Grand Cardinal Cross Activates Global Crisis Points
Welcome to Satya Center’s Autumn Equinox, Virgo Solar Festival, Pisces Full Moon 2013 Cosmic Weather Forecast, brought to you by your Editors, Curtis Lang with Jane Sherry.
The Full Moon occurs Thursday, September 19, at 7:13 AM Eastern Daylight Time, or 4:13 AM West Coast time at 26° 41’ of Pisces, opposed by the Sun at 26° 41’ of Virgo, just after Venus, the North Node, and Saturn align in the sign of Scorpio.
The Grand Cardinal Cross Dominates Stellar Energy Signature, Reflects World Events
The Grand Cardinal Cross once again dominates the Cosmic Weather Forecast as a new season approaches. September 22 is the Autumnal Equinox, which takes place this year at 1:44 PM PDT, or 4:44 PM EDT. The Equinox, celebrated around the world as a time symbolic of equal day and equal night, is one of the four cross-quarter days of the year.
On September 29, Christian mystics celebrate the Feast of Michaelmas. It's fall! Archangel Michael comes armed with subtle fire and a sword of iron, to redirect Universal Life Force Energy on planet Earth upward, toward higher chakras and higher realms, lending support to all spiritual practices, and offering the promise of accelerated spiritual growth in the season to come.
Join us in performing the powerful Archangel Michael meditation we practice every year! This powerful meditation provides spiritual protection from unwanted and detrimental energies around you, and helps to release energy imbalances you may have incurred when dealing with people close to you in life, by removing the energetic hooks and cords that bind us to negative relationships.
In mid-late September and early October, in the wake of the autumnal equinox and the Harvest Moon, the Sun presents itself against the starry backdrop of the constellation Libra, often represented by a woman wielding the sword of free will and discrimination, and holding the Divine Scales of Balance.
Initiates around the world celebrate the feasts of Michaelmas, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Navratri, sacred to the Christian, Jewish and Hindu religions. For more information read our article entitled Libra Festivals: Michaelmas, Rosh Hoshanah, Ramadan and Navratri.
Many seasonal festivals fall during the month when the Sun is in Libra, and these festivals work to create and restore an individual and collective sense of balance during a difficult transitional period of the year, when days shorten, and in the northern hemisphere temperature falls, crops wither, and the extroverted summer energy of plants in the fields begins to turn inward in anticipation of the yearly death of winter.
Mother Earth comes to the end of the cycle of spring and summer exhalation that extends the breath of life across the surface of our blue-green planet, and she begins the long inhalation characteristic of fall and winter. The planet’s surface becomes barren, but the interior of the Earth, more receptive now to the light streaming from cosmic sources, is quickening with new life.
At this time of year, the spiritual component in human nature surfaces after a long summer slumber when activities in the physical world captured the energy and attention of the entire community.
This week Jane and I are taking frequent breaks during our work day to monitor the ongoing Mt. Diablo fire, which broke out Sunday, covered the skies here in the East San Francisco Bay with brown smoke, and has now incinerated more than 3500 acres.
As we watch our favorite nearby parklands and ranchlands go up in smoke, we are also monitoring an inter-related set of global crises in the news.
First, the war in Syria. Will America attack?
Second, the Fukushima crisis. Will the Japanese be able to stabilize the site of the world’s most dangerous nuclear accident at a time of spiking radiation leakage?
Third, the upcoming budget battles in Congress that could shut down the government, or lead to further unnecessary cuts in vital government services. Will America lose the confidence of global investors?
I must apologize to those of you who would prefer to separate spiritual commentary in the Cosmic Weather Forecast from global news events.
I can’t help myself from fitting global news events into our Forecasts. Full disclosure. I am a former Editor and investigative journalist at several national magazines and websites, including The Village Voice, The Nation, Mother Jones, WORTH Magazine and Ameritrade. I covered finance, investing, politics, and national security issues. I covered the 1992 presidential elections, investigated S&L and bank frauds for over a decade, and was a national security analyst as well as an analyst of Federal Reserve policies for The Financial Markets Center.
I hope to combine insights from astrology, the study of financial market cycles, and geo-strategic analysis to provide you with a Big Picture of major trends and inflection points during this decade of unprecedented global change. I hope you find it helpful!
The Grand Cardinal Cross Activates Global Crisis Points
The civilization-altering Grand Cardinal Cross in the sky that re-formed last month created an increasing sense of tension in the collective consciousness that is set to continue this month, intensifying a sense of frustration, urgency, and barely repressed aggression around the world.
Jupiter in Cancer, Uranus in Aries and Pluto in Capricorn form an aggressive T-square formation in Cardinal signs, and from time to time during the coming month, Venus, Moon, Mercury and the Sun will all enter into the sign of Libra, filling out the Grand Cardinal Cross repeatedly, and insuring a month that will see leading players on the global stage acting out a bewildering set of conflicting narratives, agendas and strategies that threaten to trigger various types of crises in the Middle East, in financial markets, and in political power centers in Washington and other major world capitals.
These epochal outer planet formations contribute to an atmosphere of fear, anger, and soaring ambition to resolve pressing problems through rash and often irrational application of extreme measures.
This is hardly surprising.
Astrologers who study the movements of the outer planets are fairly unified in associating the Grand Cardinal Cross formation with a civilization-wide transformation of social, economic, and political systems. We have published many articles on the Grand Cardinal Cross.
We are in the evening time of the age of mass industrialization and consumption. We now approach the culmination of a long spiritual cycle that has been focused on the development of the individual sense of self, and so it is no surprise that we live in an age of self-consciousness, self-centered behavior and rampant individualism.
Here at the end of the Age of Cheap Hydrocarbon Energy we are confronted with an interlocking array of systemic failures within our highly complex global civilization: environmental crises; peak cheap oil; military tensions among countries competing for scarce resources in a time of unprecedented population growth; seemingly unending economic crisis; and political malaise.
Existing social movements, which tend to be focused on one aspect of the set of interlocking crises, are unable to create the kinds of broad coalitions that are required to successfully address any one of these crises, much less all of them at once. It will take humanity another decade to develop a comprehensive overview of the total situation and develop new alternatives to today’s unsustainable lifestyles, politics, economic system, and energy technologies.
By April 2014, the Grand Cross will be formed by Pluto, Uranus, Jupiter and Mars, afflicting the US Sun-Saturn square. This Grand Cross influences the American natal chart during a long period, from 2008-2019.
The last time Pluto moved through this area of the heavens was in the period leading up to the American Revolution.
“By December 2015, Saturn in Sagittarius will be moving opposite the US Uranus in Gemini, and square transiting Neptune, as the Grand Cross pattern formed by transiting Uranus and Pluto continues to hold the US Sun-Saturn square in its grip,” says renowned author and astrologer Robert Gover, who predicted the 2008 financial meltdown in his book Time and Money: Astrology and the Planets.
“This indicates a prolonging of economic troubles and the distinct possibility of a second revolution and/or civil war,” says Gover. “Since the influence of the US ‘corporatized’ government now spans the Earth – and because news travels so much faster now – a second revolution would most likely be worldwide as well as national.”
“Big combines of corporations and their network of associated wealthy investors and lobbyists now control the US Congress and many other branches of our government, and the governments of other nations around the world,” Gover continues. “The neo-feudal world they are building is anti-democratic. No semblance of democracy is possible in a world under their control. The purest form of capitalism is slavery. Since mankind is simultaneously moving with considerable momentum toward more and better democracy, the clash will be between these forces. The neo-feudalists may win every battle – they control the guys with the guns – but their world is unsustainable, economically as well as ecologically.”
This is the ongoing drama of the Grand Cardinal Cross.
We are in the transition time between two ages: the Piscean and the Aquarian, the age of faith and the age of spiritual science, the age of the heroic individual and the age of the communitarian individual.
We are in transition from the Industrial Age of Cheap Hydro-Carbons to the Solar Age of Global Warming and Renewable, Sustainable Energy.
The transition will reshape the entire surface of planet Earth, create entirely different yearly seasonal cycles from pole to pole, trigger mass migrations resulting in hundreds of millions of environmental refugees, and require entirely new ways of living if humanity is to survive and thrive in the New Age we are approaching.
Humanity is being tested on an individual and on a collective basis.
On an individual basis we are being asked to participate in an epochal shift of consciousness, from belief in a fixed individual self, which stands opposed to society and the natural environment, and which seeks its own best interests without too much concern for society or the environment, to belief in a fluid, permeable self, which changes according to social context and the rhythms of the natural environment, and which sees its own best interests as co-incidental with the best interests of society and the natural environment.
On a collective basis we are being asked to extend our limited sense of compassion and identity, which historically includes our family, our neighbors, our community, our nation, our economic class, our religion, our sex and our race, to include all of humanity. This is because we are learning that our lifestyles, our politics, and our economic life all have a dramatic impact on peoples in other countries, other climates, other races and religions around the world. We have obligations to the human family that extend beyond the limited circle of people with whom we feel we have common substantial beliefs, blood relations, economic interests and political ideologies.
We are asked to choose between the war of all against all and the unification of the human family on our home planet, Earth.
At this twilight time between the ages, some nations, driven by ego and greed, will choose the path of the war of all against all, the path of resource wars among nations.
Some individuals, seeking to enrich themselves at the expense of others, will pursue personal power and seek to dominate their fellows, to the detriment of their own spiritual development, and to the detriment of their own less successful brothers and sisters around the world.
Others will choose the path of community, the path of voluntary simplicity, mutual nourishment and environmental stewardship.
Even now, in many parts of the world, old souls are gathering in this magical twilight time, preparing to share their wealth, preparing to nourish one another with the accumulated treasures of their talents, preparing to forge the social structures that will become models for post-industrial, post-cheap oil communities.
This path of sharing freely and connecting deeply with one another will open our awareness to the true nature of our interdependence with others and with our environment. This path of mutual service will thus nourish our bodies, minds and souls.
The Grand Cardinal Cross and the Transition from the American Republic to the American Empire
Are we now witnessing the 21st century transition of the American Republic to the American Empire? Is our Republic a government of, by and for the people? Or are we in danger of becoming a government of, by and for trans-national corporations and global financial barons?
Current events and the ongoing Cosmic Energy Signature of the Grand Cardinal Cross formation suggest that it could be so – unless we, the people, assert our rights as citizens and demand a return to democratic values.
The most visible drama corresponding to the Cardinal T-Square/Cross formation the last 30 days has been the emergence of Nobel Peace Prize Winning US President Barack Obama as a reluctant but determined War President, actively whipping the world towards a war in Syria that will certainly spill over into the neighboring countries of the Middle East and could drag Iran, Palestine, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, and even Russia into a widening conflict.
The Uranus-Pluto-Jupiter T-square is a Cosmic Stellar Formation that indicates the potential for war and other disasters, and this difficult Formation will re-occur January 25-Febuary 3, 2014, and again in April 2014.
This indicates that despite President Obama’s decision September 10 to postpone the use military force against Syria this fall and pursue a possible diplomatic solution in the United Nations, the current Syrian crisis is just the run-up to a much more intense and dangerous phase of the ongoing Middle East conflicts in Palestine, Iraq, and Syria that astrologers predict could reach a boiling point sometime in early spring of 2014.
Over the past 7 years since the original Uranus-Pluto Cardinal Square that corresponded with the global financial meltdown, the recurring outer planet squares, T-squares and Grand Cross formations have involved a series of financial, environmental and geo-political crises, including the Fukushima disaster in Japan, mass murders in the US, extreme weather events around the world, Egyptian upheaval, the Libyan war, and much much more.
We can expect that the autumn, winter and spring seasons to come will bring us a series of crises in these same areas, which will highlight humanity’s triple geo-political, economic, and environmental crises, sparked by the slow-motion collapse of the High Industrial Age of Cheap Hydro-Carbons.
The energy signature of the Grand Cardinal Cross indicates conflict between the Plutonian/Saturnian elements of society – the 1% plutocrats who control the lion’s share of wealth and power -- and the Uranian elements – the disenfranchised 99%, the majority of people who are rebelling against the harsh control of the plutocrats.
This conflict is playing out in all three crisis areas. The Grand Cardinal Cross energy signature impels us to act in a time of escalating crisis, but there are social conflicts between the 1% and the 99% that prevent new solutions from being implemented. The 1% profit too much from the status quo to allow needed change to take place, and so the 99% rebel, but the power of the 1% is so strong, their willingness to use force to protect their interests so ingrained into the status quo, that a tense stand-off results, and the intertwined global crises continue to magnify risks in the geo-strategic, environmental and financial-economic arenas of human civilization.
Tensions rise until crises erupt that demand immediate change, and then the conflict between the Uranian elements and the Plutocrats becomes an open revolt. We are nowhere near that time, which is probably a decade away, so in the meantime, increased stress, impatience, and feelings of futility among the 99% can be expected.
This is our new normal.
We can expect more major environmental problems like the BP oil spill and the Fukushima disaster, increasingly extreme weather events, periodic financial panics and geo-political crises that lead to military confrontations and various flavors and sizes of war around the world during the Grand Cardinal Cross years.
On the geo-political front, the NSA spying scandal and President Obama’s now-delayed push for war in Syria make it clear that the United States, which assumed the mantle of global policeman after World War II, is now finding it difficult to fulfill this historical role, which underpins America’s power as global hegemon, or leading country.
The American people do not support the current American profile -- a global techno-police state and a belligerent Empire at war around the world. In addition, the US government is facing new limits to its Imperial power in the Middle East and elsewhere.
On the financial front, the United States Congress faces a turbulent fall season in which two crucial votes will be required to prevent government cut-backs, shutdowns and default.
Congress must pass a new budget by September 30, while the debt limit, to allow the US to continue borrowing to fund government spending, will need to be raised by around mid-October.
The last time we had a debt ceiling and budget crisis, in 2011, global markets swooned, US credit ratings were downgraded, and the Republicans coerced Obama and the Democrats into the sequester, which has hobbled the economic recovery.
“The most important element of a better balanced economy is investment, both public and private,” explains Robin Harding in an article in The Financial Times of London. “That means finding a way to stop the macroeconomic insanity of sequestration cuts to investment in scientific research, education and infrastructure. Not only do they leach short-term demand for the economy, they also actively reduce the very things that America needs more of, in return for minimal reduction to the budget deficit.
“More than four years after the recession officially ended, 11.5 million Americans are unemployed, many of them for years,” explains economist Robert Reich. “Nearly 4 million have given up looking for work altogether. If they were actively looking, today’s unemployment rate would be 9.5 percent instead of 7.3 percent.”
“The share of the population working or seeking a job is the lowest in thirty-five years,” Reich continues. “The unemployment rate among high-school dropouts is 11 percent; for blacks, 12.6 percent. More than one in five American children face hunger, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”
“And the median wage keeps dropping, adjusted for inflation. Incomes for all but the top 1 percent are below where they were at the start of the economic recovery in 2009,” Reich concludes.
With economic recovery still limited to Wall Street stock exchanges and average Americans still hurting, Congressional Republicans plan to play a high-stakes game of chicken with their Democratic counterparts and President Obama, threatening to close down the government if their demands are not met.
Tea Party Republicans would like to use the budget and debt ceiling votes to force the Obama administration to kill its biggest piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, which will restructure America’s health care system.
Republican leaders know that this is likely a self-defeating strategy, and are planning to demand fresh austerity measures in return for a vote to allow the government to remain open.
Yet austerity has not helped Britain or Europe to recover from the 2008 financial meltdown. And America’s deficits are shrinking rapidly, indicating no need for further painful austerity measures.
“Deficit hawks in both parties don’t want you to know this but the federal deficit as a proportion of the total economy is shrinking fast: It’s on track to be only 4 percent by the end of September, when the fiscal year ends,” Robert Reich explains. “The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office predicts it will be only 3.4 percent in the fiscal year starting October 1.”
“To put this into perspective, consider that the average ratio of the deficit to the GDP over the past 30 years has been 3.3 percent. So the deficit is barely a problem at all,” Reich argues.
So at the Congressional level, it appears that America’s political parties are unable to govern without periodic self-made crises which threaten the credibility of America’s implicit guarantees to the world that our political and financial system will provide a politically stable investor-friendly environment.
This guarantee of American stability is what makes the American dollar the currency of choice for international trade and it is what makes the US Treasury note the safe haven for global investors concerned about political upheaval around the world.
The games our politicians are playing with the budget and debt ceiling votes are more typical of Third World countries with severe financial problems and shaky political systems than they are of a global leader whose actions underwrite the entire global financial system.
Every time another round of these bruising political battles occurs, American soft power diminishes, American political credibility withers away, and the confidence global investors have in American leadership declines.
It is only a matter of time before there are serious consequences, for America and for the global financial system.
This is all part of the Grand Cardinal Cross energy signature, which is creating conditions that will force America to re-assess its role as global leader, or hegemon, over the next decade.
The NSA Spying Scandal
The NSA spying scandal, brought to light courtesy of whistleblower Edward Snowden, provides immense detail on America’s transition from a democratic country into the world’s first global surveillance state, with a demonstrated power to secretly spy on telephones and Internet communications everywhere on Earth.
As this ominous transition is publicly revealed, America’s credibility as global hegemon and beacon of freedom and democracy erodes, and American soft power, the power that accrues to a cultural and financial leader of the world, diminishes.
As the world watches horrified, leaked documents reveal that President Barack Obama, a constitutional lawyer, has presided over the most dramatic expansion of secret spying that the world has ever seen, unexpectedly surpassing his bellicose predecessor, George W. Bush.
The NSA intercepts 250 million electronic communications sent by Americans on the Internet every year, according to a recent article in The Washington Post.
The global scope of the NSA dragnet boggles the mind.
“In an effort to undermine cryptographic systems worldwide, the National Security Agency has manipulated global encryption standards, utilized supercomputers to crack encrypted communications, and has persuaded — sometimes coerced — Internet service providers to give it access to protected data,” according to a recent interview conducted by Democracy Now! with computer security guru Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
"I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the U.S. has proved to be an unethical steward of the internet,” explains Schneier. “The U.K. is no better. The NSA’s actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others."
Far from being the staunch pillar of a Free Internet, America has become the most feared and effective spymaster prying into the world’s phones and computer networks. This is a strange role for the country that sees itself as the global guarantor of humanity’s political freedom, and which has fought wars around the world for the last one hundred years to make the world safe for democracy and free speech.
Americans now live in a supposedly democratic country which functions as a de facto surveillance state with global spycraft and 21st century technology that surpasses the wildest dreams of the Nazis and the Communist dictatorships. In this bizarre situation, who will protect the world from the protectors of democracy?
In the wake of the NSA spying scandal former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was quite blunt about the scope and import of this ominous transformation. “America has no functioning democracy,” Carter said Tuesday [July 16, 2013] at a meeting of the ‘Atlantic Bridge’ in Atlanta, as reported in Germany’s Der Spiegel. Carter also told the assembly that the moral authority of of the U.S. has declined sharply due to excessive restriction of civil rights.
The revelations of global NSA spying also threaten the stability of America’s financial system, the credibility of its top tech companies, and the rights of shareholders who invest in those companies.
“The company whose shares you own may be lying to you — while Uncle Sam looks the other way,” Patrick Robinson reports in Money News.
“Let’s step through this. I think you will see the problem,” Robinson begins.
“Fact 1: U.S. financial markets are the envy of the world because we have fair disclosure requirements, accounting standards and impartial courts. This is the foundation of shareholder value. The company may lose money, but they at least told you the truth.”
“Fact 2: We now know multiple public companies, including Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB) and other, gave their user information to NSA. Forget the privacy implications for a minute. Assume for the sake of argument that everything complies with U.S. law. Even if true, the businesses may still be at risk.”
“Fact 3: All these companies operate globally. They get revenue from China, Japan, Russia, Germany, France and everywhere else. Did those governments consent to have their citizens monitored by the NSA? I think we can safely say no.”
“Politicians in Europe are especially outraged,” notes Robinson. “Citizens are angry with the United States and losing faith in American brand names. Foreign companies are already using their non-American status as a competitive advantage. Some plan to redesign networks specifically to bypass U.S. companies.”
“By yielding to the NSA, U.S. companies likely broke laws elsewhere. They could face penalties and lose significant revenue. Right or wrong, their decisions could well have damaged the business,” Robinson points out.
“Securities lawyers call this ‘materially adverse information’ and companies are required to disclose it. But they are not. Only chief executives and a handful of technical people know when companies cooperate with the NSA. If the CEO can’t even tell his own board members he has placed the company at risk, you can bet it won’t be in the annual report,” Robinson contends.