Dear Friend and Reader:
Waking up this morning, feeling the fragility of the world, I am so grateful to be safe at home, with good friends nearby, on the East Coast and in the United States this Thanksgiving. For most of these years I’ve been writing and editing (or co-editing, as is the case now) Planet Waves, I’ve often been far from familiar faces and a secure sense that the land is holding me. I can honestly say I feel that now.
I slept home last night and woke up at 6:30 am knowing that I can go down to Peter B’s Deli next to my apartment and not only get some great American jus de chausette (coffee) but also visit with Mrs. Barak, the owner’s mom, and Mo, her other son, and flip through the Post for my Sally Brompton horoscope.
It was a feeling of shock and grief about the bombings in Mumbai (Bombay) that in part fed the wellspring of that gratitude. I didn’t hear about Mumbai on the news — rather, Priya Kale, who wrote our blog for a couple of years and still contributes, IMed me somewhat frantically last night — so it came with a personal connection. Her family is there. I’ve been invited there a dozen times and met her mom and brother, and so Mumbai is a real place to me. We worked through the astrology, with Philip Sedgwick helping us out, for a couple of hours. [Read Priya’s essay here and our coverage from last night here.] Note, the city was taken just as Pluto was in the last arc minute of Sagittarius; literally hours before it entered Capricorn.
Mumbai still under siege. There were new bombings today; there is still gunfire; hundreds are dead and injured. Whoever orchestrated this attack, reasonably described in today’s Daily News as an invasion of the city, fancies himself a master of the universe. If the psychological warfare implication of staging the attack the day before Thanksgiving is not apparent, take a look; because we are all connected by the nervous system known as the media, this is a worldwide event, and it will weigh on the mind of everyone taking a day with their family today.
That to me is the somewhat more frightening part: that anyone with a computer or TV can be dragged in, even if the hostages are being held 5,000 miles away. This is a global attack. Westerners were targeted as hostages; there is a room full of Israeli hostages. It was not a suicide mission or random killing of people in trains.
Some of the most elegant spots in the city (in a total of 11 initial assaults) were targeted. The top antiterrorism official in India was assassinated.
The charts for this attack and other recent India terrorism have a strong signature of the sign Cancer. The leading terrorist has mommy issues, and there is something here about rage at women. I think that most violence is about rage at women. So far as I understand it, the basis of male violence is rejecting part of themselves, usually the feminine aspect, and then projecting that onto women first and the world, generally, second.
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Mumbai in better days. Photo is Priya Kale in the back area of where she went to college — Sir. J. J. Institute of Applied Art. She writes, “The terrorists ran through here to get to the Cama Hospital which is directly outside the back gate — about 20 feet from this photo, where college students hang out and drink tea.”
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For anyone lacking the capacity to nurture and nourish, attack and murder are the natural consequence. We need to be careful because there is a pattern developing in our current decades of making sure that women pick up the same habit. We need to be careful every time the issue of power is imposed on sex or food or the right to have a safe place to be. This is precisely where we run into the most serious problems.
Last night in the midst of this, my fellow Planet Waves blogger, Fe Bongolan, called me up as I was doing the dishes and making dinner. We now have these calls fairly regularly to put it all in perspective, and plan the strategy of how we handle coverage on this page. Fe is fun because all I have to do is start talking and she’s laughing hysterically. She appreciates my balls to the wall sense of humor, and her own perspective comes in on an angle a little like Chiron — off the normal plane of perception, shining a bright light.
We talked for a long time about the last days of Pluto in Sagittarius: in particular, the Mumbai attack, and the news, according to Wednesday’s New York Times, that the bailout of the financial “services” industry is now at $7 trillion dollars. Not $700 billion, but 100 times higher. Is that right? Let’s write out the numbers.
We were told it’s $700,000,000,000.
In reality, it’s $7,000,000,000,000 (fully 100 times higher, or about $28,000 for every person in the United States including all little kids and great grannies), once you add up guarantees, payouts, loans, purchasing of bad debt and a variety of other things that affirm that “the business of America is big business.” As Uranium Jane put it to me in an email the other day, now we can spend the rest of our lives paying off the jobs we have rented. Remember, the federal government was already about $10 trillion in the hole when this all started. Who did you vote for in 2004? I knew — with the certainty of my heart and soul — that when the war in Iraq was started, the aim was to bankrupt the country.
You might not think of this as a matter of life and death, but slavery truly is such. It is the consumption of life, on a wholesale basis. The United States was founded so that we could end economic enslavement from the crown of England, its national bank and its trading companies. We founded our country on the basis of “no taxation without representation,” a radical idea at the time. We even managed to free the slaves who were the economic basis of our country for the first two centuries of its foundation and growth. We now face being economic slaves to a grotesquely unfair system — something called usury, or loansharking on a massive, officially implemented scale — and the truth is, this is about our children and their children too.
Given this, I am particularly grateful not just for the fact that I am still in business, surrounded by a lot of intelligent, talented people almost all of whom are younger than me; but that I can apply my industrialist tendencies to doing something useful for you.
Even if, on this Thanksgiving Day, that means describing the sorry state the world is in, and reminding myself of the roof that keeps my photo paper dry and the bed where I am warm at night. I don’t know if you’re one of the people grateful every night for that dry bed, but I am.
PS: Walk right in it’s around the back, just half a mile from the railroad track…
Hey Jamesdefense, hate to butt in but have been thinking about the “American worker” since I read the Chinese interpretation a day or so ago. The description you relayed sounds to me like American managers of workers. Something has gone seriously wrong with management which leaves workers with sucking up to get ahead (more $$) or at least not getting fired. At least that was my experience and workplace is where I do my travelling (a great fan of temping and contracting for work).
I don’t know what your exposure to workplace is, but is there any sanity to be found in any new leadership trends? This failure of companies is no surprise to me with the current self interest leadership. And if the money is running short, just lay off some more of the people who actually do the work.
Well.
Huh.
Lately it’s been interesting to me how everyone brings their own little universe with them wherever they go. I have listened to countless adult humans maunder on in coffeeshops and biker bars, in pool halls and bus stations, in military camps, on flightlines, mosques, megachurches, trading floors and refugee stations; delivering from some space in their heads a rendering of: ” The World”. You’ll get one entire imaginary global rendering from a Pentecostal Evangelist. And another from a Chinese nationalist, and still another from a jaded imperial. To conspiracists everything is an inside job. To scientists everything is an accident.
To politicians every accident is useful.
I see where I went wrong here, ok:
To a politician every accident is useful. What I was trying to communicate was that Chinese people really do not care if they overtake the US as an economic power, just as you and I do not really care if the US maintains its mythological standard of living or economic power or global clout or whatever the hell they want to call it. I was not put on this earth to earn some kind of hegemonic commission for the United States of America. I would like to say something very frankly to you: I do not give a damn if the country of China takes the GDP of the USA and smothers it with a barnpail of methane gas.
What is the purpose of pitting the modern-day industrial output of one nation against another? Who benefits? Do you? The Big Table boys put us on big charts on the wall as if you and I and whoever else are little starships in a videogame battle for Planet Prosperity. We’re really perpetuating a grievous error in reality-modeling if we don’t see these things as a deep manipulation. Almost all of the sweeping emnity and “competition” swirling across humankind is fantastic invention.
I have no judgment about how Chinese people live in China except for the mild observation that they are human beings who breathe air.
Anyway, if the poor people of India can trust that their votes count, then they’re actually in better shape than we are.
~j
Chinasmack – Well that’s one way of learning about a culture….wonder what they make of us Brits. Just don’t ask the French!!
IMHO there is a huge gulf between the Chinese ruling elite and regional/local party officials and the vast majority of the population…effectively the peasantry who eke out a subsistence living at best.
In between, but much nearer the top than the bottom, is the so called “new middle classes”, the sons and daughters of the politicians and the friends and associates. Most of the growth and money generated has lined their pockets and gone into building ever more skyscrapers and gated residential areas to keep them safe (segregated) from the rest of humanity.
And this is the country that those that love to bash the US thinks will take over as the leading economic power !! yes they may have $2tn in their foreign currency reserves but what exactly are they going to spend it on now? In terms of the global economy it is small change.
My eyes were always on India, though with recent events that may now have been “blown” away. At least they try some semblance of a democracy and some of the middle classes have always been good at helping others to get a “leg up” the ladder. Also they are one of the only countries where the poor know that their votes count, so the turnout at their elections is good and despite the corruption (who hasn’t got corruption?) their politicians know that the people will exercise their vote always a good restraint. Wish we still had that in the UK, but most of our sovereignty is now invested in the EU….but that’s another story that would take all night.
R
It’s weird; there’s a real disconnect between the culture of the Chinese “westernized industrialist” and just about everybody else in China. The “industrialists” and factorymen are mostly abysmal people. But the rest of the country contains roughly three billion compassionate, well-meaning human beings. The China Rising/WorldNet Daily guys broadcasting their crap from Colorado Springs are pushing the most bigoted agitprop I have ever heard.
Have you ever gone here?
http://www.chinasmack.com/
:). Translated chatter from the smoke-saturated urban internet cafes. It’s like popcorn.
~j
There are reports coming out of China that between 150-230 million workers are heading back to their rural communities because the factories that were making cheap goods for the West have been closed down. If up to 230 million people are on the move it will be the biggest “migration” in history.
There is no work for these people and as most of the rural population exists on about 50c a day how can they sacrifice the small for the Great.
The Chinese government has already had to send out security teams to the regions to monitor how the bailout money will be spent. Last time, the local officials spent the money on new civic buildings and put a lot into their own pockets. How will that help to feed their population? I would expect this could cause major civic unrest.
You may also have seen the backlash against the man recently shot for attacking police officers who had subjected him to brutality. The images were shared on the internet so the level of respect for “authority” is reducing rapidly. The military are already being deployed to keep order……remind you of anywhere else?
R
Once I talked to a man who had just returned from a trade mission to China. He said that the Chinese industrialists were very accomodating. They assured the mission of their sympathy to the American Problem; the reason that eventually the United States would turn on its hull and sink to the bottom of history.
The American Problem? Lack of control over the Worker. The American worker is self-important, will not respond to authority, puts on airs, refuses to be controlled, and needs strong discipline.
They stressed that American business would not ever run into such problems in China. In China, the Worker was willing to sacrifice the small to the Great. In China, the worker does not make such outrageous demands.
Most of the guys on the trade mission glossed over this; really all that was irrelevant. But a few looked stung. Profits are much steadier when you can keep your people in line. Plus then nobody hints that you’re impotent.
~j
Hi Eric/Fe,
Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings at a time of Thanksgiving, but you may need to add another nought onto your $7trillion for the bailout.
Have you heard of the Credit Default Swap market? As I understand it these are the so called financial instruments based on insuring any Credit (such as a mortgage) that goes into Default….as in the sub prime market. They were Swapped around the world!!
The market is worth $60 – 70 TRILLION, well on paper anyway. If that market collapses then the sticking plaster is going to come right off the wound.
So the current bailout across the global finance market, not just in the US, is only the tip of the iceberg. We may soon see what lies in wait under the water.
Fe, you are quite right about something taking a dive in China’s portfolio. China’s Development Bank (CDB) helped Chinalco, the state owned mining group, to buy a 12% stake in Rio Tinto which cost them $14bn. The proposed $66bn takeover of Rio Tinto has failed leaving Chinalco with shares that are currently valued at only $3bn and still falling.
The Chinese politicians sitting on the board of CDB are panicking because Chinalco may not be able to meet the interest payments of $260m this year as the dividend from the shares is unlikely to make even $200m and there is a $1.8bn capital repayment due in January.
On top of this, the Chinese government has announced a $600bn+ bailout to kickstart their economy but their record of sound investment and lending has just taken a severe knock. So the markets are in freefall.
I’d like to wish you a Happy Holiday is that isn’t too trite in these troubled times.
Rossa (in the UK)
Eric my love:
Rememebr that India’s chief rival, China, dropped its interest rate by a whole percentage point. This is not small news. Something is taking huge dive in the country’s investment portfolio. I wonder what that could be?
The world has been Arbusto’d.
Happy Thanksgiving my darling, and to all Planet Wavers. Off to dance class–which will justify the green bean casserole and the mashers!!