Uranus square Pluto (2012 – 2018) here we come! This is a terrific overview of political, economic, and cultural pulverization ahead. If you find it too terrifying to read, here’s the summary:

“During the next few years we are likely to see a series of events that clearly define the end of the Industrial Revolution and the existing set of economic, military, political and religious relations that we know as global civilization. This necessarily entails the end of American global hegemony.”

Uranus (revolution, sudden, lightning like changes, earthquake, volcano) square (in friction with, set off against) Pluto (plutocratic, i.e.,, concentrated and centralized wealth and power).

Yet, remember the other side of the destruction required to pulverize the old global order. For Uranus also symbolizes sudden, courageous, individual leaps of brilliant innovation of all kinds, and Pluto also symbolizes the primal force of nature as life springs forth renewed from the long winter of our discontent.

The authors of this article don’t take into account the Mayan calendar predictions of an enormously long cosmic cycle ending; nor do they, apparently, sense the atmosphere we are just beginning to feel our way into as signified by an even more extraordinary planetary signature operating during this time, Neptune in Pisces (2011 – 2025): the spiritual realm of Oneness that we access by dissolving the artificial, and ultimately, illusory walls between us.

Suffering, ultimately, softens. Suffering is a leveling agent.

When a friend of Irma Brombeck’s, shocked to hear that she had just received a diagnosis of cancer, blurted out, “What? But why?! Why you?”, Brombeck is said to have replied, “Why not me.”

We realize that we are not separate, that walking in the other guy’s shoes is not only educational, it’s essential. And once we do, we are forever changed.

Thanks to Jean Hudon

Wesak Full Moon Cosmic Weather Forecast: The End of the Industrial Revolution

May 16, 2011

by Curtis Lang and Jane Sherry

Entering the Time of Total Transformation

Welcome to the Monday May 16, 2011 edition of the Satya Center newsletter and Cosmic Weather Forecast. This week we celebrate the Taurus Solar Festival and the Scorpio Full Moon. Warm greetings from your Editor, Curtis Lang and your co-editor, Jane Sherry.

Tuesday May 17, the Full Moon occurs at 26° 13′ Scorpio at 4:09 AM PDT, or 7:09 AM EDT. Lightworkers celebrate the Wesak Festival, the Birth of the Buddha, and the Shamballa Gathering in the Himalayas, a time of spiritual renewal when Lightworkers everywhere connect with their Guides and Teachers to receive instructions concerning their work to come during the next yearly cycle.

Mercury, Venus, and Mars are widely conjunct the Sun in Taurus, and this entire stellium of planets is trine Pluto in Capricorn and happily aspecting Neptune in Pisces, so for the first time in several months earth and water elements predominate over fire and there is a grounded, flowing, and harmonious energy at the time of the Full Moon. The Venus-Mars conjunction promises positive vibes between the sexes, and a touch of relationship magic floats on the late spring breeze.

This stream of graceful energy is auspicious for the Full Moon Festival of Wesak, celebrating the spiritual achievements of Gautama Buddha. The Wesak Shamballa Gathering of Ascended Guides and Teachers celebrates the Unity of the Wisdom Teachings of East and West, and features a yearly appearance by Buddha and Jesus Christ.

However Uranus in Aries is still opposing Saturn in Libra, and squaring Pluto in Capricorn. This Cardinal T-Square is just one more mutation of the multi-year outer planet Cardinal Sign Storm that began a few years ago with harsh aspects that ushered in the global financial crisis and collapse — a challenging planetary configuration which will continue to dominate Cosmic Weather Patterns for several years to come.

The last time these three planetary giants appeared in a T-Square in the cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn), was in 1761, at the birth of the Industrial Revolution, a time when America was seething with anger at King and Crown, and the American revolution was already visible on the horizon.

Saturn represents structure, Uranus represents the new, the revolutionary, and technological innovation, while Pluto represents total transformation on a molecular level. So when this trio of planetary strongmen gets into a three-for-all, it’s typical to see governments fall, business as usual utterly upended, and technological innovations so overwhelming that entire societies must be restructured completely.

Today, as this planetary storm pattern resurfaces, global civilization faces an environmental and energy crisis that requires nothing less than the total restructuring of our Industrial Revolution technologies, political systems, business models, economic theories, and cultural assumptions.

Revolutions are already sweeping the volatile Middle East, and America is ripe for radical change.

The United States appears to be in the early stages of Imperial decline, and appears to be suffering from symptoms of economic and military hubris.

We are officially in an ever-expanding War on Terror in the Middle East, with troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, drone wars in Pakistan and Libya, and covert military operations underway in Iran, including sabotage, assassination and support for dissident rebel forces. The war could easily widen to include Syria, Yemen and more.

This War on Terror is a War Without End, pursued by a bipartisan political consensus established by Presidents Bush and Obama. The never-ending War on Terror results in never-ending and always-rising expenses. Several trillion and counting, so far. Plus $1 trillion a year in “normal” military spending.

Then there’s the never-ending “Great Recession” afflicting America, Europe and Japan, the three key global consumer markets vital to a healthy global economy.

The “Great Recession” continues despite Bush and Obama’s $10 trillion dollar Wall Street bailout. We are in a “recovery” according to Washington and the mainstream news media, but this recovery continues to act like a recession.

Houses are losing value every month. Now home sales in the United States are down 80% from the peak in July 2005. For most middle class families, the family home is the number one financial asset. Unfortunately, U.S. home values have declined an astounding 6.3 trillion dollars since the housing crisis first began. According to a recent census report, 13% of all homes in the United States are currently sitting empty. Thehousing crisis just seems to keep on getting worse. 31 percent of the homeowners that responded to a recent Rasmussen Reports survey indicated that they are “underwater” on their mortgages. Unfortunately, it looks like millions more middle class Americans could soon be in danger of losing their homes. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, at least 8 million Americans are at least one month behind on their mortgage payments at this point.

Retail sales are anemic.

The only new jobs are McJobs. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average duration of unemployment in the United States is now an all-time record 39 weeks…. The number of “low income jobs” in the U.S. has risen steadily over the past 30 years and they now account for 41 percent of all jobs in the United States.

Medical insurance costs and the price of gasoline are rising as fast as the price of gold. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, health care costs accounted for just 9.5% of all personal consumption back in 1980. Today they account for approximately 16.3%. A New York Post analysis has found that the rate of inflation in New York City has been about 14 percent over the past year.

The wealthiest 1% of all Americans now own more than a third of all the wealth in the United States. Wall Street is booming and corporations are declaring record profits while reporting that America’s workers are more productive than ever.

Of course those workers are seeing no benefits from working harder and longer than ever before. Unions are under attack, women’s right to choose is under attack, immigrants are under attack, Medicare is under attack, the EPA is under attack, and, more and more, President Obama wants to compromise with the radical right wingers who are setting an increasingly irrational American political agenda.

This looks a little pathetic to much of the rest of the world, including many friends and allies, but more importantly, whether you are worried about deflation or hyper-inflation, whether you are in favor of fiscal austerity or a proponent of neo-Keynesian stimulus, no matter what your ideology or political preference, it’s hard to believe that the world should trust its financial future to the folks who blew up the global financial system, and who have clearly demonstrated they can’t or won’t fix it.

No wonder America’s role as global financial hegemon is being questioned around the world in the wake of the financial collapse and the ongoing Great Recession, and some analysts now say that America’s role as unchallenged sole super-power is becoming too expensive.

During the Vietnam war, during my youth, it was often said that “You can’t have guns and butter.” This meant that the government couldn’t afford both expensive social programs and expensive foreign wars simultaneously.

Well today, after 40 more years of massively expanding military budgets and an endless succession of cold, hot and luke-warm wars and covert operations designed to decapitate and replace political leaders who fell out of favor in Washington, we are seeing that America can’t afford to fight numerous foreign wars simultaneously without eliminating many social programs.

Especially after a multi-trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street and the biggest banks, a bailout which may have prevented a total global financial collapse, but which ultimately did little to promote a sustainable recovery.

And now there is no recovery at all except in the stock market where the bank bailout trillions have created a speculative bubble, and in commodities markets, where this same flood of hot money has created speculative bubbles in food, silver, gold and more.

That is why the entire middle class, unions, the elderly, the poor, environmental regulations, and more are about to be tossed overboard as “too expensive”.

The only other alternative is to tax the rich and to insure that corporations pay their fair share of taxes. “From the end of the second world war into the early 1960s, the highest income earners paid a tax rate over 90% for many years,”reports Richard Wolff in the UK Guardian. “Today, the top earners pay a rate of only 35%. . . Consider two further points: first, if the highest income earners today were required to pay the same rate that they paid for many years after 1945, the federal government would need far lower deficits to support the private economy through its current crisis; and second, those tax-the-rich years after 1945 experienced far lower unemployment and far faster economic growth than we have had for years.”

Exxon Mobil 2009 profits totaled $19 billion, yet the company paid no federal taxes and received a $156 million tax rebate from the IRS, according to a handy guide to corporate tax deadbeats compiled by Senator Bernie Saunders.

Goldman, Sachs, which received $800 billion from the Treasury Department as part of the Wall Street bailout, made a profit of $2.3 billion in 2008, and paid 1.1% in federal taxes.

Citigroup 2009 profits totaled more than $4 billion, but the company paid $0 in federal taxes, after receiving a $2.5 trillion bailout from the US Treasury.

The list goes on and on. It’s no surprise that Washington and Wall Street want to squeeze the middle class “until the pips squeak”. The money for endless wars and financial bailouts for the wealthy and well-connected must be financed by someone, and it won’t be the rich or the corporations.

It all adds up. Ten trillion here, six trillion there, a trillion a year for defense, maybe another few trillion for another bank bailout when the remaining tens of millions of foreclosures hit the streets, or when the government shuts down and the bond market has a heart attack, or when the commodities bubbles burst big-time, or when we decide to attack Iran and oil prices go to $200 a barrel and the global economy collapses.

Yes, the risks are there, because the Obama administration did virtually nothing to remove the players responsible for the financial meltdown, and did nothing to improve the regulation of Wall Street and our banking system, so that the same individuals who created the financial crisis were first rewarded by bailouts and then given a free pass for their mismanagement, fraud and abuse of the system. Obviously, they will do the same thing again, in spades. So there are many reasons to see Captain America’s cape as a bit of a fraying rag these days.

If all this sounds a lot to you like the beginning of the end of the experiment in free market democracy that was just in its embryonic stage here in America in 1761, you are probably right. According to the Cosmic Weather Forecast, America is due for a revolution once again.

So we’ve got looming and already existing resource wars, a continuously troubled global economy with no real locomotive to pull the world out of its slump, extreme environmental events around the world, the worst nuclear disaster in human history still unfolding and likely to continue for years, and people in Washington arguing about whether or not to shut down the government for partisan political advantage, and about whether or not to go to war with Iran or just continue our present policy of clandestine operations, including sabotage, assassination and cyber-warfare. To America’s leaders, the middle class is expendable, and the poor, the elderly, children, the infirm and other non-productive citizens are the new domestic American enemy.

No wonder that Chinese and Indian professionals I talk to here in the Bay Area invariably say that they are considering moving back home.

This is not a picture to inspire confidence in America among political or financial leaders anywhere in the world. In fact, one could easily predict that many less enlightened such leaders might make moves to dramatically increase authoritarian controls on their own societies around the world.

At this point in the Cardinal Cross Storm Years, which peak in 2012 and 2014, the elites that control the commanding heights of the global economy and the power centers of political capitals are struggling mightily to maintain the status quo. They are as likely to succeed in their efforts as King George was successful in his strenuous efforts to retain control of his colonies in the Americas.

But until the last we are sure to see a grand display of troops in a variety of extremely impressive uniforms armed with the very most advanced techno-weaponry attempting to do the impossible — hold back the rising tide of history during a 250 year flood of civilizational change.

So here’s your Long-Term Cosmic Weather Forecast in a nutshell: During the next few years we are likely to see a series of events that clearly define the end of the Industrial Revolution and the existing set of economic, military, political and religious relations that we know as global civilization. This necessarily entails the end of American global hegemony.