This commentary is from Jessica Murray, author of Soul-Sick Nation, available through Mother Sky
The bankers' coup-d’état that has just gone down in the USA, sending ripples throughout global markets, is a consommate expression of astrological timing. It happened on the Ides of September, on a Full Moon whose degrees triggered an epochal opposition between Saturn and Uranus. This world-altering transit is, in turn, stimulating the Pluto placement in the birth chart of the USA: the 2nd House of banks. What we have here is the signature of plutocracy.
Of particular note is the speed, shock and panic that attended the fall of the banks, and resulted in a hastily passed "bail-out" bill. Uranus speeds up whatever it touches; Saturn is reactive, retrenching in worst-case-scenario self-protection. "Sign on the dotted line or all will be lost!" the president told Congress and the taxpayers. The latter balked, causing the former to balk; at least, at first.
Certainly a sense of emergency is real and palpable; it is felt by all sentient beings these days. But it derives from something more essential than what the pundits are talking about; something that goes deeper than the supposed imminent meltdown of Wall Street. What the collective mind is picking up is the impending sense of ecological crisis and systems collapse that inform our times. Before any substantive thinking could be done, however, in hair-trigger reaction to the Wall Street crisis, unconscious Saturn came rushing in to bail Uranus out.
Without understanding the full picture, the buzzing energy of national urgency poured into the Saturnine fear syndrome. Bush's grotesquely worded "This sucker could go down" comment successfuly amplified the exortations from the very bankers who'd created the mess, and a faux-solution was rushed through Congress that will prove to be a collossal misjudgment once cooler heads prevail. Do we not know, from street wisdom, that scam artists always say “You must sign on RIGHT NOW or you’ll miss your chance”?
Sweetened with a load of tax breaks and unseemly pork, the White House convinced Congress that no discussion or vetting of the bail-out measure was possible. As Jon Stewart of the Daily Show reminded us, this was the exact ploy they used to bamboozle Americans into permitting the war of Iraq. Saturn and Uranus, when received without awareness, creates the ideal climate for ultimatums.
In fact, the "bail-out" continues Bush’s policy, proven to have been a failure, of buying time for the financial industry to fix itself. The USA is already in a recession, the cause of which is the housing market bubble breaking – the worst such scenario in 25 years. This is what created the Wall Street crisis last month, not the crumbling of banks "too big to fail".
Those assets did not suddenly turn qualitatively lethal on the day they filed for bankruptcy. But that was the official story, and like all societal myths this story had its root in a more general cultural truth. What was different on Full Moon Monday was that the financial industry had run out of credibility. The evaporation of the trust which had been placed in Lehman by its creditors and customers symbolized a wake-up call that the whole stock market game is based on an illusion. Illusion, along with all manner of leaps of faith, is governed by Neptune, the ruler of Pices --the sign Uranus is in. Neptune's lesson applies equally to the folly of a country printing money with no gold, or any other true valuable, to back it up; indeed it is being based on nothing more real than spiraling national debt.
It has been understood for some time (Obama referred to it in a brilliant speech in New York last Spring, to which the press paid little notice) that the products Wall Street has been inventing and trading have had an increasingly dubious connection to reality.They have become creatures of Neptune: wispily abstract. As Nick Paumgarten has noted [The New Yorker, 9/29/08), these creations began to take on the qualities of abstract art, though the financiers who created them have tried to pass them off as science. Uranus does govern science, but in Pisces it acts more like art; where magical thinking and imagination substitute for more banal forms of truth and Saturn's law of consequences finds no quarter.
