Pluto powers its way through the structures of Capricorn from 2008 through 2024. At first, like a wrecking ball. The old must be reduced to rubble, even as new life springs up from within.

During the final years of its long slow sojourn through this sign, Pluto will return for the very first time to the position it occupied at the U.S.A birth, 27° Capricorn. Pluto’s cycle is 248 years long. Since we are still moving through the very first cycle of Pluto as a nation, we are still unconscious of power and its use. Like unruly adolescents, the plutocrats act without recognizing long-term consequences. This unconscious use of Pluto does what it wants, and tries to get away with it.

Be assured that by the end of this Pluto in Capricorn destructuring of top-down institutional power over others, we shall have prepared the ground for Pluto’s next transit, through Aquarius, and the distribution of power equally to everyone.

The following article gives historical perspective to what we are beginning to undergo now. Thanks to Planet Waves.

Versailled

by Fe Bongolan

According to Wikipedia, the phrase “privatizing profits and socializing losses” refers to any instance of speculators benefiting (privately) from profits, but not taking losses, by pushing the losses onto society at large, particularly via the government. I give it an even shorter name. I call it getting Versailled, as in the French royal palace Versailles — the epitome of excess of the French aristocracy in the Courts of Louis XV and XVI during the 18th century. The excesses of the French monarchy caused enough economic pressure on the working classes to instigate what was finally the rise of the violent revolt that would usurp the French aristocracy.

That revolt followed a period of Pluto, the planet of compelling change, in Capricorn, the sign of institutions like government and banking. How apropos then that three years into this current ingress of Pluto into Capricorn, we get to witness the workings of the American and international oligarchy in cahoots with the US government to pocket our tax dollars?

How utterly aristocratic are our modern-day courtiers who preside over the board rooms as masters of the universe, also known as Wall Street executives. Their dealings are portrayed in Matt Taibbi’sRolling Stone article The Real Housewives of Wall Street, which brings to light the theft of taxpayer dollars, pouring like a “waterfall” into the hands of two of the wives of the very rich, through a TALF (Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility) handout to Wall Street approved during the sunset months of the Bush Administration. Here’s an excerpt:

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we’re broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year’s retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.

Most Americans know about that budget. What they don’t know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the “official” budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the “other” budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. “Our jaws are literally dropping as we’re reading this,” says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “Every one of these transactions is outrageous.”

Providing the very rich with financial windfalls from federal subsidies while the government gouges the poor and middle- and working-class taxpayers, through ever-widening diminishment of public services and programs, seems to me the very essence of Versailles. As Taibbi’s article suggests, the greed and manipulation of funds from federal subsidies to rich — also known as crony capitalism — has gone relatively unnoticed. In light of the Tea Bag Congress’s intentions for the federal budget, all the wrong people — children, poor, sick and elderly — are getting shafted with cuts to public education, Medicare and Social Security while the truly criminal get to run off with the check.

For the years 1762-1778 – the last time Pluto was in Capricorn – history records the build-up to the French Revolution caused by the oppression of the peasant and working classes and the first stirrings of the Age of Enlightenment. While Pluto is in Capricorn in this century, Congress and the White House continue to battle over what ‘fat’ to cut in programs like Head Start, public schools and health care. The land of opportunity seems to be opportunity for those few who know the loopholes.

The questions we have to ask our leaders remain on what we hold as values for this country: How can I continue to afford my mortgage? How can I get out from under my student loan? Will the banks foreclose on me? What will happen to the Social Security fund I already paid into while I was working? Will I have to still work when I’m too old? Will there be a good public school in my city for my children? Will my family have enough to eat? Hardly anybody from this Congress seems to be willing to listen to anybody but their corporate masters.

Pluto is in Capricorn and a there’s stellium of planets in Aries — including Uranus, the planet of revolution — acting like a fast moving meat slicer on a heavily fatted piece of pork. Slowly and assuredly, information that was hidden, particularly about government and finance, continues to be revealed like red meat under all that fat. Really, there’s only one question that still needs to be asked, repeatedly and loudly, which is truly appropriate to the age and time we live in. It’s the one Matt Taibbi asks in the leading paragraphs of his article:

“Why isn’t Wall Street in jail?”