulas> <v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"> <v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"> <v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"> <v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"> </v:formulas> <v:path extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t" connecttype="rect"> <o:lock ext="edit" aspectratio="t"> </v:shapetype><v:shape id="_x0000_i1025" type="#_x0000_t75" style="'width:6in;"> <v:imagedata src="file://localhost/Users/bryantgover/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_image001.png" title=""> </v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>The biwheel chart for 1931 shows transiting Saturn </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">§</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> at 16 Capricorn square Uranus </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">¨</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> at 18 Aries to form the grand cross with Sam's Sun and Saturn.<span style=""> </span>Two years previous to this, when the crash of ’29 came, Jupiter </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">¦</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> and Pluto </span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">À</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"> were both in Cancer conjunct Sam’s Sun, opposite transiting Saturn and thus also square transiting Uranus.<span style=""> </span>So the grand cross to Uncle Sam's Sun-square-Saturn at this time was anchored by Saturn and included Uranus, Pluto and Jupiter. It's also notable that this great depression followed the Saturn-Pluto opposition that would reoccur to usher in The Sixties.<span style=""> </span>The one following The Sixties coincided with the attack of 9/11/01.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Understand that there is a lot happening up there in the infinite universe at any given moment.<span style=""> </span>I am pinpointing attention on the planets within our Solar System and ignoring the countless other celestial bodies in and beyond our Solar System.<span style=""> </span>We could also include asteroids, planetary moons and rings, comets, perihelion positions and latitudes as well as declinations and more, complicating the picture immensely.<span style=""> </span>We might venture beyond our Solar System and include many other suns and planets, or add Sirius (Polaris) to our calculations.<span style=""> </span>I aim for the simplest way to portray this pattern that correlates with great depressions.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">No Grand Cross, No Great Depression<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Following the great depression of the 1930s, Saturn next arrived in mid-Capricorn, opposite Sam's Sun, in 1960. There was no heavy planet square Saturn from mid-Aries, and thus no great depression.<span style=""> </span>What developed as The Sixties unfolded was a rare combination of the unprecedented (Uranus) and transforming (Pluto).<span style=""> </span>Uranus and Pluto were conjunct in Virgo, with both conjunct the US Neptune.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>The first decade of the 20th Century was a rocky time for stocks.<span style=""> </span>Two stock market panics rattled Wall Street (1903 and 1907), sending Wall Street financiers down to Washington to seek help from government.<span style=""> </span>After much wrangling in the halls of Congress, Wall Streeters got their way and on December 26, 1913 the Federal Reserve System was created as America's version of a central bank.<span style=""> </span>In effect, Congress turned control of the nation’s monetary system over to private bankers, but by calling it the Federal Reserve, created the impression that the federal government was still in control, as prescribed by the Constitution.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Since then, we have had a debt-based monetary system.<span style=""> </span>Politicians borrow money from the private bankers of the Fed and stick unaware taxpayers with the debt at compound interest.<span style=""> </span>In effect, the US government has operated, since 1914, on something like a limitless credit card, charged to taxpayers.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">What $100 bought in 1800 it would still by in 1900.<span style=""> </span>What $100 bought in 1914 now costs $1000 or more. This debt-based monetary system’s impact on American society and the world has been subtle but dramatically accumulative. During the past 35 years, goods and services have quadrupled while the dollar has devalued by 90%.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <h2 style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Dicey Times<o:p></o:p></span></h2> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Saturn's return to Capricorn in 1961 was another dicey time economically, but military spending provided an innovative mix of Keynesian stimulus and monetary policy delivered, via the military-industrial complex, as corporate welfare.<span style=""> </span>As in the early 1950s when the Korean "police action" stimulated the economy, in the 1960s working class American draftees soon found themselves mired in a foreign land, this time Vietnam. The rationale for this war was—as it had been for the Korean “police action”—stopping communism.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Astrologically, these periods of Saturn’s return to Capricorn occurred without another of the “malefics” being found in Aires.<span style=""> </span>No grand cross, no great depression.<span style=""> </span>However, other economic “adjustments” occurred.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>What's most notable for 1989, is that Saturn, Neptune and Uranus were together in Capricorn—a rare conjunction of these three bodies—but with no outer planet in Aries, no great depression occurred.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Economists who track the 30- and/or 60-year cycle of great depressions were sure the 1990s would send the USA into another.<span style=""> </span>Dr. Ravi Batra's book <i>The Great Depression of 1990</i> was a bestseller in the late 1980s.<span style=""> </span>By May 1, 1989, Saturn at 13 Capricorn was within one degree of a conjunction with Neptune at 12 Capricorn, and within 7 degrees of a conjunction with Uranus at 5 Capricorn.<span style=""> </span>As Uranus moves faster than Neptune, it was soon to come exactly conjunct.<span style=""> </span>So this time when Saturn moved opposite Uncle Sam's Sun, Uranus and Neptune joined Saturn in Capricorn—but with all three forming a beneficent 60-degree sextile angle to Pluto at 13 Scorpio, which in turn formed a 120-degree harmonious trine aspect to the US Sun in Cancer.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Conjunctions of Uranus and Neptune occur once every 171 years, approximately.<span style=""> </span>"When a great conjunction like this happens, it means humanity has come to a 'fork in the road.'<span style=""> </span>It is a chance to start over after the slate has been wiped clean—a moment of decision when we must choose a path of destruction or a path or renewal.<span style=""> </span>This is the key to events of the 1990s.<span style=""> </span>The end of the Cold War caused us to shift the direction of our lives and our society.<span style=""> </span>Whether we move toward a peaceful, sustainable way of life that allows us to express our creative potential, or simply allow the destructive, depersonalizing corporate, military-industrial society to continue, is the great issue we confront in the years after this great conjunction."<span style=""> </span>(<i>Horoscope for the New Millennium </i>by E. Alan Meece, Llewellyn Publications, 1997, page 84).<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Uranus-Neptune Crossroads<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>The 1990 Uranus-Neptune crossroad brought us to the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany.<span style=""> </span>The Berlin Wall came down November 9, 1989, marking a major turning point.<span style=""> </span>This was not the first time a Uranus-Neptune conjunction had marked a major turning point.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>During the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1650 at 15 Sagittarius, the Thirty Years War ended, marking an end to a protracted period of religious wars, and beginning another long period of wars between kingdoms and then nation-states.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">The Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1821 at 2 Capricorn coincided with the breakup of the Turkish Empire, which had ruled most of the Middle East.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>The Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1989-93 became exact at 18 Capricorn in 1993, and formed a beneficent 60-degree sextile aspect to Pluto in Scorpio, foreshadowing positive changes related to mankind's genius, religious nature and institutions.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Nations or religious groupings of humans respond to planetary influences, positive and negative, according to their various beliefs, so positive aspects do not always bring positive changes only.<span style=""> </span>Following this 1989-93 configuration, universalists synthesized the world's great religions while at the same time fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Jews and others demanded adherence to interpretations of scriptural phrases which had changed meanings as languages had evolved, another instance of status quo ideology inhibiting natural change. <span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>In 2008 when Pluto and Uranus move into a square, we will move into another time of abrupt, dramatic and unprecedented changes.<span style=""> </span>This period from 2008 through 2019 will share qualities of the 1930s and 1960s.<span style=""> </span>A foreshadowing of the kind of events this will bring occurred September 11, 2001, when Islamic terrorists hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon.<span style=""> </span>The Saturn-Pluto opposition of that time afflicted Uncle Sam's natal Uranus and Mars, the warrior energies. Saturn-Pluto oppositions have a millennia-long history of coinciding with dramatic social and economic changes.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Neptunian Speculative Bubble<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Economically, the end of the Cold War was followed by a record run-up of US stock prices during the 1990s.<span style=""> </span>This was not as beneficial as it seemed, for it created a Neptunian speculative bubble, coupled with a foggily-perceived, widening gap between rich and poor—the two conditions which have always preceded past great depressions.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Would this bubble and gap bring another?<span style=""> </span>Not during the 1990s.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>This roughly 20-year period of the '80s and '90s<span style=""> </span>was called "the best economy in American history," but that Neptunian delusion confused the stock market with the overall economy.<span style=""> </span>Only the wealthiest partook of the stock market's fabulous run-up.<span style=""> </span>The media shouted that a new record number of jobs were created during this run-up, but that was another Neptunian delusion.<span style=""> </span>In previous decades, one worker could support a spouse and children, but by the mid-1980s it took mom and pop wage earners to keep most families afloat.<span style=""> </span>Thus arose "the latchkey kids," children who came home from school to empty houses because both parents were working jobs that didn't pay either enough, in purchasing power, to hold a family together...during this so-called "best economy in American history."<span style=""> </span>Exacerbating the situation for working class Americans, many US-based companies moved overseas to obtain cheaper labor, abandoning workers, latchkey kids and towns.<span style=""> </span>And, with a wink and a nod, the government did not enforce immigration laws, effectively importing cheap labor from south of the border, worsening the plight of working class Americans.<span style=""> </span>In some cases, native-born American workers were replaced in a single day with undocumented Mexican migrants, who worked for one-third the wages paid Americans.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Economic Indicators<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>The two primary economic indicators which mindlessly measured the economy's health--stock prices and unemployment figures--were dramatically good, so few economists noticed the plight of the working class.<span style=""> </span>Also, by the late 1990s, many working class families had adjusted to the new two-job situation, and younger generations were coming of age never having known the single-worker household.<span style=""> </span>Occasionally, someone such as Clinton Administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich appeared on TV and mentioned the downward trend of working class purchasing power, but such spokespersons were invariably sandwiched between pundits whose skyrocketing stocks were so expanding their prides, they had "no ears" to hear a discouraging word about "the best economy in American history."<span style=""> </span>The difference between money (means of exchange and measure of value) and wealth was blurred as money became equated with wealth itself.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>"As it gets increasingly difficult for most Americans to make a living, it also becomes increasingly easier for a select handful to make a killing," said Morris Berman in <i>The Twilight of American Culture</i> (Norton, 2000, page 22).<span style=""> </span>"According to the Census Bureau, the bottom 20 percent of US families in 1970 received 5.4 percent of the national income, while the top 5 percent received 15.6 percent.<span style=""> </span>By 1994, the corresponding figures were 4.2 percent and 20.1 percent."<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>"This is what happens when irrationality shapes economic policy," said Ravi Batra (<i>The Great American Deception</i>, John Wiley and Sons, NY, 1966).<span style=""> </span>"People suffer because the leaders trust the self-serving theories of established economists, most of whom are engaged in pleasing their affluent patrons," the wealthy few, the government and big companies.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Monetarists and Keynesians<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Monetarism or classical theory versus fiscal or Keynesian theory: this is the overriding contention between economists. Classical theory grew out of the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and J. B. Say, and was called supply-side economics during the Reagan Administration.<span style=""> </span>"Supply creates its own demand" is the belief of supply-siders.<span style=""> </span>The profits from production are distributed throughout the economy in the form of wages, rents, interest incomes and dividends.<span style=""> </span>Stimulate production and the whole economy will prosper—that's the belief of supply-siders.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Against supply-siders are Keynesians or fiscal economists.<span style=""> </span>John Maynard Keynes turned "Say's Law" around and argued that demand creates its own supply.<span style=""> </span>If demand shrinks, businesses are stuck with unsold goods, and thus layoffs and recession or worse ensues.<span style=""> </span>Keynesians hold that the way to stimulate a contracting economy is to get purchasing power into the hands of consumers.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>This takes us to the question money.<span style=""> </span>Is it <i>my</i> money and <i>your</i> money?<span style=""> </span>Or is it <i>our</i> money as a nation?<span style=""> </span>Is it our collective means of exchange and measure of value?<span style=""> </span>Fiat paper currency money is certainly not in short supply—governments are printing it by the ton every day. The problem is, a few wind up with most of it while the many suffer for lack of enough of it.<span style=""> </span>And this mal-distribution of money is by no means confined to capitalist societies, as it characterizes socialist societies we well.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Who Gets How Much<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>If great depressions of the past have been brought on by new record money disparities between the Haves and Have-nots (usually resulting in speculative bubbles) why had we not fallen into another great depression by year 2001?<span style=""> </span>By any reckoning, we had seen a new record speculative bubble in the stock markets, concurrent with a loss of working class purchasing power, and a new record gap between the richest and poorest.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Astrologically, the answer is clear: no grand cross anchored by Saturn in mid-Capricorn square another heavy in mid-Aires has formed since the one that coincided with the last great depression, the 1930s.<span style=""> </span>By 2001, the economy was in a recession, but by no measurement could it be called a great depression.<span style=""> </span>Not yet.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;" align="center"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="">Good News and Bad<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>As we moved into the new millennium, Saturn wasn't due to arrive opposite Sam's Sun till January 2019.<span style=""> </span>That's the good news.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>The bad news is we are not likely to make it to 2019 without suffering something like a combination of the 1930s, the 1960s and the Revolutionary War.<span style=""> </span>This is because Pluto, when it next arrives opposite the US Sun in 2014, will simultaneously square Uranus in mid-Aries, forming the next grand cross with the US Sun-Saturn square.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>Before Pluto was discovered in 1930, Saturn (associated with Satan) was considered the energy that brought death and destruction.<span style=""> </span>Astronomical data makes it possible to recover the history of Pluto’s cycles.<span style=""> </span>Tracing Pluto's history has shown it is well named for the god who rules the mystery from which we emerge at birth and into which we disappear at death.<span style=""> </span>Although it is the smallest and most distant of the bodies we call planets, its cyclical history—in both personal charts and world charts—indicates that its effects begin subtlely but manifest as powerful and long lasting.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span>What appears most likely is that the overall economy will not be brought down by one dramatic stock market crash as happened in 1929, but rather that a series of stock market crashes will lead into the next great depression.<span style=""> </span>These stock market crashes will most likely begin in earnest in 2008.<span style=""> </span>By 2010, Pluto and Uranus will form a T-square pattern with Saturn, heralding a collapse of the overall economy.<span style=""> </span>Combined with the USA’s natal chart, this T-square creates a grand cross with the US Venus and Jupiter, a prelude to the grand cross that will soon hit the US Sun-Saturn square.<span style=""> </span>It’s like we went over Niagara Falls to crash into the great depression of the 1930s, but will go white-water rafting down the Snake River’s rapids into the coming great depression.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoFooter" style="font-weight: bold;font-family:arial;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <!--EndFragment-->Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7481084828224039476.post-72437122018845376372010-01-18T14:07:00.000-05:002010-01-18T14:08:30.900-05:00Biography<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Times; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial; font-size: small;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;">Summing up his life, Robert Gover says, “I was born with the proverbial silver spoon; had it yanked out before my first birthday; grew up in an orphanage; went to college on athletic scholarship; became a rich and famous novelist in my 30s; was blacklisted in my 40s; broke, homeless and addicted in my 50s; rejuvenated and remarried in my 60s; writing again by 70.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;"> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;">Gover’s interest in the economy and money was stimulated while he was at the University of Pittsburgh during the 1950s.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>He’d chosen Pitt because of its highly ranked writing program.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>He took courses in economics because he viewed that subject as what could tie his creative writing together, giving it one overriding theme.<span> </span>He became so interested in economics that he graduated with a Bachelors degree in it.<span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;"> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;">Gover then worked for newspapers in Western Pennsylvania and Maryland for the next six years, with one year out to do corporate public relations.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>By 1960, his first novel,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding</i>, had been accepted for publication (in translation) by Le Table Ronde Editions of Paris, after being roundly rejected in the USA.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>It was feared by American publishers because it dealt with miscegenation, a subject which was taboo in all the USA back then and<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span style="font-size:100%;">outlawed in many states.</span><span><span style="font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Robert's first novel was a big hit in France. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><br /></span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;"> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;">His interest in race relations began as a child when he visited the farm in Kentucky where his father had grown up.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>His playmate there was a black boy named Robert Gover. This stimulated Robert’s interest in the history of slavery.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>He leaned from his grandmother that, although he appears to be of Irish descent, he also has Native American in his genealogy and quite possibly African too, since his forefathers had owned slaves for two-hundred some years before the Civil War.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;"> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;">Robert’s father came to Philadelphia in the 1920s to study medicine at Hahnemann Medical College.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>He graduated top of his class and was on his way to study neurological surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota when he was killed in an auto accident.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>Robert was 11 months old at the time and took his first steps at his father’s funeral.<span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;"> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;"><span> </span>Robert grew up in Girard College, a “home and school for poor, white, male orphans” in the 1930s and 1940s.<span> </span>Before Social Security, children who had lost fathers were classified as orphans.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>Under the tutelage of an exceptional swimming coach, Girard’s high school team won the Eastern States High School Championship in 1947.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>Robert swam the butterfly while it was still part of the breaststroke event.<span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;"> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;">By 1962, his first novel had been accepted for publication in the USA.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>The first American edition put out by Grove Press became a surprise bestseller during a New York citywide strike by the printers union, shutting down newspapers and blacking out book advertisements.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;"> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;">Robert has written 10 novels.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>His fifth,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Poorboy at the Party</i>, was featured on the cover of Publishers Weekly Magazine in 1967, indicating it was to become a number 1 bestseller—but shortly thereafter his editor disappeared and the first printing was cut by 95%, effectively killing sales of this novel.<span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;"> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;">Robert became interested in astrology while living in Southern California during the middle 1960s, at first as something he was skeptical about, and eventually as the best way to predict future economic conditions.<span> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;"> </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px;">“It seems to be my destiny,” he says, “to become fascinated by shunned or esoteric subjects—miscegenation, pantheism, the history of money and economics, and astrology.<span> <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>My main interest now is the historic correlation between economic and planetary cycles, and what they suggest for the future of our economy.”<span> </span></div></span></span>Robert Goverhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10745324848663262892noreply@blogger.com0