Sea Changes

Editor’s Note: This week in Planet Waves Astrology News, we have published an issue dedicated to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (Tuesday’s monthly edition covered Uranus entering Aries, though my article explores the topic from a new angle). Introductions to the three different articles are included with this post, along with the three air sign horoscopes. Planet Waves Astrology News is a subscriber service available for just $1.69 a week. Subscription options are here, and we will answer any questions you have at (877) 453-8265. Additional information is linked on the right-side margin of this page. Please have a safe & sane holiday weekend. Regular blog contributors — I am traveling (today, to the Gulf of Mexico, on Florida’s west coast), and plan to be checking in here regularly.

Dear Friend and Reader:

We are certainly in an Atlantian moment.

Coming to terms with the Gulf of Mexico, an arm of the Atlantic Ocean, named for the mythical Lost Continent that sank because its people could not control their technology, is in part about recognizing the immediate effect of this runaway chemical spill.

For the rest of our lives, the magnificent Gulf Coast, which I was blessed to see just once (from the sea wall at Galveston), will be a hazardous waste dump and wildlife charnel ground. The sight of haz-mat workers and people wearing respirators is the new image of the once-thriving region of the world. It’s become so toxic that as of Wednesday the EPA has called back all of the fishing boats that were participating in the nascent cleanup because workers are starting to get sick with dizziness, chest pains, nausea — classical symptoms of an acute toxic exposure. CNN video yesterday, produced by Anderson Cooper, was eerily reminiscent of descriptions of DDT-sprayed forests by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. The wildlife sanctuaries, they said, were dead quiet.

Barring an actual divine intervention-styled miracle [if you’re a lightworker, or if you’re in with some friendly space brothers, please get busy], it’s only a matter of time before the sludge gets into the Loop Current and then the Gulf Stream. We could be seeing this oil on the beaches of Key West, of Maine and the coasts of England and Western Europe and as far away as West Africa. Consider this description of the Gulf Stream, from Wikipedia:

“The Gulf Stream, together with its northern extension towards Europe, the North Atlantic Drift, is a powerful, warm, and swift Atlantic ocean current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico, exits through the Strait of Florida, and follows the eastern coastlines of the United States and Newfoundland before crossing the Atlantic Ocean. The process of western intensification causes the Gulf Stream to be a northward accelerating current offshore the east coast of North America. At about [40°0′N latitude] it splits in two, with the northern stream crossing to northern Europe and the southern stream recirculating off West Africa. The Gulf Stream influences the climate of the east coast of North America from Florida to Newfoundland, and the west coast of Europe.”

In other words, the Gulf of Mexico was about the worst place on the planet this could happen, as the source of one of the world’s master currents.

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No, We Can’t?

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

“Accidents happen,” said Kentucky primary winner Rand Paul, defending British Petroleum’s ecological holocaust in the Gulf. Son of Libertarian Senator Ron Paul, Rand took the president to task for being too tough on BP and holding them accountable for their actions. Libertarian disdain of government interference in the private sector, given our troubled times, seems too radical to garner mainstream approval. Growing demand for government intervention in the Gulf makes Paul’s position on property rights — code words for business interests — another voice for corporate extremism. Yes, accidents happen. And so does criminal neglect.

While this is not a crisis Obama expected, neither is it his Katrina. Katrina was localized, and while allowing New Orleans to drown in apathy, racism and cronyism was shocking and immoral, the Gulf spill is about more than a city. It’s about a planetary ecosystem. That’s not Katrina, that’s Armageddon. This isn’t Obama’s Waterloo, but Corporate America’s. The preventable disaster was no unforeseeable accident. It was a calculated risk, a treasure hunt with no plan of action should it go badly. Even now, BP exhibits not the slightest genuine remorse for what it has unleashed. The blowout was the result of reckless endangerment.

I suspected early on that the lethargic attempts to tame this spill had everything to do with continuing to exploit the blowout rather than eliminate it. Over a month later, a frustrated Obama has reportedly snapped, “Plug the damn hole!” Perhaps such a solution is naive. Perhaps BP is in over its head. It’s glaringly apparent that BP has exhausted its best engineering ideas, created roadblocks to local solutions and become not just the source of this horror but its enabler. BP refuses to share information on the extent of the spill in order to limit its liability, even as Democrats struggle to crack Republican obstruction to raising the liability cap. Growing cries for the government to seize the operation, similar to those that demanded it take control of the big banks, may be naive as well. The government is too broken to attend to this emergency, due not only to lack of technological know-how, but also to generations of corporate control.

We take pride in our democratic principles in this nation. We jealously guard our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Rule of law defines us, and we wrangle over the concept passionately, as when Bush sidestepped law requiring FISA courts and the suspension of habeas corpus. Even as new laws were being passed in Congress, Dubya issued hundreds of signing statements that eliminated his need to follow them. It’s no surprise that most politicians are lawyers; they need to be, practiced at snarling what is seldom simple to begin with into a tangle of hidden safety nets known only to themselves. It isn’t rule of law that runs this nation but exceptions to laws, called loopholes.

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The World According to BP, Monsanto, et al

Book review by Carol van Strum

Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. … Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. …The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.
— Chris Hedges

What would the Greeks do to a company whose jerry-built oil well fouled their beautiful Aegean Sea, vomiting oily death onto its shores and fish and birds and islands, for week after week?

What would the Greeks do to a government that enabled such catastrophe, accepting company bribes and favors, allowing the company to write the rules and fill in the government’s inspection reports, placing company officials in key government posts to emasculate its enforcement agency?

I don’t know what the Greeks would do, but I need to believe that some population somewhere on this beleaguered planet would have the balls to call a general strike, riot, shut down the city centers, and toss the bastards out — government, corporation and all their soiled bedding — after stripping them of every asset they had.

Some population, somewhere, but it won’t be here. Not in the USA, whose population is more distressed by the final episode of Lost — my god, how fitting! — than about destruction of the entire south and eastern coastlines of the continent. Not in the USA, where corporate media feign astonishment at the revolving-door policies of government regulators and BP, or the faked inspection reports, or the sex, drugs and money traded wantonly for drilling permits.

Of course the astonishment is feigned. Every step of the way, BP-government collusion has been the very model of American business-as-usual: fraud, lies, corruption, wholesale bribery, coverup, anything goes in the name of profit. This is the business-as-usual that has contaminated American rivers with government-approved pesticides and industrial poisons, that has inserted government-approved gender-bending chemicals into every cell of every person and living thing on land and sea, that spews radioactive waste from crumbling, government-approved nuclear plants.

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Weekly Horoscope for Friday, May 28, 2010, #817 – BY ERIC FRANCIS .

Gemini Confidential	If we could stop the world, peel back one layer and examine the psychic dramas that play out, we would see that many of them are driven by the dynamics between individuals and groups. We live in a society that romanticizes individuality, while making nearly all of its profits and basing all of its social rules on conformity. You have reached a time in your life where everything is changing in that dimension where your sense of who you are meets the world’s expectations. For too long you have let others define you; indeed, you have at times done this at the expense of all awareness of what you really want, driven by fears you don’t understand. Uranus entering Aries is urging you to break free and stretch your limits: not just of your self-concept, but of your actual existence.
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Libra Confidential	In astrology, the 7th house is considered the house of relationships, though I extend this to our relationship to existence. To put it mildly, that relationship is evolving rapidly, and is offering you some incredible gifts. One of those gifts is innovation; a genius factor is involved. If you are experiencing this as a disruption, look for that element. If your relationship to your environment is changing, take an active role in creating the new experience. The idea is to dance with the energy; to collaborate; to co-create, rather than merely letting things happen. If your charts ever said rise to the occasion of existence, the time is right now. If they ever said work with your environment to create exactly what you want, the time is this instant.
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Aquarius Confidential	Uranus, a planet that modern astrologers associate with your birth sign, is making a rare sign change. This week, Uranus entered Aries for a brief visit, before returning for a seven-year stretch beginning in 2011. Of all the things in astrology that say ‘your world is changing fast’, this is one. We can add some powerful stuff involving Saturn and Pluto as well. What is particularly appealing about this Uranus transit is that it’s all about your mental approach to life, and closer to the core, the way your state of mind influences your whole reality. Aries is a vitally important sign to you because it represents your mind — a precious thing, to an Aquarius, and Uranus (along with Jupiter) here suggests a brilliant, excellent, passionate and moreover interesting expansion of your mental environment and thus your existence.