In the thick of last fall's Venus retrograde in Scorpio, we had a very important conjunction of the North Node, Ceres and Pluto in early Capricorn. This conjunction flew under the radar for many astrologers, but in fact, these two dwarf planets coming together with the North Node was pretty big news.
Ceres and Pluto have a long and hardcore history between them. Pluto kidnapped Ceres' daughter and dragged her off to the Underworld to be his forced bride. Ceres responded by making the Earth barren and cold. And things have been pretty rocky ever since.
Ceres, asteroid of cereals, grains and the fertility of the Earth, coming together with Lord of the Underworld Pluto on the successful forward path (North Node) in October 2010 dug up plenty of information about the way our food sources and the growing of food, in general, are being manipulated. This remains a potent theme for the entire 18-month Venus cycle.
At the root (Pluto), the advance of the corporate oligarchy is coming about to a large extent through the manipulation of our food (Ceres). This relates to the implanting of genetically modified material into our food supplies by massive chemical corporations more at home producing chemical warfare for the military industrial complex than staples for your kitchen. And it also relates to the purposeful inflation of food prices through manufactured shortages and rampant speculation.
Here is the real Plutonic dirt: the exorbitant inflation on food is, in big part, a result of criminally deregulated derivatives markets and the stampeding of capital, beginning in 2008, from the collapsing U.S. mortgage scheme into a generally much more stable arena: food.
From an August article on the subject:
"One of the things coming to light under this transit is how food has become part of the derivatives scheme, creating a massive speculation bubble based on wild gambling on agricultural commodities prices. In 2008, this speculation drove food prices up (wheat by 80 percent, maize by 90 percent, rice by 320 percent) driving 200 million more people into starvation...
A lot of things have been blamed for the rising cost of food - fuel costs, supply problems, overpopulation, cash crops, diverting food crops to create ethanol. These all contribute.
But a major factor, probably the major factor, not often mentioned is the derivatives scheme on food and resulting price jumps. It was really this that spiked prices to the point that 200 million more people could not afford to fill their stomachs. This was the basis for the 2008 food riots in 30 countries. Haiti, Mexico, Egypt, Bangladesh, Mozambique...
When Haitians were eating biscuits made from clay and lard to stop their gnawing hunger, they had these speculators, their clients and the people who allowed (and continue to allow) the deregulation of the financial system to thank...
Once the mortgage scam collapsed, the ticks had to go looking for a new dog. They found one with our food supply. These speculators bet on the price of food rising, and the higher the price of staple goods like wheat, rice, corn, soybeans the bigger the profits for the speculators and their clients...
From an article by Johann Hari "How Goldman Sachs gambled on starving the world's poor - and won":
"Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldman's pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market, and they were looking for somewhere else to make their stash of cash swell. They started to buy massive amounts of derivatives based on food: they reckoned that food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded onto this ground and decided to buy, buy, buy.
So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for contracts based on food massively rose - which meant the all-rolled-into-one price for food on people's plates massively rose. The starvation began.
The food price was now being set by speculation, rather than by real food. The hedge fund manager Michael Masters estimated that even on the regulated exchanges in the US - which take up a small part of the business - 64 percent of all wheat contracts were held by speculators with no interest whatever in real wheat. They owned it solely to inflate the price and sell it on.""
Now, in early 2011, following massive flooding and crop failures in the spring and summer, prices have been pushed even higher than 2008 levels.
The recent uprisings in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt are pretty simple, really: people can't afford to buy food. Or anything else. They're hungry. They're unemployed. They're desperate. They see little future.
It's a common refrain, a pre-planned sociological theme across the globe.
And the people are rightfully fingering corrupt government structures - more corporate interests than representatives of the people.
Jupiter in Aries is squaring Pluto in Capricorn, exact February 25, blazing the same trail Uranus will follow when it enters Aries March 11. At that point, we will have the planet of rebellion, revolution and sudden change (Uranus) locked into a series of seven squares to Pluto in Capricorn (consolidation of power among the corporate-sponsored Global Governors) until 2015.
There's only so much pressure and deprivation that can be tolerated. Those applying the pressure and deprivation know this. It's a matter of survival.
Uprisings of the people are expected. And the Global Governors wait to use them to their advantage.
As the mainstream media-imbibing public looks on, talking about the spread of democracy in Egypt (ha) or humanity standing up and saying no more, we are prescribed the usual solution brought to us by United States fighter planes, helicopters, tanks and artillery.
The Canadian and U.S. middle managers Harper and Obama bleat the same interchangeable words into the cameras. We no longer have even the appearance of two separate countries.
The Global Governors ride the wave of public revolt up to the peak and take their places atop the same corrupt hierarchies with a slightly new cast of characters.
Freedom is what we're here for, it's true. But it isn't happening overnight. We grind it out, wriggling out of the shackles together, step-by-step, each revolt injecting fresh energy, inspiration and movement for the longer-term dynamics of Uranus in Aries square Pluto in Capricorn. We wiggle through the cracks and make them wider.
It's exhausting, devastating to know what is going on, to live accordingly amongst people who go on as if nothing is amiss, who don't really give a good Goddamn unless it directly affects them and their's. They don't see that it already does. That a pre-set history is in danger of repeating. That the last time Uranus in Aries squared Pluto we had the rise of the Third Reich leading into the second World War. That their willful ignorance gives it all a pass.
But we have to stay with it. We have to maintain the Plutonic X-ray vision, make the connections, share them and gain strength from the body of knowledge, from the spirit rising from it. We find our openings within the vise-like Pluto in Capricorn grip - and take them.
And we thank our fellow human beings in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and around the world for doing just that.
We'll be ready when it's our turn.
Showing posts with label food riots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food riots. Show all posts
Monday, January 31, 2011
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Ceres Direct in Sagittarius on Its Way to Pluto in Capricorn and Benefitting Financially From the Starvation of the People
Asteroid Goddess of agriculture and grains Ceres has just completed a retrograde period and turned direct in Sagittarius. From this point, she hitches up her skirt and starts on a steely-eyed mission to conjunct (and confront) Pluto Rx in early Capricorn October 19, during this fall's Venus in Scorpio retrograde.
The dirty Pluto in Capricorn dealings being pushed up into collective awareness related to Ceres' territory of grains, cereals and food production are enough to make her hair stand on end, let me tell you. And we've only just begun.
Ceres came within one degree of a conjunction to Pluto in Capricorn in April of this year. Getting that much of a whiff of what Pluto was uncovering in that sign was all the nefariousness she could stomach at the time, going retrograde for three months and re-entering Sagittarius to get some distance. Now at 20 degrees, Ceres turns direct and gathers all the Sagittarian faith and courage about her she can for the unpleasant trek and meeting with Pluto this October.
One of the things coming to light under this transit is how food has become part of the derivatives scheme, creating a massive speculation bubble based on wild gambling on agricultural commodities prices. In 2008, this speculation drove food prices up (wheat by 80 percent, maize by 90 percent, rice by 320 percent) driving 200 million more people into starvation.
Finance schmucks are gambling on the price of food rising which fuels rabid speculation. And as their money games and various manipulations cause food prices to rise unnaturally, people around the world starve, suffer horribly, watch their children and loved ones withering and dying - all to keep the scam going and the bucks rolling after the mortgage scheme crashed and burned.
This is the world we're living in.
A lot of things have been blamed for the rising cost of food - fuel costs, supply problems, overpopulation, cash crops, diverting food crops to create ethanol. These all contribute.
But a major factor, probably the major factor, not often mentioned is the derivatives scheme on food and resulting price jumps. It was really this that spiked prices to the point that 200 million more people could not afford to fill their stomachs. This was the basis for the 2008 food riots in 30 countries. Haiti, Mexico, Egypt, Bangladesh, Mozambique...
When Haitians were eating biscuits made from clay and lard to stop their gnawing hunger, they had these speculators, their clients and the people who allowed (and continue to allow) the deregulation of the financial system to thank.
The helplessness of being starved for the financial gain of other people. The cruelty of it. The injustice. It makes me go weak. I have a hard time wrapping my head around this level of corruption. I can never quite get myself to that level of deviousness, and I'm sure I'm not doing this subject justice. I was never a fan of economic theory.
From an article by Johann Hari "How Goldman Sachs gambled on starving the world's poor - and won":
"Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldman's pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market, and they were looking for somewhere else to make their stash of cash swell. They started to buy massive amounts of derivatives based on food: they reckoned that food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded onto this ground and decided to buy, buy, buy.
So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for contracts based on food massively rose - which meant the all-rolled-into-one price for food on people's plates massively rose. The starvation began.
The food price was now being set by speculation, rather than by real food. The hedge fund manager Michael Masters estimated that even on the regulated exchanges in the US - which take up a small part of the business - 64 percent of all wheat contracts were held by speculators with no interest whatever in real wheat. They owned it solely to inflate the price and sell it on."
The idea originally behind the futures market for crops was a hedging of investment for farmers and others directly involved in agricultural production. A farmer could agree to sell his crop in a future month at a certain price, thus locking in a price. If the farmer had a great year and the price was very high, he might lose some money. But if he had a poor year, the contract ensured that he would still earn a certain price, hedging his investment.
Because of an absolutely criminal level of deregulation, people who have no stake in agriculture at all - Wall Street suits who have never gotten a speck of dirt under their manicured fingers - can now buy these contracts, then upselling them to someone else who then upsells them to someone else, etc.
Once the mortgage scam collapsed, the ticks had to go looking for a new dog. They found one with our food supply. These speculators bet on the price of food rising, and the higher the price of staple goods like wheat, rice, corn, soybeans the bigger the profits for the speculators and their clients.
Floods, droughts and hailed-out crops create further shortages in supply, and although there seems to be only the slightest connection between the real, physical supply of food and the pricing schemes (apparently, only about two percent of commodities futures now end with a real exchange of goods), this also causes prices to rise.
If you are a person who believes weather is being manipulated, it is not much of a stretch to see a connection between so-called natural disasters and the manipulation of food supply and pricing, ensuring the speculation pays off - at least for now.
Pakistan's breadbasket has now been flooded. Sixteen hundred people are confirmed dead, and 650,000 homes have been destroyed. Four million people now face homelessness.
On a smaller scale, Saskatchewan and Alberta (Canada's breadbasket) have been flooded and hailed this summer causing massive crop failures.
By artificially inflating food prices through speculation and manipulations of supply, the price for the crop no longer has any relation to what it is worth in a real-world marketplace - or to what people can pay. There is no consideration of the fact that these are staples that people need to live.
And it sounds as if the food derivatives game has been pushed to its limits at this point.
Paul B. Farrell at MarketWatch is warning that this bubble is going to burst in the very near future:
"Commodity ETFs are rapidly becoming a malicious virus breeding chaos in the global markets pricing all commodities: food, farm lands, metals, oil, natural gas, livestock, water and other natural resources are the assets under commodity derivatives and their ETFs, pricing that's now controlled more by Wall Street speculators than the weather, adding wild swings in volatility and trillions in global derivative risks."
As is generally the case these days, there is a "get your's while the getting's good" ethic. This is a parasitic system that has been designed to collapse after the speculators have made their money and drained their host. The fact that they are playing with people's lives never enters the equation.
We're seeing the same speculation bubbles being overinflated to their ultimate conclusions that we saw sustained for so long during Pluto in Sagittarius.
This speculation in food (Ceres) will more than likely build during Ceres' transit of the last ten degrees of Sagittarius, but once it re-enters Capricorn and conjuncts Pluto in October, things will be stripped to the bare reality on this front.
I'm thinking about the Ethiopian woman in the Johann Hari article who said her children stopped growing and she felt that someone had poured battery acid in her stomach as she starved.
"We can't go through that another time. Please - do anything you can to make sure they never, never do that to us again."
The dirty Pluto in Capricorn dealings being pushed up into collective awareness related to Ceres' territory of grains, cereals and food production are enough to make her hair stand on end, let me tell you. And we've only just begun.
Ceres came within one degree of a conjunction to Pluto in Capricorn in April of this year. Getting that much of a whiff of what Pluto was uncovering in that sign was all the nefariousness she could stomach at the time, going retrograde for three months and re-entering Sagittarius to get some distance. Now at 20 degrees, Ceres turns direct and gathers all the Sagittarian faith and courage about her she can for the unpleasant trek and meeting with Pluto this October.
One of the things coming to light under this transit is how food has become part of the derivatives scheme, creating a massive speculation bubble based on wild gambling on agricultural commodities prices. In 2008, this speculation drove food prices up (wheat by 80 percent, maize by 90 percent, rice by 320 percent) driving 200 million more people into starvation.
Finance schmucks are gambling on the price of food rising which fuels rabid speculation. And as their money games and various manipulations cause food prices to rise unnaturally, people around the world starve, suffer horribly, watch their children and loved ones withering and dying - all to keep the scam going and the bucks rolling after the mortgage scheme crashed and burned.
This is the world we're living in.
A lot of things have been blamed for the rising cost of food - fuel costs, supply problems, overpopulation, cash crops, diverting food crops to create ethanol. These all contribute.
But a major factor, probably the major factor, not often mentioned is the derivatives scheme on food and resulting price jumps. It was really this that spiked prices to the point that 200 million more people could not afford to fill their stomachs. This was the basis for the 2008 food riots in 30 countries. Haiti, Mexico, Egypt, Bangladesh, Mozambique...
When Haitians were eating biscuits made from clay and lard to stop their gnawing hunger, they had these speculators, their clients and the people who allowed (and continue to allow) the deregulation of the financial system to thank.
The helplessness of being starved for the financial gain of other people. The cruelty of it. The injustice. It makes me go weak. I have a hard time wrapping my head around this level of corruption. I can never quite get myself to that level of deviousness, and I'm sure I'm not doing this subject justice. I was never a fan of economic theory.
From an article by Johann Hari "How Goldman Sachs gambled on starving the world's poor - and won":
"Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldman's pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market, and they were looking for somewhere else to make their stash of cash swell. They started to buy massive amounts of derivatives based on food: they reckoned that food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded onto this ground and decided to buy, buy, buy.
So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for contracts based on food massively rose - which meant the all-rolled-into-one price for food on people's plates massively rose. The starvation began.
The food price was now being set by speculation, rather than by real food. The hedge fund manager Michael Masters estimated that even on the regulated exchanges in the US - which take up a small part of the business - 64 percent of all wheat contracts were held by speculators with no interest whatever in real wheat. They owned it solely to inflate the price and sell it on."
The idea originally behind the futures market for crops was a hedging of investment for farmers and others directly involved in agricultural production. A farmer could agree to sell his crop in a future month at a certain price, thus locking in a price. If the farmer had a great year and the price was very high, he might lose some money. But if he had a poor year, the contract ensured that he would still earn a certain price, hedging his investment.
Because of an absolutely criminal level of deregulation, people who have no stake in agriculture at all - Wall Street suits who have never gotten a speck of dirt under their manicured fingers - can now buy these contracts, then upselling them to someone else who then upsells them to someone else, etc.
Once the mortgage scam collapsed, the ticks had to go looking for a new dog. They found one with our food supply. These speculators bet on the price of food rising, and the higher the price of staple goods like wheat, rice, corn, soybeans the bigger the profits for the speculators and their clients.
Floods, droughts and hailed-out crops create further shortages in supply, and although there seems to be only the slightest connection between the real, physical supply of food and the pricing schemes (apparently, only about two percent of commodities futures now end with a real exchange of goods), this also causes prices to rise.
If you are a person who believes weather is being manipulated, it is not much of a stretch to see a connection between so-called natural disasters and the manipulation of food supply and pricing, ensuring the speculation pays off - at least for now.
Pakistan's breadbasket has now been flooded. Sixteen hundred people are confirmed dead, and 650,000 homes have been destroyed. Four million people now face homelessness.
On a smaller scale, Saskatchewan and Alberta (Canada's breadbasket) have been flooded and hailed this summer causing massive crop failures.
By artificially inflating food prices through speculation and manipulations of supply, the price for the crop no longer has any relation to what it is worth in a real-world marketplace - or to what people can pay. There is no consideration of the fact that these are staples that people need to live.
And it sounds as if the food derivatives game has been pushed to its limits at this point.
Paul B. Farrell at MarketWatch is warning that this bubble is going to burst in the very near future:
"Commodity ETFs are rapidly becoming a malicious virus breeding chaos in the global markets pricing all commodities: food, farm lands, metals, oil, natural gas, livestock, water and other natural resources are the assets under commodity derivatives and their ETFs, pricing that's now controlled more by Wall Street speculators than the weather, adding wild swings in volatility and trillions in global derivative risks."
As is generally the case these days, there is a "get your's while the getting's good" ethic. This is a parasitic system that has been designed to collapse after the speculators have made their money and drained their host. The fact that they are playing with people's lives never enters the equation.
We're seeing the same speculation bubbles being overinflated to their ultimate conclusions that we saw sustained for so long during Pluto in Sagittarius.
This speculation in food (Ceres) will more than likely build during Ceres' transit of the last ten degrees of Sagittarius, but once it re-enters Capricorn and conjuncts Pluto in October, things will be stripped to the bare reality on this front.
I'm thinking about the Ethiopian woman in the Johann Hari article who said her children stopped growing and she felt that someone had poured battery acid in her stomach as she starved.
"We can't go through that another time. Please - do anything you can to make sure they never, never do that to us again."
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