Theo
Banned
The Cardinal Climax of 2010
Economic & Social Phase Change, A New World Era Dawns
©2009 By Theodore White, classical astrologer
Times are changing. Over the past two years, I’ve witnessed much of what I already knew over 10 years ago would be taking place as the decade of the 2000s drew to a close – an economic crisis the world over.
Astrologers who know about long-range global transits often are not believed when they warn about future trends; especially in the midst of booming economic prosperity, or,what economists call “Boom times.” Such as this most recent economic consume-and-spend era of the last 15 years.
Today, things have changed. Every day brings news of what many people feel is a coming depression. Rising unemployment in double-digits loses of homes and businesses to foreclosures have led to people very afraid of the future.
This is seen in the cases of increased murder-suicides, break-ups of families,relationships and marriages as whole communities weighed down under the onslaught of foreclosures are turning into ghost towns as retail shops, and malls shutdown amid deterioration of 20th century infrastructures worldwide. Global trade has slowed to a crawl, increasing the worries about what the future holds.
World transits indicate that the current world economic crisis began quietly in August 2006, when a series of New Moon cycles started on August 23, 2006, with a new moon at 0-Virgo, leading to the New Moon of September 22, 2006 at 29-Virgo. This cycle began the shocking fallout in the world financial sectors. People the world over are stressed out.
What comes now?
“The US is doing everything possible to avoid these awful realities, but probably the worst self-deception is the idea that everything would be okay if we could just re-start lending. That's just not going to happen, says James Howard Kunstler.
A former writer for Rolling Stone, the author of eight novels, and a regular contributor to the NY Times Magazine, Kunstler comments on a wide variety of issues from architecture, urban planning, to energy and economic issues. These days, he has taken aim on the unprecedented world economic crisis.
A firm believer in ‘peak oil,” Kunstler says the world economy is now in major transition and will continue to head downward until the globe gets itself un-addicted to the oil in the ground that is running out.
“The banking fiasco has introduced so much noise into the system that world leadership can't think straight,” Kunstler says. “What they're missing is real simple: peak oil means no more ability to service debt at all levels,personal, corporate, and government. End of story.”
“All the other exertions being performed in opposition to this basic fact-of-life amount to a spastic soft-shoe performed before a smokescreen concealing a world of hurt,” Kunstler says.
“If the ‘quantitative easing’ (money creation) and fiscal legerdemain (TARPs, TARFs, etc ect.) happen to jack up the "velocity" of the new funny-money, and the world resumes its previous level of oil use, the price of oil would rise again -- this time astronomically because the previous crash of oil prices crushed the development of new oil projects to offset depletion -- and the global economy will crash again,” he points out.
Moreover,“there is no more capacity to service the debt we've already piled on,“Kunstler says about the 2008 economic crisis.
“Americans borrowed too much,and the bankers who made obscene fortunes in fees and bonuses in fraudulent lending managed to leverage this un-payable debt into the greatest collective swindle the world has ever known. The swindle has sent poison into every cell of the macro socio-economic organism, and further swindles are unlikely to revive it.”
Since the peak of the downfall of the financial center in New York in September 2009, the world over the last six months has been in a state of utter shock as sinking GDPs,double-digit unemployment, bank closings, and business and trade contraction has rippled through the entire globe.
The losses as of April 2009 in the United States alone seems to confirm Kunstler’s comments:
Ø $213 million - Bonuses at American International Group(AIG)
$1.6 trillion - All AIG Toxic Assets
$8 trillion - Losses in Stock Market
$5 trillion - Losses in Real Estate
$35 trillion - Unfunded Medicare Debt
$20 trillion - Unfunded Social Security Debt
$24 trillion - Toxic Assets Held in European Banks
$500 trillion - Total Derivatives Market
Kunstler says that the next phase of this “poison” in the world’s financial system is sure to move beyond the financial, and into the social and political arenas.
“Disorders of various kinds will rule -- toppled governments, civil unrest, international tension and conflict,” he points out.
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wubKF257RQI
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lU4jri5ulc&feature=channel
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5n3JlAUS4M&feature=related
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzw3wBX_tG0
Indeed,since the end of the solar year of 2008, many nations have been on the verge of revolution, with anti-government and anti-banking protests taking place in countries throughout the European Union, with disturbances in Russia, Asia, and in a most calm state like Iceland, where the government was forced to resign en masse in January 2009 after Iceland’s currency lost more than half its value.
In the United States,protests are already taking place with anger building daily with news of corruption and multi-million dollar bonuses for CEOs at companies at the heart of the economic crisis.
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkRCPr2ZxiU
See -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yssgltIeSM0&feature=PlayList&p=2F6DF28138115E1D&index=0&playnext=1
“The socio-political fallout from the inherent anger and disappointment in all this is liable to be severe,” Kunstler says. “The public is already warming up for it, with cheerleaders such as Glen Beck on Fox TV calling for the formation of militias, and gun sales moving out-of-sight.
"One mistake that the banking elite and their lawyer paladins made the past decade was their show of conspicuous acquisition -- of houses especially -- in easy-to-get-to places where anyone can see them, for instance an angry mob in Fairfield County, Connecticut, or East Hampton, New York.”
“We have no previous experience with this type of social unrest. Kunstler says.”The violence of the Vietnam era will look very limited and reasonable in comparison -- in the sense that it was an uprising on the grounds of principle, not survival. And the Civil War was a wholly regimented affair between two rival factions.
“This time, people with little interest in principle beyond some dim idea of economic fairness, will be hoisting the flaming brands out of sheer grievance and malice,” Kunstler says.
Hear this story ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX_ydi5f6SI&feature=related
Kunstler adds that, “President Obama will have to starkly change his current game planif this outcome is to be avoided. I think he's capable of turning off the mob-- of preventing the grasshoppers from turning into ravening locusts -- but it may take an extraordinary exercise in authority to do it, such as the true (not pretend) nationalization of the big banks, engineering the exit of Ben Bernanke from the Federal Reserve, sucking up the ignominy of having to replace failed regulator Tim Geithner in the Treasury Department, and calling out the dogs on the swindlers who had the gall to play their country for a sucker.”
Sadly,looking at the world’s astrological transits just ahead in the early 2010s, I would have to agree. We are in the last year of the first decade of the 21stcentury.
From an astrological perspective, the true start of this new century begins in 2011, when a series of positions of the outer planets (Jupiter,Saturn, Uranus and Pluto) begin to form powerful configurations among themselves on, or very near the Earth’s seasonal points.
Called the Cardinal Climax, the outer planets will touch upon the early degrees of the cardinal signs of Aries, Libra and Capricorn, forming strong squares and oppositions that are sure to heighten world tension in the midst of the economic collapse.
Astrologers who are aware of these coming planetary configurations continue to be amazed at the power of these outer transits that peak in the years 2010 through 2014.
From this view, the year of 2010 is a key year as the world enters the second decade of the 21st century. As the world nears the year 2011, it is in a state of economic panic and decline. Clearly, the legacy era of the latter half of the 20th century is coming to an end, and a new era is on the horizon.
Kunstler states that the American standard of living as defined in the late 20thcentury “has got to come way down.”
What does he mean by “come way down?”
“What’s going on now is nature’s way of telling you that America’s standard of living has to be reduced by something between 20 and 50 percent. You can have it in the form of a compressive deflationary depression, including widespread bankruptcies… or you can have by way of inflation, in which money loses its value.
“But there’s one basic qualification to this: the way down is not symmetrical with the way up. That is, it’s really not just a matter of ratcheting down to a standard of living half of what it was, say, in 2006, because in the event all the various complex systems that support everyday life enter failure mode before our society re-sets at a theoretically lower level of equilibrium.”
Kunstler elaborates: “By this I mean our methods for getting food, for moving about the landscape, for deploying capital, for trading and manufacturing, for schooling,doctoring, and running public services all destabilize and, to some degree or other, fail to deliver their contribution to normal daily life.
"Banking (capital deployment) is already mortally wounded. It remains to be seen how this will affect the food supply half a year ahead in the harvest season."
He paints a picture where “capital is as big an ‘input’ for our method of farming” as diesel fuel or fertilizers when created from methane gas. “The failure of banking will combine with city and state insolvency to crush public transit,law enforcement, fire protection, and whatever flimsy local safety nets exist to keep the ultra-poor and helpless from die-off.”
“The lowering of living standards by 20 to 50 percent essentially eliminates all but the must critical commerce, meaning that most of the stores in the malls and strip malls lose their customers and shed employees,” he says, “while the mall and strip mall owners lose their rents, and the bankers lose performing commercial real estate loans. As all this occurs, tax revenues go way down;schools can’t pay their employees or buy diesel fuel for their yellow bus fleets.”
So, according to this scenario, many more people could lose their health insurance with hospital becoming overwhelmed and western-styled health care lowers to levels of the Third World. “
“Meanwhile, pensions are destroyed; the elderly live on dog food and ketchup. . .” Kunstler points out in something that sounds like a something out of a bad Ayn Rand novel.
“This is where we’re headed,” Kunstler surmises.” It could easily be worse than the1930s, when we still had plenty of family farms, plenty of oil, plenty of factories in good running order, and a highly regimented population of workers unaccustomed to luxury, leisure, and entitlement.”
As spring takes shape in the northern hemisphere, most of the world already is very much aware of the global economic downturn that has affected every area of life and industry worldwide. Trade has nearly stopped between nations; banks have not been lending, home values continue to fall worldwide, and construction of new houses and commercial buildings has completely halted.
“We’ve hardly begun to see the potential political repercussions of economic disorder now underway,” Kunstler states. “I think it will start to show in a big way not long after Memorial Day, when the current false euphoric Wall Street rally ends in yet another pool of tears, and the despair trickles downward.”
Hear what Gerald Celente forecasts for 2009 ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTIW...2B0265E4&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=25
“A crucial piece of the outcome depends on what happens over at Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department – which lately seems to have seceded from the federal government,” Kunstler says.
“A peeved public is going to start wondering why the bankers and insurers have not been called in by the criminal division to do a little ‘splainin'. As the spring yields to summer, the Obama team’s current fix-it plans are also likely to have run out of credibility. Mr.Obama better be prepared to get a new game.”
We mortgaged our future and the future has now begun,” he says. “Tough noogies for us. But the broad public won't accept the reality of this as long as the grandees of finance and their myrmidons appear to still enjoy the high life.”
“They've got to be brought down hard,” Kunstler believes. “Perhaps even disgraced and humiliated in the courts, and certainly parted from some of their fortunes --if only in lawyer's fees.
"Obama pretty much served notice to this effect (in early April 2009) telling a delegation of bankers in the White House that he was the only thing standing between them and ‘the pitchforks.’ It's possible he understands the situation.”
World Transits: The Cardinal Climax
The Astrological Year of 2009 will undoubtedly be the first full year of the beginning of the transition from the legacy world of the 20thcentury, into the new era of the 21st century.
By the year 2010, the outer planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto will form a series of squares and oppositions touching on the seasonal cardinal points of Aries, Libra, and Capricorn, forming what is known as the “the Cardinal Climax”– a major series of T-square aspects that will rotate the world in 2010, and early 2011.
Cardinal signs are “initiating” and often, when the superior planets are involved in such configurations, the world is influenced by a series of major problems that can be difficult to resolve immediately.
Saturn/Pluto world squares are mainly unfavorable, and can lead to rigid attitudes among people that can lead to power struggles as a result of economic, political and professional plots.
Pluto’s position in Capricorn indicate that the wealthy are involved, and Saturn’s coming transit in tropical Libra squares Pluto, indicating that the struggles against widespread corruption will heighten in 2010.
Jupiter will form its first square to Pluto in July 2010, and again in February 2011. These squares continue the power-play influences of the earlier Saturn/Pluto square, where forceful tactics are employed using cultural, philosophical or religious means to force others to reform, or to use dishonest means to obtain power and status.
Conflicts over finances and outdated modes of doing business are continued under this Jupiter/Pluto square where sustained struggles against corruption and established power bases heighten. The problems of pride, arrogance, and yet neglect over small, but important details are common under this Jupiter/Pluto configuration.
The problems inherent in the world’s financial and political systems have been witnessed throughout the globe since the first of several Saturn/Uranus oppositions began in November 2008. Saturn/Uranus oppositions are well-known among mundane astrologers for clearly showing conflicts between old and newer ways of doing things.
This is mainly expressed through polarizations between existing power structures and generations and younger generations and newer power structures emerging.
The clashes within professional classes often extend into the personal sphere of relationships under a Saturn/Uranus opposition with relationships that once were important and needed for the security of all are threatened by inconsistent behaviors; especially through frustrations that come from the need to change existing conditions.
Adding to the Saturn/Uranus opposition, is the coming Jupiter/Saturn opposition from 2010-2012. Occurring every 20 years, the last Jupiter/Saturn opposition happened in the years 1990-1992.
This particular opposition from 2010-2012 occurs along the Pisces/Virgo and Aries/Libra axis. Most Jupiter/Saturn oppositions signify major changing times, and also can indicate poor timing in business matter and problems within professional and personal affairs as well.
Bureaucratic red-tape is a common complaint during such Jupiter/Saturn oppositions, and the frustrations that build up as a result can be unleashed in public, sometimes in violent manner.
The conflicts that are influenced by Jupiter/Saturn oppositions can adversely affect personal matters, friendships and relationships that were once seen as positive. Ethics can suffer, and hypocrisy often arises under this planetary opposition where once stable professional and personal relationships can suffer.
One of the reasons why it is so important for the world economic crisis to be solved before the next decade matures is because of the coming Uranus/Pluto square from 2012 to 2018. The slowness of the outer planets makes such unfavorable aspects more powerful, as this particular global aspect will last for nearly seven years before all is said and done.
Uranus’ entry into tropical Aries, briefly in June, July, and August 2010, and then fully by mid-March 2011, indicates a new world era. Uranus is ending an 84-year cycle it began in 1928, and by March 2011, Uranus will start a new cycle that is important in mundane world affairs.
With Uranus entering the seasonal vernal equinox point of 0-Aries in March 2011, the world will surely be on the precipice of what can truly be called the start of the 21st century.
For15 months from its first full ingress into Aries in March 2011 to the month of June 2012, Uranus will mainly be un-aspected by major outer planets until it forms its first exact square to Pluto in Capricorn in late June 2012.
These 15-months from March 2011 to June 2012 provides a “grace period” where many positive accomplishments can be made to greatly reduce the volatile energies to come – particularly from June 2012 to Spring 2014, and again, from the years 2015-2018.
From June 2012 on, transiting Uranus and Pluto will square one another consistently, within orb of one another, until the year 2018. This has major ramifications for the world as Uranus/Pluto squares in the Signs of Aries and Capricorn influence powerful global rebellious tendencies that could lead to the near collapse of governments, and in some cases, outright revolutions taking place in several countries worldwide.
The cardinal square of Uranus in a cardinal Sign of Aries forces established structures (Capricorn) to often respond ruthlessly to problems that has long been allowed to fester without resolution.
This can lead to events on large-scale events such as revolutions that can overwhelm establishments that have not adjusted from the transition from the legacy era of the late 20th century to the new era of the 21stcentury.
Dangerous situations can arise during Uranus/Pluto squares where people may have to face potentially life-threatening situations not initiated by them, but forced on them nonetheless because of events affecting large numbers of people.
Sudden financial losses can also come under this transit if finances are not handled properly. Power struggles to and within corporations, as well as outright public rebellions are a constant threat under this Uranus/Pluto square due to the failure of established power structures to concede power, or who have become too conservative, rigid, and unyielding in their philosophy as to have outlived their usefulness.
The failure of individuals, groups, organizations, corporate and government leaders, to use the 15-months of Uranus’ first transit of tropical Aries will surely lead to great upsets that will shake the foundations of all existing structures, and, in the cases of many, destroy them for good.
One of the most serious problems concerning The Cardinal Climax world transits of 2010/2011 will be in the proper use of time. From my perspective, the wasting of valuable time by not resolving outstanding problems before these outer planets configure is a direct cause of the later, more serious events to take place worldwide in the 2010s.
The best way to counter the most powerful malefic transits of the 2010s is for many people, groups, organizations, governments and nations to freely admit that times are changing, and to make serious and lasting adjustments to the way business is done, and how society must work together positively, before the world transits configure into unfavorable positions.
One of the ways the planet’s energies affect the world is through the lack of use of positive free will, and the allowance of negativity to dominate until the malefic influences build to a crescendo.
For much of 2009, transiting Jupiter will conjoin Chiron, and Neptune in tropical Aquarius as transiting Saturn continues its oppositions to Uranus in Pisces throughout the year while Saturn moves into its first major square to Pluto in Capricorn by November 2009, and throughout much of 2010.
However, the months of July through November 2009 contain some of the best world transits to make progress for those people willing to adapt, which can be continued into the early months of 2010, just before the Cardinal Climax transits of summer 2010 come into play.
Trends show that local businesses through the work of entrepreneurs can see opportunity in these times, according to the trend research of Gerald Celeste of New York’s Trends Institute, who highlights the commercial crash of retail in 2009, his trends for 2009, and about his difficulty in taking out money from his hometown bank.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pa2Za_V6Bw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OFwZd0BDKM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfAiUBDO3MM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdTyMHGqWeE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX_ydi5f6SI&feature=related
Neptune’s transit in Aquarius since 1998-1999 has given the world a false sense of security, as Neptune, in mundane astrology, is known for its ability to “fog” over reality, making things appear better, or normal than they really are. Since 1998, the world has seen a series of recessions, bubbles, and bursts, and widespread corporate and financial corruption that has shocked even the most hardcore of non-believers.
With the position of Jupiter, and Chiron joining Neptune in tropical Aquarius, it is obvious that some of the denial about the reality and the true severity of the world economic crisis will continue in 2009 - until it becomes clearer in 2010that there is much more damage to the world’s financial structure than was previously thought.
James Kunstler comments at length on just this point:
“Lending on the scale that became normal over the last decade is for sure the one thing that we will not recover. We turn around in 2009 to find ourselves a much poorer nation than we thought we were a year ago, especially among that broad range of formerly middle-class wage-earners who lived so luxuriously until yesterday. The public can't process this reality and the president, for all his relaxed charm, is either not ready to articulate it, or can't process it himself.
“Everything that we're doing right now is engineered to avoid reality, to sustain the unsustainable, to recover the unrecoverable, when the mandate of reality compels us to face our losses in order to move on to the next chapter of a collective American life.
“The next chapter would be a society that runs on a much more local and modest scale,centered on essential activities like growing food, requiring harder physical work, and focused attention -- in other words, the opposite of a society lost in abstractions, long-range daisy chains of off-loaded responsibility, and incessant pleasure-seeking.”
“In retreat from this reality,” Kunstler points out, “We've set in motion two forces that are pretty certain to bring us to grief. The first proceeds from the fateful FMOC decision last week at the Federal Reserve Bank to begin buying massive amounts of our own treasury bonds and bills.
This is predicated on the idea that the mechanisms of wealth production -- even of illusory wealth, such as the fortunes created by trading securitized unpayable debt -- can keep chugging along, spinning off limitless additional suburban villas, chain stores, car trips, and deep-fried snacks.”
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIPMgQw3Ye8&feature=channel
“It would be sententious to explain how this destroys currencies," he says, "but wherever 'monetizing debt' has been tried before in history, that is the outcome. The result would be ruinous at every level and would lead straight to the second terrible force: social upheaval brought on by the conversion of economic problems into political turbulence.
“Those two forces are underway right now, in fact, since the overt monetizing of last week was preceded by the shoveling of bail-outs, which tacitly guaranteed a collapse of credibility in US debt instruments.
"I'm not in favor of violence and anarchy, but after the AIG bonus affair, it's hard to imagine that we are not one more corporate misdeed away from a rocket-propelled-grenade, or something like that, being fired into a glass office tower somewhere -- and then the "first-broken-window" rule of social disintegration comes into play."
"Meanwhile, I stick to my time-table of six-to-eighteen months before the reckless creation of new money-for-nothing filters through the system, overcomes even compressive mass bankruptcy, and starts expressing itself in the sinking value of dollars and the revved up velocity of their circulation in pursuit of tangible commodities.
"We're already seeing the first twinges of that in the up-creep of oil prices, busting through the $50-a-barrel barrier,” Kunstler notes. “Since scarcity tends to express itself in gross volatility, it's easy to imagine oil prices rising swiftly beyond the$147-per-barrel record level of last year. As that occurs, the most basic premises of everyday life in the USA will be called into question.
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j-vlW4aTpg&feature=channel
“If you think car sales have been bad lately, with oil in the $35-a-barrel range most of the winter, just wait. The newly-minted unemployed will be marooned in their subdivisions.
“They will not be buying GMC Yukons on 48-month installment contracts, let alone X-boxes on their Visa cards. They might be very, very hungry, though. All bets are off as to how these social classes may organize themselves to alleviate their hunger (and express their anger about it).”
Economic & Social Phase Change, A New World Era Dawns
©2009 By Theodore White, classical astrologer
Times are changing. Over the past two years, I’ve witnessed much of what I already knew over 10 years ago would be taking place as the decade of the 2000s drew to a close – an economic crisis the world over.
Astrologers who know about long-range global transits often are not believed when they warn about future trends; especially in the midst of booming economic prosperity, or,what economists call “Boom times.” Such as this most recent economic consume-and-spend era of the last 15 years.
Today, things have changed. Every day brings news of what many people feel is a coming depression. Rising unemployment in double-digits loses of homes and businesses to foreclosures have led to people very afraid of the future.
This is seen in the cases of increased murder-suicides, break-ups of families,relationships and marriages as whole communities weighed down under the onslaught of foreclosures are turning into ghost towns as retail shops, and malls shutdown amid deterioration of 20th century infrastructures worldwide. Global trade has slowed to a crawl, increasing the worries about what the future holds.
World transits indicate that the current world economic crisis began quietly in August 2006, when a series of New Moon cycles started on August 23, 2006, with a new moon at 0-Virgo, leading to the New Moon of September 22, 2006 at 29-Virgo. This cycle began the shocking fallout in the world financial sectors. People the world over are stressed out.
What comes now?
“The US is doing everything possible to avoid these awful realities, but probably the worst self-deception is the idea that everything would be okay if we could just re-start lending. That's just not going to happen, says James Howard Kunstler.
A former writer for Rolling Stone, the author of eight novels, and a regular contributor to the NY Times Magazine, Kunstler comments on a wide variety of issues from architecture, urban planning, to energy and economic issues. These days, he has taken aim on the unprecedented world economic crisis.
A firm believer in ‘peak oil,” Kunstler says the world economy is now in major transition and will continue to head downward until the globe gets itself un-addicted to the oil in the ground that is running out.
“The banking fiasco has introduced so much noise into the system that world leadership can't think straight,” Kunstler says. “What they're missing is real simple: peak oil means no more ability to service debt at all levels,personal, corporate, and government. End of story.”
“All the other exertions being performed in opposition to this basic fact-of-life amount to a spastic soft-shoe performed before a smokescreen concealing a world of hurt,” Kunstler says.
“If the ‘quantitative easing’ (money creation) and fiscal legerdemain (TARPs, TARFs, etc ect.) happen to jack up the "velocity" of the new funny-money, and the world resumes its previous level of oil use, the price of oil would rise again -- this time astronomically because the previous crash of oil prices crushed the development of new oil projects to offset depletion -- and the global economy will crash again,” he points out.
Moreover,“there is no more capacity to service the debt we've already piled on,“Kunstler says about the 2008 economic crisis.
“Americans borrowed too much,and the bankers who made obscene fortunes in fees and bonuses in fraudulent lending managed to leverage this un-payable debt into the greatest collective swindle the world has ever known. The swindle has sent poison into every cell of the macro socio-economic organism, and further swindles are unlikely to revive it.”
Since the peak of the downfall of the financial center in New York in September 2009, the world over the last six months has been in a state of utter shock as sinking GDPs,double-digit unemployment, bank closings, and business and trade contraction has rippled through the entire globe.
The losses as of April 2009 in the United States alone seems to confirm Kunstler’s comments:
Ø $213 million - Bonuses at American International Group(AIG)
$1.6 trillion - All AIG Toxic Assets
$8 trillion - Losses in Stock Market
$5 trillion - Losses in Real Estate
$35 trillion - Unfunded Medicare Debt
$20 trillion - Unfunded Social Security Debt
$24 trillion - Toxic Assets Held in European Banks
$500 trillion - Total Derivatives Market
Kunstler says that the next phase of this “poison” in the world’s financial system is sure to move beyond the financial, and into the social and political arenas.
“Disorders of various kinds will rule -- toppled governments, civil unrest, international tension and conflict,” he points out.
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wubKF257RQI
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lU4jri5ulc&feature=channel
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5n3JlAUS4M&feature=related
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzw3wBX_tG0
Indeed,since the end of the solar year of 2008, many nations have been on the verge of revolution, with anti-government and anti-banking protests taking place in countries throughout the European Union, with disturbances in Russia, Asia, and in a most calm state like Iceland, where the government was forced to resign en masse in January 2009 after Iceland’s currency lost more than half its value.
In the United States,protests are already taking place with anger building daily with news of corruption and multi-million dollar bonuses for CEOs at companies at the heart of the economic crisis.
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkRCPr2ZxiU
See -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yssgltIeSM0&feature=PlayList&p=2F6DF28138115E1D&index=0&playnext=1
“The socio-political fallout from the inherent anger and disappointment in all this is liable to be severe,” Kunstler says. “The public is already warming up for it, with cheerleaders such as Glen Beck on Fox TV calling for the formation of militias, and gun sales moving out-of-sight.
"One mistake that the banking elite and their lawyer paladins made the past decade was their show of conspicuous acquisition -- of houses especially -- in easy-to-get-to places where anyone can see them, for instance an angry mob in Fairfield County, Connecticut, or East Hampton, New York.”
“We have no previous experience with this type of social unrest. Kunstler says.”The violence of the Vietnam era will look very limited and reasonable in comparison -- in the sense that it was an uprising on the grounds of principle, not survival. And the Civil War was a wholly regimented affair between two rival factions.
“This time, people with little interest in principle beyond some dim idea of economic fairness, will be hoisting the flaming brands out of sheer grievance and malice,” Kunstler says.
Hear this story ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX_ydi5f6SI&feature=related
Kunstler adds that, “President Obama will have to starkly change his current game planif this outcome is to be avoided. I think he's capable of turning off the mob-- of preventing the grasshoppers from turning into ravening locusts -- but it may take an extraordinary exercise in authority to do it, such as the true (not pretend) nationalization of the big banks, engineering the exit of Ben Bernanke from the Federal Reserve, sucking up the ignominy of having to replace failed regulator Tim Geithner in the Treasury Department, and calling out the dogs on the swindlers who had the gall to play their country for a sucker.”
Sadly,looking at the world’s astrological transits just ahead in the early 2010s, I would have to agree. We are in the last year of the first decade of the 21stcentury.
From an astrological perspective, the true start of this new century begins in 2011, when a series of positions of the outer planets (Jupiter,Saturn, Uranus and Pluto) begin to form powerful configurations among themselves on, or very near the Earth’s seasonal points.
Called the Cardinal Climax, the outer planets will touch upon the early degrees of the cardinal signs of Aries, Libra and Capricorn, forming strong squares and oppositions that are sure to heighten world tension in the midst of the economic collapse.
Astrologers who are aware of these coming planetary configurations continue to be amazed at the power of these outer transits that peak in the years 2010 through 2014.
From this view, the year of 2010 is a key year as the world enters the second decade of the 21st century. As the world nears the year 2011, it is in a state of economic panic and decline. Clearly, the legacy era of the latter half of the 20th century is coming to an end, and a new era is on the horizon.
Kunstler states that the American standard of living as defined in the late 20thcentury “has got to come way down.”
What does he mean by “come way down?”
“What’s going on now is nature’s way of telling you that America’s standard of living has to be reduced by something between 20 and 50 percent. You can have it in the form of a compressive deflationary depression, including widespread bankruptcies… or you can have by way of inflation, in which money loses its value.
“But there’s one basic qualification to this: the way down is not symmetrical with the way up. That is, it’s really not just a matter of ratcheting down to a standard of living half of what it was, say, in 2006, because in the event all the various complex systems that support everyday life enter failure mode before our society re-sets at a theoretically lower level of equilibrium.”
Kunstler elaborates: “By this I mean our methods for getting food, for moving about the landscape, for deploying capital, for trading and manufacturing, for schooling,doctoring, and running public services all destabilize and, to some degree or other, fail to deliver their contribution to normal daily life.
"Banking (capital deployment) is already mortally wounded. It remains to be seen how this will affect the food supply half a year ahead in the harvest season."
He paints a picture where “capital is as big an ‘input’ for our method of farming” as diesel fuel or fertilizers when created from methane gas. “The failure of banking will combine with city and state insolvency to crush public transit,law enforcement, fire protection, and whatever flimsy local safety nets exist to keep the ultra-poor and helpless from die-off.”
“The lowering of living standards by 20 to 50 percent essentially eliminates all but the must critical commerce, meaning that most of the stores in the malls and strip malls lose their customers and shed employees,” he says, “while the mall and strip mall owners lose their rents, and the bankers lose performing commercial real estate loans. As all this occurs, tax revenues go way down;schools can’t pay their employees or buy diesel fuel for their yellow bus fleets.”
So, according to this scenario, many more people could lose their health insurance with hospital becoming overwhelmed and western-styled health care lowers to levels of the Third World. “
“Meanwhile, pensions are destroyed; the elderly live on dog food and ketchup. . .” Kunstler points out in something that sounds like a something out of a bad Ayn Rand novel.
“This is where we’re headed,” Kunstler surmises.” It could easily be worse than the1930s, when we still had plenty of family farms, plenty of oil, plenty of factories in good running order, and a highly regimented population of workers unaccustomed to luxury, leisure, and entitlement.”
As spring takes shape in the northern hemisphere, most of the world already is very much aware of the global economic downturn that has affected every area of life and industry worldwide. Trade has nearly stopped between nations; banks have not been lending, home values continue to fall worldwide, and construction of new houses and commercial buildings has completely halted.
“We’ve hardly begun to see the potential political repercussions of economic disorder now underway,” Kunstler states. “I think it will start to show in a big way not long after Memorial Day, when the current false euphoric Wall Street rally ends in yet another pool of tears, and the despair trickles downward.”
Hear what Gerald Celente forecasts for 2009 ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTIW...2B0265E4&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=25
“A crucial piece of the outcome depends on what happens over at Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department – which lately seems to have seceded from the federal government,” Kunstler says.
“A peeved public is going to start wondering why the bankers and insurers have not been called in by the criminal division to do a little ‘splainin'. As the spring yields to summer, the Obama team’s current fix-it plans are also likely to have run out of credibility. Mr.Obama better be prepared to get a new game.”
We mortgaged our future and the future has now begun,” he says. “Tough noogies for us. But the broad public won't accept the reality of this as long as the grandees of finance and their myrmidons appear to still enjoy the high life.”
“They've got to be brought down hard,” Kunstler believes. “Perhaps even disgraced and humiliated in the courts, and certainly parted from some of their fortunes --if only in lawyer's fees.
"Obama pretty much served notice to this effect (in early April 2009) telling a delegation of bankers in the White House that he was the only thing standing between them and ‘the pitchforks.’ It's possible he understands the situation.”
World Transits: The Cardinal Climax
The Astrological Year of 2009 will undoubtedly be the first full year of the beginning of the transition from the legacy world of the 20thcentury, into the new era of the 21st century.
By the year 2010, the outer planets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto will form a series of squares and oppositions touching on the seasonal cardinal points of Aries, Libra, and Capricorn, forming what is known as the “the Cardinal Climax”– a major series of T-square aspects that will rotate the world in 2010, and early 2011.
Cardinal signs are “initiating” and often, when the superior planets are involved in such configurations, the world is influenced by a series of major problems that can be difficult to resolve immediately.
Saturn/Pluto world squares are mainly unfavorable, and can lead to rigid attitudes among people that can lead to power struggles as a result of economic, political and professional plots.
Pluto’s position in Capricorn indicate that the wealthy are involved, and Saturn’s coming transit in tropical Libra squares Pluto, indicating that the struggles against widespread corruption will heighten in 2010.
Jupiter will form its first square to Pluto in July 2010, and again in February 2011. These squares continue the power-play influences of the earlier Saturn/Pluto square, where forceful tactics are employed using cultural, philosophical or religious means to force others to reform, or to use dishonest means to obtain power and status.
Conflicts over finances and outdated modes of doing business are continued under this Jupiter/Pluto square where sustained struggles against corruption and established power bases heighten. The problems of pride, arrogance, and yet neglect over small, but important details are common under this Jupiter/Pluto configuration.
The problems inherent in the world’s financial and political systems have been witnessed throughout the globe since the first of several Saturn/Uranus oppositions began in November 2008. Saturn/Uranus oppositions are well-known among mundane astrologers for clearly showing conflicts between old and newer ways of doing things.
This is mainly expressed through polarizations between existing power structures and generations and younger generations and newer power structures emerging.
The clashes within professional classes often extend into the personal sphere of relationships under a Saturn/Uranus opposition with relationships that once were important and needed for the security of all are threatened by inconsistent behaviors; especially through frustrations that come from the need to change existing conditions.
Adding to the Saturn/Uranus opposition, is the coming Jupiter/Saturn opposition from 2010-2012. Occurring every 20 years, the last Jupiter/Saturn opposition happened in the years 1990-1992.
This particular opposition from 2010-2012 occurs along the Pisces/Virgo and Aries/Libra axis. Most Jupiter/Saturn oppositions signify major changing times, and also can indicate poor timing in business matter and problems within professional and personal affairs as well.
Bureaucratic red-tape is a common complaint during such Jupiter/Saturn oppositions, and the frustrations that build up as a result can be unleashed in public, sometimes in violent manner.
The conflicts that are influenced by Jupiter/Saturn oppositions can adversely affect personal matters, friendships and relationships that were once seen as positive. Ethics can suffer, and hypocrisy often arises under this planetary opposition where once stable professional and personal relationships can suffer.
One of the reasons why it is so important for the world economic crisis to be solved before the next decade matures is because of the coming Uranus/Pluto square from 2012 to 2018. The slowness of the outer planets makes such unfavorable aspects more powerful, as this particular global aspect will last for nearly seven years before all is said and done.
Uranus’ entry into tropical Aries, briefly in June, July, and August 2010, and then fully by mid-March 2011, indicates a new world era. Uranus is ending an 84-year cycle it began in 1928, and by March 2011, Uranus will start a new cycle that is important in mundane world affairs.
With Uranus entering the seasonal vernal equinox point of 0-Aries in March 2011, the world will surely be on the precipice of what can truly be called the start of the 21st century.
For15 months from its first full ingress into Aries in March 2011 to the month of June 2012, Uranus will mainly be un-aspected by major outer planets until it forms its first exact square to Pluto in Capricorn in late June 2012.
These 15-months from March 2011 to June 2012 provides a “grace period” where many positive accomplishments can be made to greatly reduce the volatile energies to come – particularly from June 2012 to Spring 2014, and again, from the years 2015-2018.
From June 2012 on, transiting Uranus and Pluto will square one another consistently, within orb of one another, until the year 2018. This has major ramifications for the world as Uranus/Pluto squares in the Signs of Aries and Capricorn influence powerful global rebellious tendencies that could lead to the near collapse of governments, and in some cases, outright revolutions taking place in several countries worldwide.
The cardinal square of Uranus in a cardinal Sign of Aries forces established structures (Capricorn) to often respond ruthlessly to problems that has long been allowed to fester without resolution.
This can lead to events on large-scale events such as revolutions that can overwhelm establishments that have not adjusted from the transition from the legacy era of the late 20th century to the new era of the 21stcentury.
Dangerous situations can arise during Uranus/Pluto squares where people may have to face potentially life-threatening situations not initiated by them, but forced on them nonetheless because of events affecting large numbers of people.
Sudden financial losses can also come under this transit if finances are not handled properly. Power struggles to and within corporations, as well as outright public rebellions are a constant threat under this Uranus/Pluto square due to the failure of established power structures to concede power, or who have become too conservative, rigid, and unyielding in their philosophy as to have outlived their usefulness.
The failure of individuals, groups, organizations, corporate and government leaders, to use the 15-months of Uranus’ first transit of tropical Aries will surely lead to great upsets that will shake the foundations of all existing structures, and, in the cases of many, destroy them for good.
One of the most serious problems concerning The Cardinal Climax world transits of 2010/2011 will be in the proper use of time. From my perspective, the wasting of valuable time by not resolving outstanding problems before these outer planets configure is a direct cause of the later, more serious events to take place worldwide in the 2010s.
The best way to counter the most powerful malefic transits of the 2010s is for many people, groups, organizations, governments and nations to freely admit that times are changing, and to make serious and lasting adjustments to the way business is done, and how society must work together positively, before the world transits configure into unfavorable positions.
One of the ways the planet’s energies affect the world is through the lack of use of positive free will, and the allowance of negativity to dominate until the malefic influences build to a crescendo.
For much of 2009, transiting Jupiter will conjoin Chiron, and Neptune in tropical Aquarius as transiting Saturn continues its oppositions to Uranus in Pisces throughout the year while Saturn moves into its first major square to Pluto in Capricorn by November 2009, and throughout much of 2010.
However, the months of July through November 2009 contain some of the best world transits to make progress for those people willing to adapt, which can be continued into the early months of 2010, just before the Cardinal Climax transits of summer 2010 come into play.
Trends show that local businesses through the work of entrepreneurs can see opportunity in these times, according to the trend research of Gerald Celeste of New York’s Trends Institute, who highlights the commercial crash of retail in 2009, his trends for 2009, and about his difficulty in taking out money from his hometown bank.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pa2Za_V6Bw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OFwZd0BDKM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfAiUBDO3MM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdTyMHGqWeE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX_ydi5f6SI&feature=related
Neptune’s transit in Aquarius since 1998-1999 has given the world a false sense of security, as Neptune, in mundane astrology, is known for its ability to “fog” over reality, making things appear better, or normal than they really are. Since 1998, the world has seen a series of recessions, bubbles, and bursts, and widespread corporate and financial corruption that has shocked even the most hardcore of non-believers.
With the position of Jupiter, and Chiron joining Neptune in tropical Aquarius, it is obvious that some of the denial about the reality and the true severity of the world economic crisis will continue in 2009 - until it becomes clearer in 2010that there is much more damage to the world’s financial structure than was previously thought.
James Kunstler comments at length on just this point:
“Lending on the scale that became normal over the last decade is for sure the one thing that we will not recover. We turn around in 2009 to find ourselves a much poorer nation than we thought we were a year ago, especially among that broad range of formerly middle-class wage-earners who lived so luxuriously until yesterday. The public can't process this reality and the president, for all his relaxed charm, is either not ready to articulate it, or can't process it himself.
“Everything that we're doing right now is engineered to avoid reality, to sustain the unsustainable, to recover the unrecoverable, when the mandate of reality compels us to face our losses in order to move on to the next chapter of a collective American life.
“The next chapter would be a society that runs on a much more local and modest scale,centered on essential activities like growing food, requiring harder physical work, and focused attention -- in other words, the opposite of a society lost in abstractions, long-range daisy chains of off-loaded responsibility, and incessant pleasure-seeking.”
“In retreat from this reality,” Kunstler points out, “We've set in motion two forces that are pretty certain to bring us to grief. The first proceeds from the fateful FMOC decision last week at the Federal Reserve Bank to begin buying massive amounts of our own treasury bonds and bills.
This is predicated on the idea that the mechanisms of wealth production -- even of illusory wealth, such as the fortunes created by trading securitized unpayable debt -- can keep chugging along, spinning off limitless additional suburban villas, chain stores, car trips, and deep-fried snacks.”
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIPMgQw3Ye8&feature=channel
“It would be sententious to explain how this destroys currencies," he says, "but wherever 'monetizing debt' has been tried before in history, that is the outcome. The result would be ruinous at every level and would lead straight to the second terrible force: social upheaval brought on by the conversion of economic problems into political turbulence.
“Those two forces are underway right now, in fact, since the overt monetizing of last week was preceded by the shoveling of bail-outs, which tacitly guaranteed a collapse of credibility in US debt instruments.
"I'm not in favor of violence and anarchy, but after the AIG bonus affair, it's hard to imagine that we are not one more corporate misdeed away from a rocket-propelled-grenade, or something like that, being fired into a glass office tower somewhere -- and then the "first-broken-window" rule of social disintegration comes into play."
"Meanwhile, I stick to my time-table of six-to-eighteen months before the reckless creation of new money-for-nothing filters through the system, overcomes even compressive mass bankruptcy, and starts expressing itself in the sinking value of dollars and the revved up velocity of their circulation in pursuit of tangible commodities.
"We're already seeing the first twinges of that in the up-creep of oil prices, busting through the $50-a-barrel barrier,” Kunstler notes. “Since scarcity tends to express itself in gross volatility, it's easy to imagine oil prices rising swiftly beyond the$147-per-barrel record level of last year. As that occurs, the most basic premises of everyday life in the USA will be called into question.
See - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j-vlW4aTpg&feature=channel
“If you think car sales have been bad lately, with oil in the $35-a-barrel range most of the winter, just wait. The newly-minted unemployed will be marooned in their subdivisions.
“They will not be buying GMC Yukons on 48-month installment contracts, let alone X-boxes on their Visa cards. They might be very, very hungry, though. All bets are off as to how these social classes may organize themselves to alleviate their hunger (and express their anger about it).”
Last edited: