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January 30, 2015

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Massacre in Paris

The latest example of retail terrorism in Paris has inspired a huge wave of outrage and indignation. Retail terrorism is what is know as “terrorism” in the United States and involves a small group of perpetrators; wholesale terrorism is that preformed by governments and is usually not recognized as terrorism except to those to whom it is applied. The terms retail and wholesale terrorism are from Wharton economist Edward Herman, and were dealt with by Saint Augustine in Book IV of City of God. In there he describes an encounter between Alexander the Great and a pirate: Alexander asks the pirate how he can bear to molest the sea; the pirate replies indignantly “When I molest the sea they call me a pirate, but when you molest the whole world they call you an emperor.”

Shortly after this massacre there was a large march, one of the largest in French history, to show that people of that country and of the world would not stand for this threat to freedom of speech, which was considered inviolable. Many world leaders were present in the front row of the march to show how highly they valued the freedom to say anything no matter how controversial or offensive. Other leaders spoke directly to support the marchers and freedom of speech, such as the leaders of Saudi Arabia — where a journalist is receiving 50 lashes a day for criticising the government, whose leader just died and President Obama made haste to Saudi Arabia to show his condolences — and Egypt — which currently imprisons three journalists for Al Jezeera, whom they consider to “pro-Muslim”, and whose country gets one of the greatest shows of military support from the United States. Leading the March was the President of France, a country that shortly thereafter imprisoned someone for “glorifying terrorism”. This is a country where denying the Holocaust can result in a prison sentence. France has a checkered history with Jews. After Jewish people were allowed full freedoms during the French Revolution, and Catholics were not treated as highly as they had come to expect (several popes lived in France for awhile), anti-Semitism arose again under the French, as shown in the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890’s, where Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly accused of treason, and during World War II when France sent many Jews to Nazi death camps. After the attack France cracked down of hate speech, speech glorifying terrorism, and anti-semitic speech. I’m surprised no one’s head exploded at the contradictions. It seems freedom of speech is only acceptable if a marginalize people is being attacked. One wonders if offensive cartoons about black people were published in a major magazine in the United States if the Congress would support that publication, or if MSNBC and Fox would agree that that was a good thing showing how expansive is the freedom Americans enjoys.

We have a fairly exact time for the attack and so we can do an exact chart; I don’t have a chart for the founding of Paris so we will look at just the event chart. The first chart is at the time of the event.

Charlie Hebdo Massacre

In this chart we see that the tightest aspect is Mars sextile Midheaven, suggesting something involving gunfire (Mars) will be noted by the world. Also tight is Sun semisquare Saturn, suggesting disappointment or limitations. Mars is opposite Jupiter by a wide orb, and suggests much (Jupiter) gunfire (Mars). Sun is conjunct Pluto, suggesting Plutonian events on that day. Another aspect is Moon sesquiquadrate the MC, suggesting that the public will know what happened at that hour. Finally, let us not forget that the overriding aspect of this period is the Uranus square Pluto — change, revolution.

Charlie Hebdo Massacre Fourth Harmonic

Let’s look at the fourth harmonic chart, which shows squares, opposition, and conjunctions as conjunctions. The most prominent aspect is Sun opposite Saturn which is very tight. This is the same as the semisquare between those two planets we saw in the first harmonic chart. We can see how wide that Mars-Jupiter opposition is by noticing that the conjunction of those two planets in the fourth harmonic chart is very wide, whereas the Uranus-Pluto conjunction (square in the first harmonic chart) is very tight. We also notice something not apparent in the first harmonic chart, a tight square between Pluto and the Ascendant. This is an aspect of 67.5° in the first harmonic chart, a hard aspect. Also notable is the Mercury-Mars square (extremely tight), perhaps gunfire at a newspaper office.

Charlie Hebdo Massacre Fourth Harmonic Midpoints

This final chart shows the midpoints in the fourth harmonic, which is the same as the traditional 90-degree dial used in German schools of astrology. We see that Pluto is at the midpoint of three pairs of planets, and the midpoint Pluto = Mars/Jupiter is exact. Ebertin says about this midpoint “a great loss”. Another tight midpoint is Midheaven = Sun/Neptune for which Ebertin says “A negative outlook” which is certainly something we’ve seen in the world after this terrible event.

From looking at these three charts of the same moment, the overriding conclusion is that Pluto is by far the dominant planet. This was indeed a Plutonian event, happening during an important Pluto aspect and we can expect other things to follow.

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January 16, 2015

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Presidential Mistakes

Picking the best and at times the worst of presidents is an endless contest. In most lists, the best presidents of the United States are Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President, and Franklin Roosevelt, the thirty second President — both Aquarians. Both are considered the top two Presidents, in no particular order. But both made an extremely bad decision, which no one credits them with, that were among the worst presidential decisions every, and the results of which we still live with.

During his first term, Lincoln’s Vice President was Hannibal Hamlin. Hamlin was a radical Republican who fully supported the abolishment of slavery. He was replaced in the second election by a Democrat from the border state of Tennessee and they ran on, instead of the Republican Party ticket, a new party formed for that election only called the National Union Party; the idea was to show that the Democrats and Republicans were united and that the Civil War was a bipartisan effort. Unfortunately, Lincoln was assassinated shortly after the election of 1864, which the National Union Party won. Lincoln’s chosen vice president was Andrew Johnson, a Democratic Senator who still supported the Union, even though Tennessee had joined the Confederate States. It was for that reason that Lincoln decided to have him on the ticket of the new union party that was set up just for the election of 1864. By early 1865 the South had lost the Civil War, and Lincoln had been assassinated, so Johnson was the new President. Johnson had given a bad impression when he had shown up for his inaugural as vice president drunk, but as Lincoln had explained, that was only because he was so nervous. Johnson was never a friend to black people, either when they were slaves or after the War ended.

The period between the end of the war and 1876 was called Reconstruction; the South was suppose to re-enter the Union and the freed blacks who had formerly been slaves were to have been brought into full-fledged citizens of the United States. To say that Reconstruction was unsuccessful would be an understatement, and we are still living with the consequences of that period. The so-called Black Codes were soon passed in the South, which restricted the freedom of the newly freed slaves. While there were more Blacks elected to the Congress during Reconstruction than ever since, few long lasting changes were made and after the end of Reconstruction the South tried to revert as closely as possible to the antebellum ways of treating their black citizens. Andrew Johnson did not help Reconstruction, and he so angered the Radical Republicans in Congress that they passed a law so that Johnson would break it and they would have an excuse to impeach him, and they did. Johnson goes down in history as the first President to be impeached; he was not convicted, but after that his frosty relations with Congress did not improve.

Reconstruction ended in 1876, even thought it had not been finished. What happened was the election of 1876. That was a interesting year in the United States. It was the centennial of the founding of the country, and there was much celebration on the Fourth of July, a special birthday. Just a few days before that party a civil war veteran named George Armstrong Custer had been killed fighting Indians and the news had just reached the East. The current President, Ulysses Grant, who had accepted the South’s surrender in the Civil War, was very unpopular. The election that November was disputed, and in fact was more controversial than the recent election of 2000 and Bush v Gore. It was seemingly won by the Democrat Samuel Tilden and the Republican Rutheford Hayes lost. But in several states both the Republicans and Democrats turned in electoral college votes, which disagreed. Eventually a committee was formed consisting of members of the Senate, House, and Supreme Court. The committee was suppose to choose between the disputed electoral votes. As a result, the Republican was chosen, but the Democrats, who were the party in the South of white people, also got something that they wanted: a removal of troops in the South and thus an end to Reconstruction. The whites in the South could go back to interfering with the newly freed slaves with no interference from the Army. The new President was referred to a Ruthefraud Hayes after that election.

Assassination of Lincoln

The first thing we look at in this assassination chart is the position of Mars, that indicates gunshots. Since we have a time, the position of the Moon is valid, and it is opposite the US Mars. Transiting Mars is on the cusp of the eight house (the long dark blue line extending out from that planet indicates this) which in traditional astrology is the house of death. Mars is within the core of the US chart — Sun, Venus, Jupiter — and approaching an exact conjunction with the Sun. Mercury is sesquiquadrate the Midheaven, and the news of this event was communicated rapidly, besides taking place within a theater. Saturn, depression, is aspecting the Moon, Pluto, and the Ascendant of the US chart.

***********
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had an unprecedented four terms. In fact, the twenty second amendment to the US Constitution was passed to prevent this from happening again. In his third term, Roosevelt had as Vice President Henry Wallace, who had been Secretary of Agriculture during the first two terms and an important supporter of the New Deal. Wallace was an American original. He was a farmer from Iowa whose political beliefs were out of step with the Washington Establishment. He was also someone who had esoteric beliefs that were out of place in Washington. In fact, it was his idea to put the eye on the pyramid on the back of a dollar bill. This corresponds directly to something in the astrological birth chart of the United States, as we will discuss at some other time. Not only was he FDR’s Vice President in his third term, he was also Roosevelt’s choice for the fourth term. But by that time Roosevelt was noticeably sick, and the Democratic Party officials knew he wouldn’t last for four more years, so they knew that whoever was vice president would become President, and they wanted someone in that position that they could control, and they did not want that person to be someone with the maverick ideas of a Henry Wallace. They convinced FDR to nominate Harry Truman, who had supported New Deal policies and was also from the Midwest, but was not an independent thinker and could be trusted to take orders. Some people called him a hack, and his start in politics was the result of action by a local political organization called the Pendergast machine. But the convention, which was heavily in favor of Wallace, would have selected him anyway, except the power in the convention hall failed conveniently and the selection was put off to the next day.

While Wallace really supported FDR’s policies, especially in regards to the Soviet Union, and he had been in the Roosevelt cabinet since the first election, Truman did not support the Roosevelt foreign policy and was strongly influenced by such people as his Secretary of State, James Byrnes. As a result, Truman was in charge of ordering the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and he took a tough policy towards the Soviet Union after the war ended and ignored the agreements made at Yalta. He helped bring the policy of anti-communism to America, which led to McCarthyism, and helped bring the Cold War with his Truman Doctrine. Conservatives and liberals did not like Wallace at all, and this belief still exists. I recently saw an article in the New Yorker from last year defaming Henry Wallace. But if Wallace had served as President after the war, the Cold War would have had much less chance of happening, and the future of the world would have been considerably different. Truman brought in the National Security State, which has only gotten stronger after 9/11. As discussed previously the beginnings of the NSS changed America’s path and position in the world.

Even though the Cold War is over, the Cold War tendencies to mistrust the Russians are still in full force in America, and has led to a second Cold War and the accompanying danger of nuclear war.

Death of Roosevelt

In this chart we have a conjunction of four planets in Aries — Sun, Moon, Mercury, and Venus — and a new Moon had happened eight hours earlier. This quadruple conjunction is aspecting much of the chart: Moon, Pluto, Ascendant, Uranus, Mercury, and Mars. Saturn is approaching the core planets of the United States: the government will be depressed, and there were many changes to the government in the next three months it took Saturn to cross the Sun. In fact, Saturn was exactly on the Sun of the US on July 4, 1945.

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January 9, 2015

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The Great Recession, The Rise of Britain, and the Reformation

These three events appear to have nothing in common, except that that all shook the foundations of the world. But they did have something in common in terms of symbolic meaning. I will discuss these three events and show the commonality. It is of course difficult to get exact timing of these three events, but we only know when they were under way, that is, shortly after they started.

“The Great Recession” is now commonly used to refer to the economic meltdown, or whatever you want to call it, that happened in the period 2007-2009. It wasn’t as bad as the Great Depression, but it was, and still is for many people, worse than anything else they experienced in their lifetime, thus the term The Great Recession. The most commonly used event as a marker for the Great Recession, but not the only one, is the fall of the Lehman Brothers Bank on September 15, 2008. But the housing bubble that had been growing, in the United States as well as other countries such as Ireland and Spain, burst in the middle of 2007 and the recession is said to have bottomed out in the middle of 2009, so at the very least we can considered the event to have happened 2007 to 2009. On October 9, 2007 the Dow reached a record high of 14,164 which it would not see again for several years. The meltdown is considered to have started on August 9, 2007, but that is only obvious in hindsight.

Great Recession

Looking at the first chart for September 15, 2008 we see that Pluto is very near to 0 Capricorn, having crossed it the first time this cycle in January of the same year. It was near the cardinal point through 2007, 2008, and 2009.

Since this is the crossing of the cardinal axis, I consider it an important event, more important than the Great Depression of the Thirties, which is commonly said to have started in 1929. We are regaled weekly by now that the Recovery has happened, that the Great Recession is so far removed in time, and that the economy is doing so well, that we should forget about it. But for the great majority of people, the good times have not returned, if the times before 2007 could be considered “good” for many people in the United States. Even though the unemployment rate in the US has fallen, many people have dropped out of the job market, and thus are not classified as unemployed, and the wages of the new jobs are much less that of the old jobs lost in the Great Recession. And it appears that Europe will soon witness its third dip in GDP since the Great Recession, Japan is having problems, and the economic news from China is not as rosy as it was a few years ago. In the United States one of the main effects of the Great Recession was to transfer more money to the really wealthy, so that now the top one percent of the population makes more than 25% of the national income, a figure that has risen over the last decade. The effects of this so-called Great Recession will be with the world for a long time. And in 2015 many people, but not government officials, are predicting bad economic times ahead. People are waiting for the other shoe to drop. The price of a barrel of oil has dropped to almost half of what it was a year ago, and many countries and businesses are expected to take a hit. The next three months see the last of the Uranus-Pluto square, and the square is tight for the entire period.

It is difficult to find an exact date for the rise of England to be the number one power in the world, replacing Holland, but many historians maintain that it happened with Britain’s victory in the Seven Years War, known in the colonies as the French and Indian War. I discussed this a few weeks ago. Even knowing that, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact date when England won. Was it the loss by the British at the Battle of Fort William Henry in August 1757? Was it later, since at that date the war had only started? Was it with the death of General Wolfe at the Batttle of Quebec, as shown in the famous painting by Benjamin West? One clear date, though it is surely late, is the Treaty of Paris signed by England, France, and Spain, where France gave up their part of North America to either England (Canada) or Spain (Louisiana). The Treaty of Paris was signed on February, 10 1763. But battles can change the course of history: The fighting in North America that culminated with the battle that “James Wolfe fought outside the walls of Quebec on 13 September 1759 altered the world in a dramatic and lasting way.” {Dan Snow Death of Victory 2009]

The rise of England to be the world power changed much for the next 150 years. England had many colonies in all parts of the world, including one that was lost shortly after they became top dog, and maintained those colonies at least until the end of World War Two, almost 200 years later. The history of a large and increasingly important country, India, was influenced strongly by England and its policies there, including the dominance of the Hindu people, who worked well with the British, over the Muslim people. Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister during World War Two, strongly influenced world and United States policy in those years, including the formation of the Cold War, even though Britain was no longer the most powerful nation. And the list goes on. The dominance of England after the Seven Years War strongly influenced the world as we know it now, it ways great and small.

Treaty of Paris

The chart for the signing of the Treaty of Paris show Pluto just three degrees past the 0 Capricorn cardinal axis. It had been passing back and forth over 0 Capricorn during the Seven Years War. This was about 250 years before the Great Recession start, and thus just one Pluto cycle previously.

And what about the Reformation? There were several movements in that direction earlier, and dissatisfaction with the Roman Church, which at that time was the only type of Christianity known since all apostolic forms had been long banished, but in general the date for the Protestant Reformation is assigned to October 31, 1517, when Martin Luther supposedly nailed his Ninety-Fives Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenburg, Germany (Prussia). Of course, the ideas contained in those theses had long been percolating in the mind of Martin Luther. To say that this is a major event for the world would be an understatement. There were battles in Europe between the newly-formed Protestants and the Catholics, culminating in the very bloody Thirty Years War that decimated Germany. (Some think the current conflict between the Shias and the Sunnis is the Islamic equivalent of that war.) And of course there is evangelical Protestantism that has spread into parts of the world such as Latin America and Africa and is in competition with Catholicism or Islam in those areas. America was founded by Protestants and for a long time “Catholic” was a dirty word in that country.

Reformation

In the chart for October 31, 1517 we again see Pluto has just crossed the Cardinal axis at 0 Capricorn. This is again just one Pluto cycle before the previous event, and two Pluto cycles before the Great Recession discussed first. Again, the state of the world was changed, for good and bad, and we still live with the consequences of that event, the Reformation.

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December 20, 2014

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“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”

The killing of a black man Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri by a white policeman on August 9 has set off a flurry of demonstrations across the country in protest. It is interesting that this event has triggered such a response, since previous events that were much more blatant did not result in such sustained protest. Two example that occur immediately are the killing of Sean Bell in Queens (New York City) on 11/25/2006 while he was at his own bachelor party, as well as the wounding of two of his friends. It appears that he backed away from an undercover police officer who came at him brandishing a gun, and that resulted in this death, though the police give another explanation. Another case was that of African immigrant Amadou Diallo who was shot 41 times — though only 19 (!) bullets found him — while reaching for his wallet in a darkened stairwell on 2/4/1999 in Bronx (NYC) just after midnight. In both these cases police officers were indicted and stood trial, but were acquitted, unlike the Brown case where the police officer was not indicted by the grand jury. Shortly before the Brown shooting Eric Garner was strangled by police officers in Queens. It was caught on video and the officers involved were also not indicted. Since the No True Bill retuned by his grand jury was after Brown’s non-indictment, the protest continued to spread.

Many of these cases of police shootings involved young black men, so many that parents warn their children to be aware of police officers, but not always. Consider the case of reclusive white millionaire Donald Scott, 61, who was killed on 10/2/1992 at his 200 acre ranch in Ventura County, California. His ranch was invaded by Los Angles police forces and DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) agents but no Ventura County officers on the charge of having a marijuana plantation. He was shot when he entered the room having just woken and recovering from a cataract operation and holding a pistol. It turned out that the police were interested in gaining his ranch because it had a high resale value. No marijuana was found. Very little protest resulted.

But many other issues surrounding the use of police in the country have also come to the fore recently. The militarization of the police, wherein the police departments of all major and many minor cities get surplus weapons that were designed to be used by American military forces, is one such issue. And like the old saying that if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, when police have military weapons they tend to use them in involvement with civilians. The heavily armed response to the killing of Brown is an example. Then there is the issue of asset forfeiture. This was originally a policy where the “ill-gotten gains” of criminals could be seized, but it has turned into a way that police can seize the property of an individual that they suspect of a crime, no matter how tenuous the connection to a crime could be. It is as if the property itself is guilty, and no trial is needed. The case of Donald Scott, above, was a case of forfeiture gone wrong. The Washington Post recently (Sept 6. 2014) had a major series about the problems with asset forfeiture. Another issue also being brought up, and one that was also at play in the case of Donald Scott, is the whole edifice of the so-called War on Drugs. That policy is coming in for much more criticism these days than ever before. One reason for all this uproar is that we are in a Uranus-Pluto square, and people are more protest-worthy. This recalls all the protest seen during the previous Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the Sixties. As a result of many riots from black communities in 1967, a report chaired by the governor of Illinois and thus called the Kerner Report in 1968 famously declared that our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white, since the dominant white culture does not understand black culture. We can all see how much attention was paid to their warning.

But the watching of blacks by police has been a long tradition in this country, going back to 1704 and what were called “slave patrols”. This first happened in the colony of the Carolinas. This was before that proprietary colony was split into two royal colonies with the names we know today. These slave patrols developed into police. For some reason the white owner of black slaves in America was frightened of a slave revolt. This fear got even more frenzied after a successful slave revolt. For example, the freed slave Denmark Vesey wanted to lead a slave uprising in South Carolina called The Rising. When he was caught he was hung on July 2, 1822.

Another slave rebellion was that of Nat Turner: he and his followers killed 60 whites on August 21, 1831. This scared the white slaveholders of Virginia. Virginia was different from South Carolina: it had been settled by Cavaliers, the losing side of the English Civil War, whereas the Carolinas were settled by people from the sugar islands in the Caribbean, especially Barbados, that had already dealt harshly with their large black population. The slave holders in the Caribbean made the Chesapeake slave holder look like kindly gentlemen.

Now let’s look at charts representing these events. None of them are especially definitive, and in some cases exact times and even dates are difficult to come by. But notice that Neptune, representing confusing and deception, is prominent in many of the charts, and often Mars — violence — and Saturn — difficulty are also. Mars and Neptune together are often prominent. These two planets are in square aspect in the natal chart of the United States, suggesting that that country has problems in dealing with violence and the military, the prime extension of the violence of the US into the outer world.

Nat Turner Event

The year 1831 started with a solar eclipse, and that year is described in Louis Masur’s book 1831: Year of Eclipse; the year featured President Jackson’s harsh attitude toward the Cherokees, Nat Turner’s rebellion, and many other things that helped to put the slavery issue into high relief.

Mars conjunct Saturn indicates harmful or destructive energy, blockage of proper expression of energy. That was certainly true, since nothing much came of this event except more anger. Jupiter-Uranus (Moon over conjunction some time that night): Optimism that things would work out, lucky. The Turnerites thought things would work out so they went for it; unfortunately they were wrong.

Nat Turner USA

Transiting Mercury is conjunct natal Neptune with a small orb — not thinking clearly, confusion. The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction mentioned above is sesquiquadrate the US MC, showing this was an event that would have meaning for the country. And it still does: In 1967 William Styron wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. This is further emphasized by the fact that the transiting Sun — indicating the day — is opposite the US Moon.

Denmark Vesey Hanging

I’m not sure when he was hung, so I set this for noon, when the Sun is at the Midheaven. This is another event that took place under the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the early 1820’s, which was discussed in the article about Jacksonian America. Here again we see a Mars-Saturn aspect, in this case a sesquiquadrate. There is also a Venus-Jupiter conjunct, which would seem to be beneficial, and we will see this again in the Ferguson chart.

Vesey USA

Mars conjunct natal Neptune: Low energy, confused motives, difficult like Saturn-Mars. Transiting Saturn is sesquiquadrate natal Neptune, filling out the Mars-Saturn-Neptune pattern.

Donald Scott Shooting

This took place early in the morning of October 2, 1992. The most obvious pertinent aspect is the opposition between Mars (shooting) and the Uranus-Neptune conjunction. The time is not exact, so we don’t know how close the Mars-Neptune opposition was, or if both were indeed square the MC of the event, thus forming a T-square. But in those hours Mars was opposite Neptune, suggesting confused use of energy or firearms. Between midnight and two, the MC was in Aries.

Scott USA

Here the thing that juts out is Mars — representing shooting — in on the Sun of the United States.

Amadou Diallo Shooting

In the event chart, we see the Moon in aspect (sesquiquadrate) to the Sun-Mercury-Uranus conjunction at the bottom of the chart, as it should be considering it is just after midnight. That triple conjunction suggests erratic thinking (Ebertin) and the Sun-Mercury conjunction suggests that this event will be communicated. The Moon was high in the sky at this time. Also notice the Mars-Neptune square, stress and again bad or hasty judgment.

Diallo USA

This murder took place shortly after midnight and the Moon was crossing the MC of the United States. This event got immediate recognition in the country because of the outrageousness of it. Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about it called “American Skin” with the refrain “41 shots”. The tight Sun-Mercury-Uranus conjunction, discussed below, was aspecting the United States MC, again indicating this event would be known to the public.

Saun Bell Shooting

If this killing happen at nine in the evening, the Moon was setting; later and the Moon had already set. The Uranus square Venus (erratic or unexpected relationship) suggests the nature of this event: it was a bachelor party for a wedding — no one expected the groom to be killed at his own party. There is also a grand trine between Saturn, Pluto, and the Midheaven. I’ve talked about Saturn-Pluto combinations before. This is not a hard aspect, but with grand trines behavior becomes stuck in a rut. In this case the rut was cops killing young black men.

Saun Bell USA

Neptune once again rears its head — Neptune is in hard aspect to the MC and Venus. Saturn opposite the United States Moon.

Eric Garner Death

Garner’s death happened just a few months ago, and the video of the event has been widely seen. In this chart again we have a prominent Neptune (video, movies), at the bottom of the chart and opposite the MC — people (ie., the police) were confused. And Neptune also represents that the event was caught on video and widely shown. Notice also Mercury — communication — was aspectng both Neptune and the MC — this is an event that was communicated to the wider world. Sun square Mars speaks of possible violence. But Mars is square the Sun-Mercury — that doesn’t promise much good.

Michael Brown Shooting

Another widely reported event — Sun conjunct Mercury up near the top of the chart. Mars is in the first house: possible violence in the environment. And the Uranus is trine the Sun-Mercury: expect the unexpected. And few in positions of power expected the uproar that was engendered by this shooting. For them, this was another ordinary thug shot by a law officer, nothing could be more common.

But here is something I had trouble coming to grips with: Venus and Jupiter on either side of the MC, which is opposite the Moon at the IC. Sounds sweet! Ebertin says a union between two people that are good natured. What could go wrong? But that is the positive meaning of this combination. Negatively, this combinations can represent false conduct between two people, a relationship where everything goes wrong. For Michael Brown this is true. For the officer that shot him, Darren Wilson, while I’m sure he did not like shooting people, he probably thought he saved his own life and the grand jury choose not to send his case to trial.

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December 5, 2014

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Jacksonian America

Ah, what could be more boring than a discussion of the Age of Jackson? He was President of the United States between 1829 and 1837. That was almost 200 years ago and who cares about people in antebellum America. They sure didn’t call it “antebellum” in those days, for obvious reasons. But many important things developed at that time, which of course we take for granted now. The standard biography about Andrew Jackson is the three volume set by Robert Remini, though many have written biographies about Andrew Jackson, a very interesting President whose character tells us much about America, though that might not be good. A very good overview of Jacksonian America is The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz. What I am referring to as “Jacksonian America” or the Age of Jackson started before the man was elected President, and just like Ronald Reagan, he served as a symbol for changes that were sweeping the country.

The Age of Jackson is important now because that was when the country started many of the characteristics that are bedevilling it currently. With the election of Jackson, as shown below, the country veered off from the path it had followed up to that time. Many claim that the country became democratic, or at least more democratic, since by that time more could vote than just property holding white males. Of course, women and Blacks, whether freed or slaves, could not vote. Women had the vote for a brief time in some places, such as New Jersey. This is the period in which America became a “hustler” nation (as described in Walter McDougall’s book Freedom Just Around the Corner and Morris Berman’s Why America Failed), a nation devoted to what’s best for Number One, a change from a democracy of fraternity to a democracy of cupidity (Hofstadter) as discussed previously.

Democrats claim that Jackson and Jefferson were the founders of their party, and have a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner once a year. While Jackson did pay obeisance to Jefferson, I think there was a disconnect between the party of Jefferson and the party of Jackson, which was called The Democracy. And while Jackson gets the credit for creating the Democratic Party, the hard organizational work was done by Martin Van Buren (who according to Gore Vidal in his novel Burr was the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr) who was Jackson’s Vice-President in his second term, and served a single term thereafter, because the Panic of 1837 (partially caused by Jackson’s dispute with Nicholas Biddle and the Bank of the United States) doomed him to only one term. Van Buren, called the Little Magician and Martin Van Ruin, who was the first of non-British descent to make President, also ran for President in the Free Soil Party which became part of the Republican Party twenty years later.

Like other eponymous President Ages, the Age of Jackson started before Andrew Jackson became president, or even before he first ran for President. Ages get names for significant Presidents who happened to be in office when major changes were overtaking the country, and they were just one of the changes, and something about their behavior or actions symbolized the changes taking place in the country. For those who accept the Great Man theory of history, then the President was the person responsible for the changes taking place in the country.

In the United States, the country had as Presidents up until Jackson either Founding Fathers or relatives of such, and most of those Presidents before Jackson were members of what is called the Virginia Mafia, since they were all from Virginia. The Presidents of the United States were George Washington, from Virgina, and then John Adams, from Massachusetts, first Washington’s Vice President and then a one-term President, then Thomas Jefferson, from Virginia, the James Madison, from Virginia, then James Monroe, from Virginia, and then John Quincy Adams, from Massachusetts and son of the first Adams. In the contested election of 1824 Jackson ran against Adams and, even though he had more electoral votes, did not have enough and so the issue was settled in the House of Representatives. One of the candidates, Henry Clay of Kentucky, withdrew and threw his support to Adams. Later, when Adams was President he appointed Clay to be Secretary of State. This was not a politically wise thing to do, but since Clay was obviously the most qualified person for the post, it was natural that he was appointed by Adams. Jackson was very upset at what he considered a “corrupt bargain” and began campaigning for the next election. There was so much ill will towards Adams that not much was accomplished in his term, but his remains the most accomplished post-presidential career. Jackson beat Adams in the next election and served two terms.

At this point in the early Nineteenth Century the Industrial Revolution, which had began in England over 100 years before, finally spread into the wider world. The Industrial Revolution is declared to have come to America in 1790 when Samuel Slater, who was an apprentice in England, brought ideas of the Industrial Revolution to New England. England had attempted to keep the ideas of the Industrial Revolution within England, but that could only last so long.

By the third decade of the Nineteenth Century what is called Laissez-Faire Capitalism developed within America. This had been started by the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1776. Laissez-Faire implies leaving people alone to follow their own path. What it amounted to in reality is that businesses could do whatever that wanted, within reason, to make money. At the beginning of this revolution, because it was certainly a revolutionary principle, things went along fine. It wasn’t until after the Civil War and the rise of corporations, starting with the railroads which had been empowered by the War, that things began to vary from the ideal.

Along with this was the development of something called the Market Revolution in America. The cotton gin had been invented at the end of the Eighteenth Century, and it was coming into use in the South, where much cotton was grown. Before the cotton gin, people wondered if there was a future for slavery, but the cotton gin made possible the use of a type of cotton that had previously been difficult to use. This made the need for slaves to harvest the cotton more important than ever. This cotton was shipped to the many weaving factories in New England that had been automated by the work of Samuel Slater. Massachusetts especially developed many weaving factories and employed young women from the cities.

At this time, when the Age of Jackson was starting, there was also a Transportation Revolution. Before this time goods could be slowly transported by horse and wagon over relatively primitive roads or shipped down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. But in this period many well maintained roads — call turnpikes — were build by the Federal government, which allowed faster transportation by horse-drawn wagons. There was also the building of the Eire Canal in upstate New York, joining the Great Lakes to the Hudson River whose outlet was New York City. This allowed ships to enter the Hudson River at New York and access the many cities bordering the Great Lakes, including Chicago, and from there reach by wagons much of the Midwest. While the Eire Canal is in much disrepair now, at the time it was revolutionary and allowed the country along the canal to build up, as well as the land of middle America that could now be reached from the Atlantic. Other canals were built at this time, connecting, for example, Lake Eire and the Ohio River. The Cumberland Road, also known as the Nation Road, was built in this period and extended over 600 miles from Cumberland, Maryland into Illinois. It became the first road in America surfaced with macadam. Steamboats became popular on the Mississippi River (think Mark Twain) and allowed relatively easy transport of people and goods up and down the most important river in the country, and helping to unite the Midwest. Accentuating this trend to easier transportation, the railroad was first introduced into the United States in 1828. By 1830 the Tom Thumb, first common-carrier railroad, was built. The development of a railroad system in the United States was helped by much investment from England.

The Communication Revolution is another event that occurred in antebellum America. America had been a country interested in writing since the early days. Daniel Boone, when he was out in the country, enjoy being told the tales of Shakespeare. Bookstores were one of the first establishments to go into a new town. In this Jacksonian period the Napier steam-driven press was developed in England and allowed more books and newspapers to be printed easily. This allowed the burgeoning middle classes to more easily find books, magazines, and newspapers, and helped support a literate population. Schooling increased and eventually public schools became commonplace. The telegraph was invented at the end of this period by artist Samuel F. B. Morse in 1835. The telegraph has been called the Victorian Internet and for the first time ever allowed near instantaneous communication.

Age of Jackson 1

The most important transit for this period, and one with deep seated meaning, is that of Pluto over the IC of the US chart, and thus opposite the MC (black arrow chart 1). The IC represents the foundation or base of the entity in question, in this case the Untied States. Transits over the IC appear to last longer and their meaning less obvious than transits to more visible points. Since Pluto moves so slow, this transit had never happened in the history of the country; it previously happened in the 1570s. Pluto represent large scale change or transformation, and that is indeed what the Age of Jackson had to offer. There was a massive change in the United States, which had only won their war for independence forty or so years previously. The country had started to become its own person (cf Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution for a description of the first generation of post-Revolution Americans). Pluto then went on to square the Sun of the US in 1832–38 (black arrow chart 4). This was the time of the development of abolitionism and William LLoyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator. The closing of the Pluto Sun cycle, and of course the beginning of the next cycle happened with the Pluto conjunct Sun aspect in the Twenties.

Age of Jackson 2

Age of Jackson 3

Compounding this situation during these years was the actions of Uranus and Neptune. These two planets were conjunct in 1820-23 (red arrow in first chart) and square the MC of the United States. This conjunction happens three times per 500 years and the next time that conjunction happened was in the early 1990s and we are still strongly witnessing the effects of that conjunction. The conjunction of the early Nineteenth Century was opposite two of the core planets of America, Jupiter and Venus. Uranus went on to oppose the Sun in 1823-24 (black arrow in second chart) and Neptune opposed the Sun 1824-27 (black arrow in third chart). These aspects just added to the central changes happening in the country, in so many areas. In this group of aspects the final one was Uranus conjunct the US Moon (chart 4), which has been discussed before and signified the revolution of Texas, which had been part of Mexico but then split away, hoping to be part of the United States.

Age of Jackson 4

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November 21, 2014

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Neoliberalism and the Cult of the Market

I am entitling this post “Neoliberalism” even though what happened in this period was much more than the development of neoliberalism (also known as market fundamentalism) in the world, but that by itself is more than enough. As we’ve seen before at times of midpoint configuration between the three outer planets, things change in such a drastic way that it is hard to remember what life was like before that time. One could call it a “phase change” in society, a watershed moment, or a Zeitgeist (German for spirit of the time) change.

First we should define neoliberalism. My favorite definition, which I coined myself, is Market Über Alles, the market above all. Thus the demands of the market supersede anything else: We must lower the taxes on markets and those who run them, privatize everything, the government can not do anything right, regulation of markets (by the government) is bad so we must reduce regulation. These policies have been ascendant since this time; for another look at this phenomena see Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A History of the World in Three Castes by David Priestland.

Neoliberalism: Uranus at the midpoint of Neptune and Pluto

We can see signs of this all around, and it is increasing: privatize the Post Office (it was partially privatized long ago), replace public schools with charter (ie., private) schools, replace the government-run military with private contractors, what use to be called in a simpler time mercenaries. Let the water system be run by private contractors. Replace government-run prisons with private prisons. How about private roads and bridges? And don’t forget medicine; trust the (private) insurance companies to provide you with health care.

First we must start with Ronald Reagan. Many people are upset at the title of Sean Wilentz’s book The Age of Reagan, but I realized that it is certainly true. Some President have such a wake that the administrations after them take on some of the same characteristics that the eponymous President’s administration had. Thus we speak of the Age of Jackson from at least 1829 when Andrew Jackson took office to 1861 when a Republican took office, the Age of Roosevelt, from 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt took office until 1974 when the last New Deal President resigned. And finally we have the Age of Reagan, starting when the sainted Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 and still going strong, in fact stronger than ever. Just as I believe those previous two Ages started before the named President was elected, and his election was just a concrete manifestation of the changes that took place in the country’s psyche, the Age of Reagan, the only one whose start I was able to witness, started before Saint Ronnie was elected. One can see many signs of the upcoming age under President James Earl Carter. Among other things, Carter deregulated the airline industry, the trucking industry, railroads, and he started the process of deregulating the telecommunication industry. He also got the CIA involved in Afghanistan before the Soviets invaded, a forerunner of Reagan’s boosting the Cold War. This is much like Roosevelt carrying forth ideas of Hoover to combat the Great Depression, as a member of FDR’s Brain Trust Rexford Tugwell pointed out. Conservatives who are not blind to Carter realize that just as it took a Republican to recognize Red China — as the expression Nixon in China well illustrates — it took a Democrat to realize the “miracle of markets” and start the ball rolling for neoliberalism. In fact, Carter’s final defense budget was greater than Reagan’s first. And he proclaimed the Carter Doctrine, that any threat to Middle East oil is a threat to America, and even force may be used to stop that threat.

Carter’s Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, early in 1979 convinced Carter to allow the CIA to set up operation against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan, hoping to embroil the Soviets in what he called “their Vietnam” in that country. The Soviets took the bait to support the Afghanistan government, and the result was a long and bloody civil war that the next president was more than willing to support. From that came Osama Bin Landen, the Taliban, 9/11, and the continued involvement of America in Afghanistan still 35 years later. What may have seemed like a good idea at the time had long-ranging repercussions and the world is worse for that decision.

Another thing that Carter did that helped get neoliberalism started, even though it cost him the 1980 election, was to appoint Paul Volker head of the US Federal Reserve in July 1979 and Volker soon changed the monetary policy of the country, resulting in bad economic conditions that doomed the Carter presidency.

Half way around the world, China in 1978 got a new leader in Deng Xiaoping to replace Mao Tse-tung who had died a couple of years earlier. Deng started a massive change in the economic policy of China; he is reputed to have said “To be rich is glorious” which certainly could be a motto for neoliberalism. But the changes that he started in China are well known today in the United States, where it seems that more and more of the products for sale in our stores, whether cheap clothing or expensive computers, are made in China.

And in Great Britain in May of 1979 the shopkeeper’s daughter Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister. She served as a good partner for Ronald Reagan, elected 18 months later, to remake the world in the vision of neolibreralism. Her motto was TINA — There Is No Alternative. And she certainly remade England, with her crushing of a coal miners strike being only the most obvious example. And governments after Thatcher, either Tory or Labor, followed the Thatcher formula. Even now Britain’s National Health Service, a beacon for the world, is being dismantled and replaced by private practice.

But on a more local level, California passed Proposition 13 in the Summer of 1978 to amend the Constitution of that state. Passage of this had profound implications for the state, and was a trendsetter for the country. The major effect of this act was to limit property taxes in the State of California, which hampered the construction of new schools, among other things. The act also required a two-thirds majority of both houses of the state legislature to change the state taxes. Since it was difficult to get such a majority in both houses, there became less and less money for such things as education, both for public schools and the state university system, which had been relatively inexpensive for residents and had been renowned for its quality. Both those things disappears in the aftermath of the passage of this act.

The National Rifle Association — NRA — is famous for their strong stand on the supremacy of the Second Amendment and their equally strong political stand. Many people forget that the NRA use to be a simple organization devoted to gun safety and teaching young people to handle firearms. Then, in 1977, there was a right-wing coup in the organization called the Revolt in Cincinnati; the NRA was taken over by a small band of firebrands and the organization was remade into the NRA we know today.

Iran has been ruled by an autocrat who had been put into office by a coup instigated by Kermit Roosevelt, son of Theodore, working for the CIA in 1954; this was Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. His secret police SAVAK were notorious. But in 1979, while the Shah was out of the country, an Islamic revolution occurred which toppled the government that had been strongly backed by the United States. Ever since that time Iran has been ruled by an Islamic government and has been severely opposed by the United States government, which still does not have diplomats in that country.

Transiting Nepturn/Pluto Midpoint

This graphical ephemeris show a period of five years from the middle of 1976 through the middle of 1981, with the center at the start of 1979. The blue wavy line is transiting Uranus, and the other wavy line is the transiting Neptune-Pluto midpoint. You can see they start to get very close at the beginning of 1978, are in contact through 1979, and separate in 1980. The other chart near the top is a standard wheel for a specific time. In that you can see clearly Uranus at the midpoint of Neptune-Pluto. This was the third and last midpoint involving the three outer planets this century. The previous two midpoints, which have already been discussed, were in the first decade of the Twentieth Century and at the end of World War II.

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November 7, 2014

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The Cold War

The Cold War between the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union and its allies started right after World War II ended — we will deal with the exact start in a later post — and supposedly ended with the fall of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991. Some authorities contend that the Cold War started with the rise to power of the Communist Party in Russia at the end of World War I. That was indeed an early version of the Cold War, which involved the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan sending troops to fight against the Communist government in a Civil War that occurred with the fall of the Czar in Russia. And near the beginning of the Second World War several leaders, such as Harry Truman, maintained that we should support Germany if it looked like the Soviets would win, and support the Soviet Union if it looked like Germany would win, in a hope that both countries would destroy each other. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union was allied with the United States during World War II and so the Cold War did not start in all its glory until that war ended

Cold War 1950

The operative aspect during the Cold War was what is called the Long Sextile between Neptune and Pluto. Pluto is an oddity among the planets since its orbit is very eccentric so that at some times it travels much faster than at other times, and once every 250 years it goes inside the orbit of Neptune so that it is no longer the outermost planet. That happens appropriately when, since Pluto is considered to be the ruler of the sign Scorpio, the planet is in the sign Scorpio. This happened between January 1979 and February 1999, with Pluto closest to the sun (perihelion) half way between those two dates. As the result of this, the sextile between the two planets lasted a very long time, and it will return in another decade, but that is an important topic for another time. As a result, this is called the Long Sextile.

Cold War 1980

The first two charts illustrate a typical sextile between the two planets , one from 1950 near the beginning of the Cold War,and one for 1980, thirty years later when the Cold War had warmed up again. In both charts notice the blue line representing a sextile between the planets Neptune and Pluto. But the real proof is in the graphical ephemeris shown below. This graphical ephemeris covers a fifty year period, between 1944 and 1994, and shows in the sixth harmonic just two planets, Neptune and Pluto. We know that in a sixth harmonic chart, planets that are exactly sextile show as conjunctions, or lines that are together in the graphical ephemeris. From the graph we can see that the two planet first came close together in 1946 or 1947, stay close together until they finally separate in 1991 or 1992, mirroring the extent of the cold war that lasted all those years. We also notice that the lines get very close together in he early Fifties, just as the Cold War was getting intense with the successful Communist victory in China, the Korean War, the first successful atomic bomb explosion by the Soviets, and in the United States McCarthyism. The other time the planets are very close together is in the early Eighties with President Ronald Reagan, when defense spending greatly increased, when he talked about the military plan called “Star Wars” and helped the fights in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

The Cold War 1945-1991

Also notice that the two lines, representing Neptune — blue– and Pluto — red in the late Sixties, early Seventies are further apart. This is when President Richard Nixon was practicing the policy of détente with the Soviet Union. One important treaty negotiated during this period was called SALT I for Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. This was in the works between late 1969 through 1972. On May 26, 1972 an Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was signed between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev. Also in this period was the famous “Nixon Goes to China” moment when Richard Nixon when to “Red” China, something that was unheard of before then, and the subsequent recognition of China by the United States and then the admission of mainland China to the United Nations, something that had been blocked (mostly by the United States) since 1949. In fact, it was because the Soviet Union was not in the United Nations Security Council in 1950 to protest the exclusion of China from that body that allowed the United States to have the United Nations approved the start of the Korean War.

As we’ve seen previously, a midpoint involving the three outer planets represents a watershed moment. For the midpoint that indicates the start of the Cold War, this is certainly true. It was a bifurcation point in the flow of time, where the future was radically different that it would have been without the Cold War. The Cold War has affected the whole world and the way it behaves, in ways unimaginable and not really seen at the time it started. But by now the “official” Cold War has been over for almost a quarter century. We are living in a post Cold War world, but the effects of the Cold War has changed the way we response to most everything.

America has always had enemies, someone it could dominate and rail against, someone that the people at home would draw together against. For much of the early years of the country the enemy was Great Britain, the country it was a colony of for a long time, and finally rebelled against. The US then had another war against that country a quarter century later. But by the time of the Spanish-American War, the enemy was that by then decrepit empire Spain. This served as an enemy until the Huns in World War One intervened. But at the end of that war there was the Russian Revolution and they became the official enemy, a status that has endured even though the official Cold War has supposedly ended. One historian (Gordon Wood, The Idea of America) has an interesting theory as to why the Russians were so hated after their Revolution. For over a century after the American Revolution, America is where anyone considering a more democratic country would look. It was almost as if the definition of revolution was illustrated with a map of America. But after the Russian Revolution, this was no longer the case. After that act, when people though of revolution, they thought of Russia. We were no longer the top dog in the Revolution-definition business. Russia had stolen America’s thunder, and America was not about to allow that to happen.

After the Soviet Union ceased to exist, America searched for another enemy to take its place. The first choice was the menace of drugs, come to steal out precisions bodily fluids. That audition did not go over too well, and fortunately 9/11 allowed America to bring back a bogeyman that Ronald Reagan declared war on 20 years earlier, but this time it seemed more real and was brought home to Americans on their television screens, the window to reality. This new threat was terrorism, and so a War on Terrorism was declared. Some people pointed out the difficulty in declaring war on a noun, and that terrorism was a tactic, and some even pointed out that America was the largest purveyor of terrorism, but none of those arguments held much sway with the American people. In fact, the argument became are you for the country or for the terrorist, just like in previous times the question was are you for us or the Communist. It was a black and white world.

It won’t be for several hundred years, when we are able to look back at the Cold War as a historical period and not as a entity which has just recently passed, and maybe not really, that we can see this period is one of insanity. It changed drastically where money was spent, so that trillions were sent to defense companies, making their owners very wealthy, which reduced the amount of money available for most of the people. As President Eisenhower said “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” These days that certainly sounds like Communist propaganda, and the person who said is not fit to be allowed in society, but Eisenhower was a Republican President and a war hero of the Second World War. That one quote shows how much things have changed in the last sixty years.

We are now in the post Cold War world, but having the Cold War as such a prominent feature of the world for so long — 45 years — has changed the way people think. Our first response to any problem is to send in the weapons, if not “boots on the ground” then at the very least a few bombs, missiles, or drones. The world has developed so that the killing of strangers because they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time does not seem worthy of comment, and the interception of all personal messages seems perfectly normal. In fact, supporters will often give praise, or at least find an excuse, when their leader does any of that.

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October 31, 2014

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Death of the Uni-polar World

One of the phenomena of the last 500 years — the Party Time — was the rise of the uni-polar World. This is a world that has one dominant player. Before that time, the concept did not really exist, since the world was not globalized, and the large scale empires of the time, such as the Roman, Chinese, or Persian, only held sway over a limited part of the whole world. Once the New World was known by the Europeans (and I ignore those who criticize the term since it was obviously known by the natives, as a case of semantic confusion) the uni-polar world became possible. We are now moving into a multi-polar world where there is more than one power center. But the unfortunate situation is that the uni-polar power at this time does not recognize that a multi-polar world is possible or desirable. When the previous uni-polar champ, Britain, was replaced in the early years of the Twentieth Century, it was able to resign with some grace and did not make a scene. This is often held up as a example that superpowers should follow. But perhaps Britain was an exception to the rule that a superpower does not go gently. For the next 500 years, there will be several dominant powers in the world, including, one hopes, the people of the world, as was predicted by the New York Times (“world public opinion was a second superpower”) after the large marches on February 15, 2003 to prevent the invasion of Iraq.

For the purpose of this entry, I am going to talk about four superpowers that dominated the last 500 years, their rise and fall. These four were, in turn, Spain, Holland, Britain, and the United States. The important astrological event for these power changes seems to be Pluto crossing the Cardinal Axis — 0 Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn. Note that the importance of the cardinal axis is shown by the chart of 1492, which has Neptune, and not Pluto, crossing the cardinal axis.

Spain was the dominant power at the beginning of this 500 year period because the country became unified and they had several explorers travel to the rest of the world and bring back riches, gold and silver, to the home country.

Rise of Spain

The important year seems to be 1479: This was after Isabelle and Ferdinand were married, but Isabelle was still involved in a war with her sister over control of Castile. This war was settled in September of that year with the Treaty of Alcáçovas. Also that year Ferdinand succeeded his father in Aragon. This paved the way for Castile and Aragon to join together and a unified Spain to result. As we can see from this chart, Pluto crossed the Libra point, and thus crossed the Cardinal Axis.

Spain Unified

Both these events took place in the same year, but of course the developments leading up to and following after were important. Spain had been conquered by the Moors in the Tenth Century, and it was a challenge for the Spanish to drive (or convert) the Moors over the next 500 years. They were finally successful in 1492 with the Reconquista. Another ethnic group that upset the Spanish were the many Jews who lived in Spain. Spain also gave them the choice of converting to Catholicism or else — see Spanish Inquisition. This was accomplished pretty much by the same year. But Spain was still not a unified country: There was Castile which was in the center and north of the Iberian peninsula, and was controlled at this time by Isabelle, and Aragon in the north of the Iberian peninsula near the Pyrenees Mountains, controlled by Ferdinand. After the two were married in 1469 the two nations of Castile and Aragon were joined together, and after the Muslims were driven out, Spain became a unified country, bent on establishing its power. After this point Spain was sending explorers around the world, bringing back gold and silver to enrich the home country. This Spanish Golden Age was also a great one for Spanish arts and literature, with the examples of the painter El Greco, known for his elongated figures, and Miguel Cervantes, whose best known work is Don Quixote. The country began to lose lustre with the defeat of the Spanish Armada by England in 1588 and the loss of the lowland countries. As we can see from the chart for that date, Pluto came to the Aries point, thus crossing the Cardinal Axis again.

Rise of Netherlands

The Dutch Republic rose with a long war against the Hapsburg dynasty of Spain. The Dutch Republic established the Dutch East India Company and the oldest stock market in the world in the early years of the Seventeenth Century. The Dutch had a large fleet of merchant ships covering the world. At one time they were masters of New York, which they lost, won and lost again to the British. The artists of this Dutch Golden Age are well known, consisting of such as Rembrandt (Night Watch) and Vermeer (Girl with a Pearl Earring). The Dutch of the Low Countries dominated the world trade that had previously been controlled by the Spanish.

Rise of England

Like other Empires, the Dutch enjoyed their time in the sun, but they felt competition with England. England was involved in the Seven Years War (1756-63) which also involved the other major powers of Europe and was fought at various locations around the world. The part in North America is called there the French and Indian War. Winston Churchill thought that this war should be considered a World War. In North America there was a battle between the French and British over the control of Canada, and the French lost. The painting by Benjamin West called The Death of General Wolfe marks an important point in this battle, near Quebec. This marked the rise of Britain to be the dominant power in the world, a position that would last for over a century. The chart for this transfer of power from the Dutch to the British is marked with Pluto at 0 Capricorn, again crossing the Cardinal Axis.

Rise of United States

But by World War I, in which Britain defeated Germany, they had lost much power, and going off the gold standard didn’t help. There was a new powerful country in the world, one that did not exist in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, and they wereThe Death of General Wolfe able to step into the gap vacated by the British. The British loss of power is spoken of in almost reverential terms by historians since that are widely credited with handling their loss of world power in a responsible manner. One can only hope that the last country to give up power will have learned lesson from Britain, but at present that outlook is doubtful.

Death of the Uni-polar World

The United States was the country to become dominant after the British lost their pole position after World War I. The Twentieth Century was indeed the American Century as Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce predicted in the Thirties. With the 9/11 attacks and the Great Depression America is no longer the dominant power of the world. A single dominant world power was a phenomena of the previous 500 years and now the world must adapt to something new in this area, as in many, many others. As H. G. Wells said, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

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October 24, 2014

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Revolution At The Top

The planet Uranus has transited over the Midheaven of the United States three times since the country was born. Uranus is the planet of revolution and the Midheaven represents our public position in the world, so one would expect just by combining those two symbols that this transit would suggest a revolution in the way we are seen or present ourselves to the world, in our public persona. Let’s see how that plays in in reality. Unlike Uranus transiting the IC, where the effects will be hidden from public view, transits to the MC will be public and apparent to all the world.

The first time Uranus reached the MC of the United States was 1799-1801. This time represented an important Presidential election for the country, its fourth. In the first two elections, George Washington was easily elected. He represented the Federalist Party which was all there was at the beginning, since initially it was thought that there was no need for political parties, that the president would represent everyone. In the first two elections Washington was unopposed. Washington chose not to run for a third term, which amazed outside observers since it was thought that he would continue to be president for his life, or in other words a king, much like what European countries were use to. By the time of the third election in 1796 there was a party other than the Federalist, the Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson, and he ran against the Federalist candidate, John Adams, who had been Washington’s Vice-President, and who won the election. This was the first contested election, with Thomas Jefferson serving as vice president, even though he was from a different party than Adams.

By the time of the fourth election, things got more interesting. Adams was again running against Jefferson, along with Aaron Burr as Republicans. But not all the bugs had been worked out of the election process, and there was no separate President and Vice President, a problem that the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution was passed to fix. The person receiving the highest votes was suppose to be President, and the person receiving the second highest was to be Vice President. But both Jefferson and Burr got the same number of votes in the Electoral College.

This was the second contested presidential election in United States history and the first where the power would transfer from one party to the other; people were not sure that the transfer would be peaceful. In France they had had a Revolution ten years previously, it had gotten violent, and now a dictator by the name of Napoleon had taken over the country just a year before, so people were wondering if the United States would go the same way as France.

Revolution of 1800

After the Electoral Collage vote tied, the election fell into the House of Representatives, where each state had one vote. But each ballot was the same, with both Jefferson and Burr getting the same number of votes. This process stretched out towards Inauguration Day in late March, and tempers were rising. There was even talk of a civil war. It began to look like America would be another failed state. The balloting had gone on 35 times and still there was no winner. If it hadn’t been for the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, which gave states extra electoral votes based on three-fifths of their slave population, Adams would have won and the election would not have been thrown into the House. Finally, on the thirty-sixth ballot, one person changed his vote and Jefferson was elected as President and Burr became Vice-President. Jefferson later called this the “Revolution of 1800.” The United States survived its first election where the office of the President changed hands to a different faction.

Uranus has a period of 84 years; the next time Uranus went over the Midheaven of the United States was the middle of the 1880s. Important activities were happening regarding labor relations — the May Day celebration in Chicago comes to mind, most notably the Haymarket Massacre on May 4, 1886. This was a rally to support the eight hour work day. A bomb was thrown into the rally resulting in gunfire, chaos, and the death of seven police and at last four civilians. Some anarchists were convicted on little evidence. Four were executed as a result of the trial, while another killed himself just before his execution. Others were pardoned. This was a very important milestone for labor relations in the United States, and it resulted in the annual observation of May Day as a labor celebration. It also served as a warning to the middle and upper classes that the workers below them were unhappy with the state of labor.

Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad

But I believe the most important event at the time, which has even more meaning now than then, took place initially in California and eventually ended up in the Supreme Court of the United States where a decision was handed down that changed the real rulers of the country. This was the decision known as Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad. The argument before the Supreme Count and the decision took place in the first half of 1886, but it had been in process for years. That county in California wanted to tax that railroad, but the railroad did not want to be taxed. Th upshot of the decision, the one that is still with us today, came from a headnote to the decision and not the decision itself. Interestingly, the headnote was not written by any Justice but by a court reporter who had been the president of another railroad. Basically, the headnote said that corporations were persons as far as the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was concerned. At the time of this decision this Amendment had been passed only 18 years previously. The Fourteenth Amendment has been applied more often to corporations than the freed slaves it was intended for. Some think that this assumption of corporations as people was possible because that amendment uses the term “persons” instead of “natural persons” which is legally more applicable to flesh-and-blood people. In any case, recent Supreme Court decisions such as the infamous Citizens United have only built on the structure of that earlier Supreme Court decision that took place over 125 years ago.

1968

The third passage of Uranus over the Midheaven of the United States, and one that happened relatively recently, needs no introduction, since the year in question has many books with the year as a title. This transit was in 1968 and 1969. The listing of “revolutionary” events of these years almost becomes repetitious. This was near the end of the Sixties, and passions had built up over the years. A brief mention of the events of 1968 in America includes the assassination of Martin Luther King in April, the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June, and the police riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August. 1969 saw the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in August, the Moon Landing in July, and the Concert at the Altamont Speedway in California in December, which was declared the death of the Sixties. (For a take on that concert from a group that was there, check out “New Speedway Boogie” by the Grateful Dead from their album Workingman’s Dead released the next year.) Also in December the followers of Charles Manson, inspired by another rock song “Helter Skelter” from the album The Beatles (called the “White Album”) brutally murdered five people at a Hollywood home, and two more the next day. Another important but rarely mentioned event of 1969 was the assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton by the FBI in December. This is one of the events that helped radicalize even more the Weathermen (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” Bob Dylan sang in the song “Subterranean Homesick Blues” from the album Bringing It All Back Home) a splinter from the New Left group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that was widespread in the Sixties. The Weathermen would go on in the next couple of years to make waves in society with their violence.

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October 17, 2014

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The Twenties

There were several aspects that define the decade that is call the Twenties in the United States. This decade also had a meaning in Europe, which had recently been ravaged by the Great War and was slowly recovering. In Germany the Weimar Republic was an attempt to have a functioning democracy in that country after the previous regime was so tarnished by World War I. England and France were also recovering from the effects of the War, and Russia just saw a new Communist government take the reigns of power after the previous one had been overthrown by the Communists and a civil war between the Red and White Russians — supported by Western Powers England, France, and the United States — had been won. As is often the case after a major war, new governments and new ways of life take over. There had also been a major influenza epidemic that had swept the world in the closing years of the previous decade, killing millions, and that of course also changed the world.

Even though the United States had witnessed little of the war, and then only from a great distance, they also had many changes, often self-induced. The Prohibition of Alcohol took place on January 17, 1920, designed to coordinate with the beginning of a new decade. America was also coming off a previous period that had seen the passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts under Woodrow Wilson, which allowed such dissents as Eugene Debs to be jailed. It is noteworthy that this same act is being currently used by President Obama to jail whistleblowers. There was a great fear of foreigners after World War I, and a distrust of the Russians (the country was not recognized until 1933), which led to much fear of communist/alien/anarchist presence in the country.

But in the United States the “Return to Normalcy” (the phrase of the first president of the new decade, Warren Gamallel Harding) continued until the stock market crash of 1929. The decade of the Thirties was to be much different, not only in the United States, but throughout the world.

Uranus trine Pluto Early Twenties

The first aspect of note is a trine between Uranus and Pluto that lasted from 1920 to 1923. This affected the entire world, not just America, and indicates the changes that took place after the end of World War I and the influenza epidemic. The US had three important aspects to its natal chart, which had different effects (or rather symbolized different things) but their combinations was the profound changes that took place in America during the Twenties. This trine is shown above in a third harmonic graphical ephemeris.

In Germany, which had been ruled by the Hohenzollern family since the Eleventh Century (long before Germany existed as a country) which included their leader during World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the rulership came to an end with the Germany Revolution after the War. This was followed by what is called the Weimar Republic. This was Germany’s first attempt at democracy, and it was a period of great interest in such things as astrology and “New Age” ideas. This of course came to an end with the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1933.

Neptune Opposite US Moon

One aspect, that has been mentioned before is transiting Neptune opposite the Moon of the United States. The peak of this was 1926-29. Since Neptune moves so slowly, this was the first time that this aspect has happened since the planet was discovered. Neptune Moon can be read as the people are deluded, which can refer to the stock market mania that swept the country during the Twenties, and it could speak to the great interest in sports during the Twenties, witness Babe Ruth and Red Grange in baseball and football, respectively; and that golf became a middle-class sport. After the horrible war people just wanted to forget the past decade and have fun. But the most obvious association is Prohibition that took place, in the United States and some other countries, during this decade. While other countries, such as Canada, gave up Prohibition earlier than the United States, the US maintained it until 1933 when the Depression, marking the next decade, was fully ensconced.

It is still debated whether drinking increased or not in the Twenties, especially later into the decade when the corruptness of the Prohibition agents was revealed. But one of the things that caused Prohibition to be repealed is that many school children were showing up to school drunk; these were children who did not drink before. There was much deceit involved in getting alcohol, not only in bootleggers and speakeasies, but also in the large demand for sacramental wine, only (of course) used for religious purposes, and also in doctors recommendations for alcohol, only (of course) for medical reasons. The nation became, because of Prohibition, a less law-abiding country, with many people willing to look the other way. Unfortunately, this attitude did not change after Prohibition was repealed, because once those attitudes take root it is hard to turn them off.

Uranus Transits IC of US

The transit of Uranus over the IC of the United States, and thus opposite the Midheaven, is a bit harder to describe. The peak of this was 1926-28. The IC — Imum Coeli or Bottom of the Sky — is the most hidden point of the chart, the foundation or base of the country. Transits over that point represent deep seated changes. I’ve notice that transits over the IC start earlier and last longer than more obvious changes. Transits over the IC seem to represents changes in how the country see itself. With this transit the people of the country began to feel comfortable with credit. Before this decade, most people were uncomfortable with buying on time. Starting with the Twenties, people bought consumer items with credit and paid them off over time. This allowed the middle class, which was growing in this decade, to purchase more of the items they needed for their lifestyle, a trend that has really never stopped since that time, though the Great Depression and the Second World War put a damper on things for a period. The United States recently went through a similar aspect, and the results have been described as the “New Normal.”

The overriding aspect of this decade was Pluto conjunct the Sun of the US, lasting the whole decade but with a peak 1923-27. One of the meanings given for Pluto is organized crime, and the Twenties was certainly a highpoint for crime, when, because of Prohibition, organized crime really took off and gained a foothold in America that of course did not lessen once Prohibition was repealed in 1933. This is something lawmakers seem not to know, or forget as soon as the current crisis passes, but a failed policy often (always?) has unintended consequences and even though the failed policy can be ended, the unintended consequences often will not go away. That is certainly something that current lawmakers would be well to understand.

Pluto Conjunct US Sun

Probably one of the most vivid image of the Twenties is the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, where seven people (but not the intended target) were killed in Chicago in February of 1929, but that was only symptomatic of gangland killings that took place in the Twenties as businessmen attempted to protect their turf since the courts were unavailable to them. The story of Al Capone is still popular since he epitomize the rise of gangsters in that era.

A more far-reaching symbol for Pluto is transformation, and this happened to the country, if not to its government. Pluto also represents large-scale enterprises. During the whole decade a series of Republicans served in the Presidency, and one Secretary of the Treasury served the whole period, Andrew Mellon, the third richest person in the United States. During this decade the cult of the market grew strong, sort of a preview of what would happen in our own time after another Republican was elected President, and worship of the stock market reached new heights.

In the decade of the Twenties, America was transformed from a rural country to an urban country. This was the decade in which a majority of the people started living in cities and no longer were farm dwellers. As more people were in cities, automobiles really became popular. There were many manufacturers of automobiles, especially General Motors, and they gave competition to Ford, who had ruled the roost since the introduction of the Model T before the Great War. In the late Twenties Ford introduced the Model A to compete with the other manufacturers and it proved to be a great success, becoming one of the more popular models of the period. By this time the infrastructure for automobiles — roads, gas stations, mechanics — had been developed and so America became a driving society.

There was also a sexual revolution in the decade, despite what people want to think of the Sixties. Margaret Sanger had popularize birth control and founded the Planned Parenthood Federation, though it was initially called something else. Women started smoking, something that had been relatively unknown in decades before, and drinking openly. The image of the flapper is well know, and women began to bob their hair, something that had previously been connected to prostitutes.

This decade was also the time that movies started to talk. The first talking movie is considered to be The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson and released in 1927. This sounded the death knell for silent movies, and made the cinema even more entrancing. This movie was a full 90 minutes long, similar to what is found today. Also in the Twenties commercial radio got started with news, entertainment, live performances and, of course, sports. Just as the Fifties was the decade of television, the Twenties was the decade of radio.

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Author Archives: dak1024

Massacre in Paris

Presidential Mistakes

The Great Recession, The Rise of Britain, and the Reformation

“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”

Jacksonian America

Neoliberalism and the Cult of the Market

The Cold War

Death of the Uni-polar World

Revolution At The Top

The Twenties