Full Moon Over Wall Street

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“A WATERSHED moment.” “A crossroads.” “Things will never be the same again.” “Is anybody awakening to the fact that there is a new reality at hand?” These words were spoken in the space of five minutes on CNN’s Lou Dobbs program Wednesday night.

Controlled demolition of the South Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Note the clean line of explosions.

By now, most of us know — at least in outline form, or in our gut — what happened this week. America’s Empire of Debt imploded on itself. The cosmos of zero savings, zero down and maxed out 18% APR credit, was revealed to be the vacuum that it is.

Monday morning, hours after the Pisces Full Moon conjunct Uranus lit up the New York City dawn, we were greeted by “surprise” news of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the sellout of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America.

Two of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious investment banks, once symbols of Wall Street’s supremacy, basically disappeared; Lehman is, to date, the largest bankruptcy in American history. Merrill Lynch and its 16,000 financial advisers may be its biggest embarrassment.

Everyone paying attention wondered what was next. Pisces is the karmic filter of the zodiac. The Moon and Uranus, the astrological equivalent of The Tower tarot card, seemed to be flushing things out fast. The Bush administration’s grand finale started to unfold much as the story had begun: back in the days of Enron, Worldcom and Arthur Anderson. If the collapse of the World Trade Center was sold to us as a movie-like metaphor, this was the corresponding reality or rather revelation of unreality.

Then on Tuesday, the federal government bailed out the American International Group, Inc. (AIG), the world’s largest insurer, to avoid what was being described as a potential global economic meltdown. Had the insurer collapsed, the losses would have rippled through the economic system causing a kind of domino effect. All this, a result of stock losses, defaulted benefits payments and mere shock.

The cost of the AIG bailout was up to $85 billion, but this was in exchange for the United States government taking over 80% of the company’s stock; in other words, taxpayers bought the farm. In an unprecedented, astonishing move, the government took ownership of a massive, multinational corporation, though the recent bailouts of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had a similar feeling.

The Tower, Trump XVI, from the Haindl Tarot.

This, in effect, changed our form of government; some are calling it corporate socialism, but that’s being entirely too kind. In a supposedly free market system, the government merging with corporations leans more toward the technical definition of fascism.

By Wednesday, Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest consumer bank, was on the auction block. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the only two remaining major independent investment banks, were on shaky ground. Eleven banks have failed this year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen by nearly a thousand points by Wednesday’s close.

By Thursday morning, a $25 billion federal bailout of the American auto industry was being considered. Central banks were pouring money into the markets. By the close Thursday, stocks had rebounded 400 points. The Wall Street Journal reported that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has started a “wide-ranging investigation into short-selling in the financial market” related to companies that had gone bankrupt or been bought out. Short selling is profiting by betting that a stock will go down.

By Friday, the bill for the bailout was around $900 billion. The New York Times reported, “Senior aides and lawmakers said the goal was to complete the legislation by the end of next week, when Congress is scheduled to adjourn. The legislation would grant new authority to the administration and require what several officials said would be a substantial appropriation of federal dollars, though no figures were disclosed in the meeting.” In other words, the Bush administration was being given another blank check.

What really happened? The astrology is revealing — too revealing. We’ll get there in a moment; let’s stay grounded in some real-world analysis. You could say that America’s financial shadow came to the surface. You could say the entire shadow banking system revealed its existence. You could say that free-market capitalism was revealed to be an illusion. It was clear that we were witnessing history, but then that’s difficult to consider a privilege if you’re wondering whether you’re going to have a job, a business, a retirement fund or a place to live.

I’ve spent much of the week on the phone with and emailing experienced market professionals and one of its former longtime leaders, trying to sort out the news. What I took away from these communications is that what is happening is unprecedented, and that while many people saw it coming, what is now happening is entirely unpredictable. That it’s occurring within 50 days of a major presidential race demonstrates that something had run out of control.

Said one of my sources, “Forty percent of the value of the stock market came from the financial services industry, and that was untenable. We drove up stock prices without understanding the balance sheets of this industry. Without the actual criminality that was Enron, the people in charge of these banks had an extraordinary amount of hubris because they grew so big they thought they were untouchable. They believed they couldn’t be allowed to fail. And they took on all kinds of unsustainable risk.”

Part of that risk involved investing in Residential Mortgaged-Backed Securities: basically, massive, reputable banks investing in worthless mortgages. Part of it involved securities firms being leveraged 60-to-1: that is, for every dollar in cash, they had up to $60 in debt. This makes Manhattan’s skyline look like a Hollywood facade.

I heard several times how everything we are witnessing was driven by greed, that this is the end of the road for Americans thinking they can have it all, and that the deeper disease we share is denial. However, I would not rule out the “actual criminality of Enron,” based on the astrology or otherwise.

Part of that greed is that Americans want everything so cheap, they don’t actually have to make up their minds about what they really need. It is easier to go into debt than it is to make money, and it’s more difficult to get out once you’re there. Though while many people were living beyond their means, the risks and the rewards were not distributed evenly.

While numerous Americans lost all or part of their retirement funds and life savings between 1993 and 2007, Lehman CEO Dick Fuld took home $466 million in pay (according to executive pay research firm Equilar). Why should he and other CEOs be allowed to take home such staggering paychecks? Well, of course: we live in a free market system. And that system is now being purchased by the government.

Smashing the Glass-Steigal Act in 1999

I learned that part of the problem goes back to the fairly recent repeal of the Glass-Steigal Act of 1933, a Depression-era law which established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and separated the different kinds of banks and thus protected depositors from the activities of market speculators. In other words, if you put your money in a savings bank, the law protected you from someone gambling your funds on the stock market. That repeal occurred in 1999, essentially paving the way for what we are witnessing today by removing the banking regulations designed to prevent another Great Depression.

Unemployed men vying for jobs at the American Legion Employment Bureau in Los Angeles during the Great Depression. Photo from Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

That date got my attention: the year of the grand cross and total solar eclipse, a rare kind of total solar eclipse at the heart of the fixed signs that many people predicted would reshape reality. If we want to get a sense of the risks that were being taken at the time, that was the summer that NASA shot the Cassini Space Probe with 72 pounds of plutonium past the Earth on the way to Saturn — enough to give 32 billion people lung cancer, had the probe accidentally re-entered the atmosphere and burned up.

The 1999 total solar was the first Leo eclipse in 18 years, with the grand cross reaching into the fixed signs Taurus, Scorpio and Aquarius. Solar eclipses returned to Leo this summer, in effect triggering the 1999 eclipse and initiating a cascade effect out of that sign.

While Taurus (the scene of an unusual Full Moon in May 2008 that triggered something called the Aries Point) is the sign of values, Leo, whose metal is gold, is the sign of value. And the value of things has been changing very fast this year and in particular since the Aug. 1 eclipse. Remember that two of the nation’s giant mortgage funds, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, also went under in the wake of that eclipse.

The Capricorn Files

But here is what I’m really thinking. On Dec. 11, 2001, about a week after Enron declared bankruptcy and with the World Trade Center still smoldering, Chiron entered Capricorn for the first time in more than 45 years. At the time, I thought that Chiron would be running vanguard during its four-year journey through this sign — vanguard, that is, for Pluto, which was due to arrive there seven years later, in 2008.

Enron’s ex-chief executive Jeff Skilling.

I once buttonholed astrological legend Rob Hand coming out of an elevator and asked him what he thought Chiron was about. (Rob, for those who don’t know him, is only nominally interested in minor planets — he is a traditional astrology scholar, which is why I asked him.) He said that Chiron represented something like an event that revealed the weakness in a system. If you fixed the system based on that revelation, it would work, and if you didn’t, the system would collapse.

The Enron disaster — immortalized in the astonishing documentary, The Smartest Guys in the Room — was followed on its heels by the Arthur Anderson accounting scandal and then the Worldcom scandal: two of America’s allegedly most blue-chip stocks, and the auditing giant, all went up in the smoke and mirrors of mass public deception at the beginning of the Bush administration.

At the time, Worldcom was the largest Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in history, but this honor was taken over by Lehman Brothers this week. Worldcom’s chief was eventually convicted of fraud, conspiracy and filing false documents with regulators. Enron in its entirety turned out to be a lie.

Now that Pluto is working its way into Capricorn, we have more than a clue that the flaw in the system wasn’t fixed; to the contrary, it seems to have been exploited. With just a brief visit to Capricorn earlier in 2008, the events of this week made Enron look like a joke — and it wasn’t. It was a prototype.

Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld.

Now consider that Pluto will re-enter Capricorn in December and take until 2024 to finally make its way into Aquarius. Pluto’s journey through Capricorn will bring numerous cascading changes like the ones we are seeing this week that will reshape the structure of society on every level.

To the extent that anyone is profiting from these changes, difficult question we have to ask ourselves is: is someone doing this intentionally? “Intent” is not as simple as it sounds. In fraud law, intent translates to being able to say that someone “knew or should have known” that an action or lack thereof would have a certain effect; for example, you know that your actions will cause your company to collapse while you profit.

I have covered fraud for many years, and in hindsight, I notice that there are two kinds. One is where the people who are being lied to have no idea and no desire to be fooled; and another kind where the fraud is accomplished with their complicity. In other words, the supposed victims “knew or should have known” that something was up. They had warning. That is the more frightening kind of fraud, because it’s done with full complicity of the victim. In the current scenario, both kinds of fraud are at work. We have had many warning signs, but many people were too busy swiping their credit cards to notice. The system was working for them.

An Aquarius Awakening?

Aquarius represents the general public, the tribe and our sense of community. It’s also an excellent archetype for the electronic media. The presence of Neptune in Aquarius, which began in January 1998, has fostered an environment where it seems people are begging to be lied to and the electronic media is very happy to oblige.

President Bill Clinton during the impeachment era. Photo by Doug Mills, Associated Press.

The first major news event of the Neptune in Aquarius era happened later that year: the Clinton impeachment, which in my view was a first-class fraud on the public. Yet it could not had have happened without so many people so devoted to being offended by sex. While I affirm everyone’s right to be offended by whatever they want, that’s fine as long as it’s not abused by someone with some other agenda.

In 2000, we all witnessed a stolen presidential election. Whether you may think that Florida’s electoral votes were stolen or not: the United States Supreme Court, full of Reagan and Bush appointees blocked a recount, and that is a form of fraud. It is a fact that Al Gore won the popular vote and George Bush took office. That is not a democracy, but very few people complained, wanting life to get back to normal. Where was the outrage?

Less than one year later, in September 2001, we witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center and an attack of some kind on the Pentagon. In less than hour, before any investigation and before anyone had claimed credit, the word was out that Osama bin Laden had done it. The United States immediately went to war with Afghanistan in “retaliation.” But to this day, Osama’s FBI wanted poster neglects to mention the Sept. 11 attacks.

Then came the war on Iraq, which was foisted on the American people because Sept. 11 was blamed, in the second instance, on Saddam Hussein. When I asked my congressman, Maurice Hinchey, why Sept. 11 was left off of Osama’s wanted poster, he said it’s so the administration could more easily put the blame on Saddam because it wanted a war with Iraq. I will skip in this article what an obvious inside job the Sept. 11 incident was, but I will say that it seemed like a strange slumber had come over the nation between the fake impeachment, the pretend election, Sept. 11 and its multiple supposed perpetrators.

George Bush being briefed by the CIA and White House attorney Harriet Miers on Aug. 6, 2001. This was the famous presidential daily brief from that day.

Then came Enron, and Worldcom and a long-forgotten splash of news in May 2002 about how Bush actually knew that the country was about to be attacked (which I think was, in itself, a cover-up). If you would like to research this for yourself, check the Wikipedia page on the CIA’s Aug. 6, 2001 presidential daily brief. That was the one that said, “Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.” more than a month before Sept. 11 occurred — yet administration officials claimed they had no warning.

If you track the history of Neptune in Aquarius, it’s one scandal after the next, but so far I haven’t heard the word scandal used in the mainstream media; everything is just business as usual. Scandal is an understatement. And that includes how the American public ran up its credit cards on cheap goods from China and the lenders who profited, while Washington ran up $9 trillion in national debt, much of it to China, and much of it to fund a war that costs $230 million a day.

Chiron is now in Aquarius, and that is a wake-up call. If Neptune is the energy of sleepy delusion and denial — mainly because so many people shun the spirituality and love that it could represent — Chiron is the energy of awakening and the crisis that leads to consciousness. Chiron is now just five degrees from a conjunction with Neptune, which will exact on May 31, 2009.

This is really a triple conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune — and it’s going to be big. It is the moment when the truth, whatever that turns out to be, is undeniable. We can’t quite say that today.
To Be Continued Next Week.

Yours & truly,