Welcome to the February 2025 Full Moon Cosmic Weather Forecast by Curtis Lang with Jane Sherry!
This fiery Leo Full Moon is startling, electric, conflicted, and potentially creative -- a wake up call for all of us as we prepare to enter a New Era in outer planet Air and Fire Signs that will completely restructure every aspect of human civilization, for better or worse.
Sun and Mercury in Airy Aquarius oppose the Full Moon at 24º6' of scene-stealing Leo, and all three luminaries square disruptive Uranus in Taurus, creating a potent T-Square in Fixed signs.
The Leo Full Moon is the focus of a Funnel Formation, with the majority of planets in the quadrant opposite the Moon, so the energy of this configuration will be channeled through the Moon in the sixth house, highlighting issues of service and community, which are also primary concerns of the Aquarian Sun.
The Sabian Symbol for this Leo Full Moon is "A Large Camel is Seen Crossing a Vast and Forbidding Desert", indicating that we must cultivate independence and self-sufficiency in order to successfully navigate towards a distant goal which can only be reached by a long and winding road through treacherous conditions.
The Fixed Sign T-Square focused on Uranus in Taurus indicates a sense of existential crisis that generates a perceived need for urgent action to resolve what can feel like unbearable tensions in the Taurean realms of finance, nurturing, and structured community relations.
This Full Moon chart synchronizes with the onset of the Trump-Musk assault on America's current system of government. Trump-Musk forces are moving fast and breaking things with Leonine ferocity. Those who prefer democracy in America feel a sense of existential crisis and a thwarted desire for immediate action.
The Trump agenda aims to disrupt all existing social relations, cut $1 trillion a year in government spending, and reduce or eliminate people's reliance on community for their needs by slashing government programs such as education, medical research, the arts, Medicaid, and Social Security.
These cuts would force Americans to become more self-reliant, like the proverbial homo economicus of right wing economic theory, who makes all decisions based on a rationalist calculation of costs and benefits to himself or herself alone without reference to any community or society at all.
Every person would become their own camel in a desert society denuded of life giving community relations and supports of all kinds.
After the frayed federal social safety net is gutted in the name of freedom for the .001%, those with unlimited resources would enjoy massive tax cuts and increased freedoms in many areas of life.
Proposed deregulation of business would empower the powerful to engage in increased predation of all kinds, while those of more modest means would be forced to pay more for less access to health care and education and rely solely on themselves for retirement support.
The result for the masses would be a reduction of freedom.
In many ways the Trump agenda is an updated, turbo-charged version of the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal agenda, with new authoritarian, techno-feudal, Christian nationalist, white supremacist elements elevated to primary importance in the new social order envisioned by Trump and his largest techno-feudal campaign contributor, Elon Musk.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump,
For example, Musk has pronounced the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) "dead". The CFPB was created in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis to stop the banks who had received trillions of dollars worth of bailouts from ripping the faces off of their customers with sky-high interest rates, onerous usage fees, payday loan scams and other financial predation.
"By shuttering the CFPB, Trump is not just going back to a pre-financial crisis status quo, but to something actually weaker than that," explains financial journalist Matt Stoller. "There is essentially no longer any Federal enforcement of consumer protection rules for financial products."
"Let’s start with some of the small stuff that will now change," Stoller continues. "Rules against excessive overdraft fees? Gone. A rule capping credit card late fees? Gone. Oversight of debt collectors and payday lenders? No more. An honest site to compare credit card products? Likely gone. In 2023, the CFPB said that big banks can’t charge junk fees for basic customer service, like being able to check the amount of money in your account. The reason isn’t just that it’s nice, but that big banks themselves were unable to offer basic information, like who owned mortgages, prior to 2008. That’s gone too. Another rule put forward recently is that mortgage servicers can’t garner excessive fees when they foreclose, which is an incentive to foreclose rather than working out loans. No longer."Shutting down the CFPB opens the door for financial technology companies, such as Elon Musk's proposed fintech app, to compete directly with banks and other traditional institutions on a playing field tilted toward the tech giants, and without any protections for consumers.
"Elon Musk’s stated goal with X is to create an 'everything app,' which you would use to communicate, engage with social media, pay for things, hail cabs, shop, and so forth," Stoller continues. "All the big tech monopolists want to be the 'everything' app. The CFPB was proposing to treat these companies with payment systems as, well, payment systems, and subject them to the same supervisory treatment that banks have. Now that’s out the window, so big tech firms have a competitive advantage over banks. More than that, new 'fintech', which is to say companies that act like banks but do so on your phone, won’t be regulated or FDIC insured, so a whole generation of Americans will be introduced to the nice bank runs of the 1920s, losing their savings because they clicked on the wrong box."
Can you say disqualifying conflict of interest? Elon Musk seeks to use the power of his vast fortune to take over control of the US financial system and to deregulate that system so that his own companies can make vast fortunes, vaulting him into position to be the world's first trillionaire. I wonder if Trump voters realized they were voting to have their faces ripped off by Elon Musk?
"Donald Trump may be the president of the United States, but Musk has made himself its CEO," reports WIREDmagazine.
"This is bad on its face. Musk was not elected to any office, has billions of dollars of government contracts, and has radicalized others and himself by elevating conspiratorial X accounts with handles like @redpillsigma420. His allies control the US government’s human resources and information technology departments, and he has deployed a strike force of eager former interns to poke and prod at the data and code bases that are effectively the gears of democracy. None of this should be happening," WIRED continues.
"Elon Musk’s initiative, called the Department of Government Efficiency, has installed itself in the Office of Personnel Management with a view to purging the bureaucracy of anyone who opposes the president’s plans for transformation," The New York Times reports. "Finally, in direct violation of the law, Mr. Trump has fired inspectors general without notice across a wide array of federal agencies."
AI-generated image advertising the Department of Government Efficiency,
posted by prospective department head Elon Musk in 2024
myCountrAI on X, via AI image generation, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In the many federal agencies embedded in Washington, D.C. there are two crucial sources of power: money and data.
Musk and Trump intend to control the flow of both money and data, without interference from either Congress or the courts, despite any Constitutional or legal barriers to their predation.
"Speaking of data: They want that, too," WIRED continues. "DOGE agents are installed at or have visited the Treasury Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Small Business Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor. Probably more. They’ve demanded data, sensitive data, payments data, and in many cases they’ve gotten it—the pursuit of data as an end unto itself but also data that could easily be used as a competitive edge, as a weapon, if you care to wield it."
Much of the Trump/Musk assault on USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Treasury Department, and other government agencies is quite likely illegal and unconstitutional, and we shall soon see if Democrats in Congress, whistleblowers, journalists and activists will rise to the occasion and hold Musk and Trump accountable for their predations.
US Capitol, West Side,
In addition, to combat inflation, Musk wants to cut tens of thousands of government jobs, downsize or eliminate major government agencies, and cut $1 trillion a year in federal spending, without the approval of Congress or the courts.
"A more fundamental challenge to the constitutional order comes from Mr. Trump’s assertion of a broad right to impound, or refuse to spend, funds appropriated by Congress," The New York Times explains. "The president’s ability to do this is limited by a 1974 law, the Impoundment Control Act, but some conservative legal scholars associated with the administration have long viewed this law as unconstitutional."
Radical right wing oligarchs are right now attempting to engineer a fundamental restructuring of the US Constitution.
Regular readers of this newsletter will recall that for the last few years, as America went through its Pluto Return, I predicted a major Constitutional Crisis and the extremely contentious creation of a new social contract in America. Now that we are just out of that Pluto Return, the full effects of that passage are bearing fruit.
Every law, every human right enshrined in the US Constitution, every dollar spent in Washington is now subject to political contention and unending litigation until a new social and legal structure emerges from the current chaos. Needless to say that will be years from now after untold collateral damage is inflicted during this embryonic Civil War 2.0.
2024 U.S. Presidential Election by Congressional District
"Most sweeping of all, President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship effectively asserts the right to reinterpret the Constitution itself," The New York Times explains. "Birthright citizenship has been the rule in America since long before the passage of the Constitution, derived as it was from precedent in English common law. But it was enshrined in the constitutional text via the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause and has been affirmed repeatedly in subsequent case law."
This Full Moon week it is clear that we are seeing the beginning of the Pluto Return constitutional crisis we've long predicted, and in addition we are seeing the fruits of the incendiary outer planet aspects displayed in the Trump administration's astrological chart at the time of the January 2025 inauguration.
You can see in the chart above that Pluto in Aquarius, the energy signature of Techno-feudalism and the emerging oligarchy of authoritarian Tech Bros including Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and the rest conjoins the energy of the new President at the top of the chart.
The manipulative energy of the dark side of technology provides President Trump with a new constellation of 21st century military/surveillance/fintech tools which will be used to oppress the American people and attack rivals throughout the world.
With Uranus entering Gemini on July 7th, 2025, with the Pluto in Aquarius energies of the Muskite Techno-Oligarchy supporting Trump's revolutionary right wing agenda, and with America still processing its lengthy Pluto Return, America's Civil War 2.0 will reach new levels of acrimony.
So brace yourself because the turbulence, angst, anger and turmoil you have been feeling this Full Moon week is just a taste of what is visible on the horizon.
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The Trump/Musk revolution is bent on creating a new, authoritarian, oligarchic America, with an economy, a political system, and a culture that is more like a Third World country than the country I grew up in.
We already have extreme disparities of wealth and power, a consumer culture of conspicuous triviality, a politics of celebrity worship and a cultural bias toward cut-throat competition that encourages greed and aggression.
Gold Colored Toilet, stu_spivack, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
We are destroying our middle classes.
We are punishing the poor.
We have a health care crisis that affects everyone but the extremely rich.
We have an environmental crisis that threatens our coastal cities, our home insurance policies, and our entire way of life.
We have an energy crisis that requires trillions of dollars to be invested in new green technologies, but we are focused on maintaining control of the supply of world oil by military means.
Worst of all, our leaders are behaving like Third World despots, engaging in multiple wars of aggression to strengthen their own power, endorsing torture, bombing civilians indiscriminately, and alienating billions of people around the world as a result.
And that's just for starters.
Terminator, Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle, Photo by Thierry K on Unsplash
Because to Trump and the Neo-Feudal Tech Oligarchs and the other billionaires in Trump's cabinet, the vast majority of people in America and around the world are simply less than human, unnecessary impediments to the creation of a new AI powered model of governance and a new AI driven economy that will deliver AI created technologies to insulate the .0001% that control these technologies from global climate catastrophes as they profit from endless global resource wars directed by AI and conducted by robotic soldiers.
Of course, that's just an extrapolation of current trends into a potential dystopian future that lies years away. Or is it?
Have you ever heard of Google's Operation Maven?
"Google has essentially always been involved with the U.S. military" reports Drago Brosnic, in The Monthly Review. "The evidence for this is overwhelming and involves much more than just conferences and reports. Namely, back in December 2023, the U.S. announced that it wanted to deploy “Skynet-style weapons” against its geopolitical adversaries and wanted its so-called Big Tech to work on such projects."
"By April last year, even the mainstream propaganda machine revealed that the Pentagon was using advanced AI to kill Russian troops," Bosnic continues. "Precisely in those terms. The New York Times reported that the U.S. military was using Project Maven to revolutionize modern warfare. The program was started by none other than Google in 2018, or seven years before its 'updated ethical code' that switched from 'don’t be evil' to 'do the right thing'."
SKYNET Terminator Logo,
TriStar Pictures, Paramount Pictures, and/or the graphic artists,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
"Project Maven was purely a military program from the get-go, as it allowed the Pentagon to use ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] data more efficiently by coordinating all battlefield assets, resulting in better target acquisition," Bosnic explains. "This allegedly caused an uproar among the company’s 'pacifists' who supposedly 'urged Google to have nothing to do with it'. In reality, the program’s development continued, only officially moving to 'other contractors', as the U.S. military would never give up on finding 'shiny' new ways of killing."
"Project Maven has grown exponentially since 2018 and was actively being tested in NATO-occupied Ukraine, where the Pentagon is sharing battlefield data directly with the Neo-Nazi junta forces," Bosnic concludes.
Leaving aside futuristic AI battlebots for now, there are some very predictable near and medium term financial consequences that would flow directly from the Trump/Musk assault on government that could affect 99% of us.
“If we try for $2 trillion [in spending cuts], we’ve got a good shot at getting one,” Musk said in an interview streamed Wednesday evening on X, which he owns. “And if we can drop the budget deficit from $2 trillion to $1 trillion and kind of free up the economy to have additional growth — such that the output of goods and services keeps pace with the increase in the money supply — then there will be no inflation. So that, I think, would be an epic outcome,” as reportedby CNN.
Bitcoin Crashing, Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash
In 2024, deficit spending of approximately $1.8 trillion was more or less 6.1% of total US GDP of around $29.7 trillion.
According to calculations supplied by The Kobeissi Letter, a well known commentator on global financial markets, experts can use a 1.5X multiplier to determine the effects of cuts in government spending on GDP.
Reducing government spending by $1 trillion would reduce GDP by approximately $1.5 trillion, or by approximately 5%.
The Great Recession of 2008 saw a 4% drop in GDP, for comparison, so this magnitude of reductions in deficit spending by the US government would result in a catastrophic financial crash and a staggering blow to the American economy and to Americans in the bottom 99% of earners and wealth holders.
To get an idea of the immediate impact of a $1 trillion cut in government spending, analogous to the Great Recession of 2008, here is the unemployment report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showing a 10% unemployment rate in 2009.
Can you say stock market crash, multi-trillion dollar bailout, housing market crash and unimaginable pain for working Americans? Yeh, you can.
So if Musk wants to put a halt to inflation, this is one way to do that. The strategy reminds me of what American top brass purportedly said during the Vietnam war: "We had to destroy the village and kill the inhabitants in order to save it."
And keep in mind that the $1 trillion per year cuts in deficit spending would be a permanent drag on the economy and markets, not a one time event, like the housing crash. Without yearly multi-trillion dollar bailouts of banks and Wall Street firms, businesses and consumers, the consequences would be incalculable, but probably much worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s..
These dire financial consequences of the war on government, by the way, would be very much in keeping with hard aspects to Uranus in Taurus, such as what we see in this month's Full Moon chart and in Trump's Inauguration Chart which indicates trends that continue for the next four years.
In the 2025 Trump Inauguration Chart we looked at earlier in this newsletter, Uranus in Taurus is in a square to an enfeebled and irritable Mars in Cancer, a pernicious aspect that bodes ill for both financial markets and the state of the American economy in general during the next few years.
What will Trump's army of fans say when they realize they voted to create another Great Recession every year for the foreseeable future??
Women's March on Washington, 2017, Photo by roya ann miller on Unsplash
Despite the gloomy picture this Full Moon week, all is not lost.
The status quo is no more.
The masks are off. The gloves are off.
The oligarchy is working its black magic in plain sight.
The stakes are high, but this Full Moon in Leo week we can all call upon our inner lion and find the courage to confront those who would enslave us and destroy our habitable ecosystems in the process.
We have the ability to rewrite the rules of the game and to envision entirely new ways of relating to one another and to the world around us.
This then, is a time when courage, compassion and above all, discernment, are called for in abundance.
So let’s get to work!
How about demanding public financing for all elections? That would be a great start to removing the pernicious influence of big money from our politics, and returning power to the people!
American Protest, Getty Images, Licensed under the Unsplash+ License
Call your representatives in Congress and demand that they introduce legislation to mandate public financing of elections and an end to the legal corruption that enables billionaires like Elon Musk to conduct what amounts to a hostile takeover of our democracy!
Call your representatives in Congress and demand that they refuse to co-operate with the Republican leadership that is engaged in a wholesale, unconstitutional and illegal transfer of power from Congress and the Courts to the Imperial Presidency and to unelected grifters like Elon Musk!
Democrats say they have no power and can do nothing about this disgrace.
Remember when they held majorities in the House and Senate and told us they could do nothing because they did not have 60 members of the Senate to stop Republican members from endless filibusters that would stop proposed bills from reaching the floor of the Senate for a vote?
Working Families of New York Demand Filibuster
Alec Perkins from Hoboken, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Guess what? Republicans don't have 60 votes! Demand that your Democratic representatives refuse to co-operate in any way with Republicans until the unconstitutional and illegal behavior ceases completely.
Call House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at 202-225-5936 or send him an email on his contact page!
Call Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer at (518) 431-4070, or send him an email on his contact page!
In addition, demand that they engage in filibusters to STOP all proposed legislation including funding bills until the hostile takeover of our democracy ends.
FULL STOP!
That's something we can all do to prevent the sleazy sale of our democracy to the billionaire broligarchs intent on reducing all to slaves on their Techno-Feudal plantations in the cloud!
Remember, homo economicus is a pernicious myth! We are not isolated camels in a desert engaged in a war of all against all.
Together we are strong, together we are unbeatable!
Jane and I affirm that we all have constant access to the inner strength, courage and fortitude we require to engage with the forces of darkness and to vanquish them with the help of the grace and guidance we receive from our Guides and Teachers in abundance.
Meditation Moment: Aubade, by Ranjit Hoskote
Rumours of wind, banners of cloud.
The low earth shakes but the storm
has not arrived. You pack
for the journey, look up, look through
the doors at trees shedding their leaves
too soon, a track on which silk shoes
would be wasted, a moon
still dangling above a boat.
Wearing your salt mask, you face
the mulberry shadows.
The valley into which
you're rappelling
is you.
