Katrina. Credit & Copyright: Steve Abrams

That aspect occurred Aug. 5, 2001, the day before the now infamous Aug. 6 Presidential Daily Brief, wherein the CIA informed the vacationing president that Osama Bin Laden, the half-brother of a Bush family business associate, was determined to hit targets inside the United States.

About four weeks later, with no additional security having been put in place in light of the warning, four airliners were hijacked, some buildings were knocked down, 3,000 people died, and another phase of a long coup d'etat in the United States was accomplished. We know the story: massive shifts from civilian to military budgets, a rapid gutting of civil rights (what some call "givebacks"), the rise of the national security state, the PATRIOT Act, and the beginning of what some hoped (and still hope) would be a world of perpetual war.

Let's remember back to those terrifying days, when reality seemed to be turned upside down. Remember the panic of not knowing what was happening. Not knowing where your kids were or whether they were safe. The silent skies. The Executive Branch government complexes of Washington, DC being evacuated to bunkers. And then, from nowhere, weapons-grade anthrax showing up on the desks and in the mailrooms of journalists and Democratic Party public officials, the U.S. Supreme Court, and of course maybe in your own house. In the wake of this, there were the Enron, Worldcom and the Arthur Anderson scandals in a stampede.

Remember the march to revenge and the American flags and the beginning of the war on terra and the bombing of Afghanistan, and George Bush, newly studded with an American flag pin that has not come off his lapel since, standing tall and proud and popular. Remember the megaphone speech at Ground Zero. Election night 2000 and all its mercurial scamming were forgotten.

Remember how this whole thing was spun into the need to bomb Iraq, which was falsely associated with the World Trade Center. Remember the Space Shuttle disintegrating over Texas, that little omen. Remember the millions of people who came out to peace marches two weeks later, then vanished into the woodwork like mice. Remember the shock and awe campaign beginning a few weeks later. Remember Bush declaring victory on an aircraft carrier. Remember the rows of flag draped coffins finally being seen by the public in the spring of 2004.

Is it possible to remember so much? When you think of all that, think of the June 21, 2001 total solar eclipse.


ON THE SUMMER SOLSTICE of 2005, with the Sun making its annual visit to the first degree of Cancer, the Moon entered Capricorn. There was an exact Full Moon, to the degree, on the first day of summer.

With this aspect, the solar eclipse of June 2001 was re-activated. Eclipses have a long shelf life, and they do something that planets don't -- they stay still. They stand there waiting for a transit or a progression to come along and set them off. Four years is a pretty good duration for an eclipse, but the solstice/total solar of June 2001 was no ordinary chunk of space debris.

With a Full Moon triggering the eclipse in 2005, we had reason to be concerned that something was developing this summer. One immediate result was the transit bombings in London. But that seemed too localized to be the full effect. Now, given that Hurricane Katrina has made her appearance, and the effects are beginning to be felt around the world (petrol is now about $6.50 per gallon in Paris), we have reason to be concerned about what else that something includes.

As we saw with Sept. 11, the problems did not end with the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They were exploited, enhanced, bungled, manipulated, twisted, business-planned and developed into something beyond what most anyone was expecting and what any reasonable person seriously thought was possible; indeed, beyond what any of us now realize.

A Full Moon setting off the total solar eclipse gives the feeling of a 180-degree turn. Something has both come to full fruition since 2001, and something is reversing itself. Rather, it has reversed itself, and fast -- in the space of a few days or weeks. Full Moons often signify the breaking of a deadlock, and this is what we are now facing as well; a long-held deadlock shattered in the mud.

This time around, while ordinary people are once again suffering and struggling and voluntarily throwing their bodies into another grossly toxic disaster zone to assist others -- both Ground Zero and New Orleans are dioxin areas -- and many people are getting sick and dying, reality has finally come home to roost at the front door of the political community.

It has not done so, until now. We can only hope, pray and keep paying attention and make the connection between politicians and the businessmen they really are. This is always the elusive connection for Americans; we sometimes see politicians as bad, and almost always see corporate executives as good. In reality it is the same greed that drives capitalism and its favorite form of government, corporatism. They are one and the same. Only public relations makes them different.

But for now, what happened in New Orleans is going to land in Washington, D.C.

A massive region of the United States has been destroyed, and its population has been scattered across the country, from Texas to New York City to Seattle. Evacuees are everywhere. Because of this, the story is a local story everywhere. And everybody knows somebody in New Orleans. Just about anyone who travels has been there.

The cleanup and rebuilding is going to go on for a long, long time. There may be other storms that set the whole thing back to the beginning. The effects may or may not -- it remains to be seen -- be crippling to the United States economy. The economy is resilient, but it can't absorb $4 per gallon gasoline for long without massive and painful changes in our entire way of life. How will we function without the Port of New Orleans, without barges to transport lumber, steel, oil and grain? How badly will this situation be exploited by businessmen?

The changes that result will be with us every day, so we're not going to forget. People with SUVs are not going to forget when their monthly gas bill far exceeds their car payment. (Hmm, we may actually start to see smaller cars on the road, an appropriate, if indirect response, to a hurricane that was probably enhanced greatly by climate change. Americans will have to consume less. We can stand it.)

It is becoming painfully obvious that there was government neglect involved both before and after the disaster struck. Neglect or, as many are now observing, some kind of intentional act. The money, the National Guard, the highwater Humvees, are in Iraq. Why are they in Iraq? Because Sept. 11 was exploited; because Halliburton and the Carlyle Group and Chevron control the United States Government; and because due to a wide diversity of circumstances, we now find ourselves without an electoral process, living under an empire rather than in a republic.

And the empire is, unfortunately, no longer funded or prepared to deal with disasters, just with terrorism. Sorry, we could have handled a hurricane five years ago, but we're not in that business any more. You now live in the United States of Homeland Security.

The most important difference between 8/29 and 9/11 that it's more or less impossible to blame this on an enemy and launch a bombing campaign. (Who knows, maybe Karl Rove will figure it out, and we might want to watch for that somewhere soon.) This is usually the feel-good response when something goes wrong in America, or when we need to clear out the munitions stockpiles and buy more from Boeing, General Dynamics and Raytheon. We assert our might and power, get out the yellow ribbons and beer and watch it like the Superbowl or the Grand Old Opry.

But now, that illusion is failing, and we all know that what happened in the southeast could be anywhere. To give one example, the city of Houston, longtime home base for Bushes and Enron and much else, has been turned into an evacuee staging area. Many of the people seeking refuge there are senior citizens, uprooted from their homes and their reality after long lives. The Houston Astrodome is a refugee camp. Isn't that weird? People are camping out in $200 box seats.

For a long time, reality has resisted having such a foothold, or rather, we have resisted. We might have noticed and you might have noticed. Most people did not, and for most, life has gone on as usual. There has been a long, long series of national disasters and tragedies and pain and bombs raining down on poor countries in the Middle East, and for the most part, people have played along with the game -- even many who "objected." We have watched television helplessly and wondered what we can do, if anything.

Now something real has happened. It has happened at home, where we can notice it, and where we can do something. What has happened is so real that we may even get angry. While anger is a good start, it's not a replacement for leadership. And leadership is the one thing that's lacking in the United States right now, both in the form of a person, or people, and in the form of an idea.

I assure you that we're going to see a tar and feather campaign for the Bush administration. It will not be pretty, and it will be interesting, and on some level, it will be satisfying. We are likely to see a Constitutional crisis of some kind, but that may come in 2009 when, still well coated, Bush or Cheney refuses to leave office. But tar and feathers is not enough.

To understand the astrology of the Bush administration, Sept. 11, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, one needs to look no further than the four cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn). For the moment, the focus is on Libra, and on Oct. 3, we will have an eclipse of the Sun in that sign. This will accelerate the process of karma that has -- at long last, after what has seemed like years of being stuck -- finally been set into motion.

We will see things happen in government and in society that we had no notion could go down. What will shock us most is how fast things can change, and how fast we need to adapt. It can be a very exciting time in history, a great moment to be alive, if you go with the flow. The potential creativity, the sense of adventure, the community and the sense of being alive are unlikely to be like any other we've ever experienced, except maybe Burning Man. I propose that soon, having been to that desert party will become the equivalent of a college diploma in post-industrial America, where life is organized into camps.

On the other hand, many people who have become extremely comfortable doing the same thing and thinking the same thoughts and, more than anything, holding themselves as better than everyone else, will be presented with what we can politely call a spiritual challenge. Well, there really is only one spiritual challenge, which is the need to love.

As I have said, the spotlight is about to be thrown onto Libra. The current theme is JUSTICE. Something that for long periods of time is dormant in the American mentality, then occasionally returns with a vengeance, is the need for justice, and we're about to feel what that is like. My concern is that, if taken for its own sake, justice often becomes vengeance. And that is what we need to beware of right now. Anger is an appropriate response; but we need to direct it.

So much outrage at George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Scooter Libby and many others of their ilk has been forced beneath the surface of consciousness that it's far better that it come out than stay held down. We have been lied to, our country has been ripped off, and our government is now bankrupt and in debt and waging a huge war it can't get out of and at the same time, cannot take care of its own people. As a result of all of this, thousands of our young people are dying for a lie in Iraq, and it's known that 100,000 civilians have been killed as a result of that lie. And now, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are laying in waste.

Fact: those levees could have been fixed long ago. Fact: they were not. Fact: the money was spent on a private war. Fact: oil business cronies of the White House, as well as Halliburton, will rake in billions on this disaster.

When this all hits home as ONE idea, it's going to transcend politics entirely. And that moment is coming soon. Indeed, it's coming now. The challenge, in true Libra fashion, will be staying in balance and keeping a grip on ourselves, and applying reason. The larger issue is leadership. Because the power vacuum that is appearing on the national level only reflects a power vacuum that has existed in our minds for a long time.