#58b
The United States Through Its Planetary Cycles
Part II  1896 to Present
December 12, 2004

Summary Of How The Planets Behave In The U.S. Chart

     With all nine planets having run their cycles, how each behaves in the U.S. chart has been demonstrated.  Here's a summary for each:

      Rahu  Turmoil and change; fear of and rebellion against overbearing authority; creating a democratic secular government and free market; mystical beliefs seen as protective; inventions; sexual neurosis

      Jupiter  Balancing fears of outside control and sex; mystical religious revival; consensus building for democratic rule; wealth expansion; sexual indulgence; ethically driven war; prosperity from war; inventions

      Saturn  Technical innovation; infrastructure development; economic reversals; distrust of foreigners; public protections; pioneering spirit

      Mercury  Discord with foreigners; inventions; boom and bust growth, standard of living improvements; social challenge; mysticism

      Ketu  Unusual war; unhappiness and protest; religious insight; unexpected wealth; economic growth

      Venus  Striving for cooperative progress; international trade; economic expansion; social justice; compassionate war; prosperity from war; innovation; overindulgence; relationship problems

      Sun  Supportive government; innovations; wealth; unrestrained economic expansion; power elite

      Moon  Intoxication with power; resource development; wealth and power concentration in an elite; abusive business; government corruption; pork-barrel spending; cuts in social spending; dirty-tricks elections; enforced moral purity; popular protests

      Mars  Widespread violent protests against inequality; economic depression

     Rahu's second planetary cycle begins the second set of America's planetary cycles.  Rahu's behavior  was interpreted in its first cycle from 1776 through 1893.  This second cycle repeats the energies, though   of course, not the same events.

     As the nation created itself via a freeing democracy and capitalism during the first Rahu cycle, it recreated itself during its second cycle, known as the Progressive Era.  Reacting to the robber barons' abuse of power, government corruption and class warfare protests and the continuing depression, William McKinley won the tumultuous 1896 election by assembling a coalition of new industrialists and their workers, promising a full dinner pail and rejecting moralistic crusades of earlier Republicans.  (Note: Except for Democrat Grover Cleveland, who was as reactionary as Republicans, McKinley's election ended the conservative Repub- lican's twenty-eight year reign of greed and corruption that began with Ulysses S. Grant in 1869.) 

     Progressives were a post Civil War generation.  Raised in cities with the new social and physical sciences (including Darwinism) and mass media, they did not share their parents' Victorian-inspired religious fervor.  Progressive modernists, were inclined to reject institutionalized restrictions and to support individual freedoms.

     Progressivism revitalized democracy by redressing Gilded Age excesses and political corruption.  This was basically class warfare, similar to the first Rahu cycle's revolutionary's fight against the English colonial class system.  (Unfortunately, with Jim Crow laws having formalized restrictions against Blacks, redress here would not occur until much later in the nation's history.)  The Progressive Movement increased federal pow- er and ended Laissez Faire's absence of regulation.

Teddy Roosevelt began enforcing the Sherman anti-trust act for its true purpose, earning him the nickname, Trust-buster.  Roosevelt also pushed through legislation requiring pure food and drugs, railroad rate regulations and the conservation of natural resources.      In his 1903 Square Deal speech, Roosevelt concluded by saying, The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.  The second Progressive era presidency, William Taft was less effective than Roosevelt but continued to break up trusts and empower the court system.      The Progressive Movements' regaining democratic freedoms and equality lost during the Gilded Age is the second example of how, Imbalances and inequality among groups stimulate conflicts to reintegrate the culture along shared democratic values.

     There is another thread to this Rahu cycle, relating to its signification for foreigners.  Early in the cycle, America was thrust into following the Europeans' colonial expansion by the short 1898 Spanish/American war.  During William McKinley's term from 1897 to 1901, America developed an innovative approach to compete with the Europeans and to gain needed international trade.  As a democracy, America was a reluctant colonial master. The Rahu cycle's emphasis was not on building an empire but upon expanding trade through the concept of spheres of influence, an expansion abroad of Manifest Destiny.  This re- quired control only of scattered territories in the Caribbean and Pacific. These are listed above.  The Open Door Policy was an attempt to keep the China trade open, in part by denying imperial Europeans the change to carve up the giant.

     As Rahu is science, it is natural that Einstein's Theory of Relatively came during its cycle.  The Wright Brothers first flight in 1903 also fits this cycle, for Rahu is specifically airplanes.

(Rahu's next cycle will run from 2016 to 2034...)

     Woodrow Wilson's presidency is reminiscent of the first three Presidents under the initial Jupiter cycle.  He was the last of the three Progressive Presidents and also the first modern Democrat.  Wilson lowered tariffs, reformed the currency, and toughened the trust laws yet again. Wilson then carried progressive ideals into World War I, seeing it as a fight for democracy.  Keeping with nation's Saturnian distrust of foreign entanglements, Wilson had to lobby hard and long to dissuade America from maintaining its isolationism from world affairs.  Wilson also presided over the eighteenth Amendment giving women suffrage and the nine- teenth Amendment prohibiting alcohol, again in tune with Jupiter's fairness and morality.

     The twenties, of course, saw tremendous economic development during the Republican administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.  Prosperity following war was analyzed in the first Jupiter cycle narrative. Economic growth, women's suffrage, a consumer economy and mass entertainment also furthered expansion in personal freedoms and a rejection by many of Victorian values that had been firmly embedded in America culture via conservative Protestant religions. 

    Yet, this was neither an even nor nationwide trend.  The first sixteen year Jupiter cycle signaled the Second Great Awakening's religious revival.  This second Jupiter cycle reinvigorated conservative religious beliefs by promising to protect Americans from Darwinism, cultural decadence, the Red Scare (immoral communists) and the racial violence resulting from Blacks moving to northern cities.  As these events and their conservative backlash occurred under Republican presidents, Harding and Coolidge, they hearken back to earlier Victorian conservative Republican presidents during the Victorian nineteenth century. 

     In this environment, two Christian revivalist movements emerged.  Fundamentalism (infallibility of the Bible and the Second Coming of Christ) and Pentecostalism (speaking in tongues and faith healers).  The Scopes trial on teaching evolution was a focal point in this conflict between science and theology, faith and reason, individual liberty and majority rule.  It was also a clash between urban secular sophistication and rural fundamentalism.

     Jupiter, however, can be overly expansive, and this is made excessive by being conjunct self-indulgent and extravagant Venus.  Recall that the Venus cycle saw the inception of the industrial excess culminating in the Gilded Age and accompanying government corruption.  The economic expansion of the 1920's was excessive by any yardstick and could not endure.

     Restrictive and responsible Saturn began its cycle with the Great Depression again paring away excess from expansive Jupiter's previous cycle.

     As Saturn also serves to protect the public, to administer practicalities benefiting the masses, newly elected Franklin Roosevelt immediately announced the New Deal in 1933 to stimulate the economy.  Two years later he supported the Social Security Act to give the elderly retirement insurance.  The Fair Labor Standards Act established a minimum wage and set protective child labor standards. Under Harry Truman, the 1947 Marshall Plan, rebuilding war-ravaged European countries, was another application of Saturn's dutiful nature.

     Saturn again stimulated infrastructure build-up.  The depression era Civilian Conservation Corps replant- ed forests and combated erosion nationwide.  The Tennessee Valley Authority restored that area's resources and brought hydroelectric power to a destitute area.  The industrial war machine for World War II further developed the nation's economic base, including technical innovation. 

     While Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was intended to rescue America from the Great Depression, as a massive redistribution of income (from the rich to the poor), it was America's first leap into socialism.  While the New Deal was the heir to the Progressive Era, that effort focused upon regulating business to protect the public. Here, then is the third example of how, Imbalances and inequality among groups stimulate conflicts to reintegrate the culture along shared democratic values.

     Because practical Saturn rules the second house of food quality, it ended Prohibition in 1933 for being unworkable and empowering organized crime in bootlegging.

     By the end of Saturn's cycle in 1948, the U.S. had fulfilled it's promise, begun under the first Saturn cycle (1810 -- 1828) of becoming the world's leading industrial nation, both in output and innovation.  As factory jobs would later be increasingly eliminated through automation (efficiency gains) at home and production sent overseas, a population engendered with highly skilled hands would eventually be alienated.

    Mars' aspect to Saturn, which brings violence, instigated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  Because Saturn is an isolationist, it took this warfare on American soil to drag the country into World War II.  This influence also brought the Cold War with the USSR starting in 1948, the year Saturn ended its cycle.

     As in Mercury's first planetary cycle from 1829 to 1845, it's second cycle was also a period of mental variability and creativity stimulating: discord with foreigners, turbulent economic growth, commo- tion in Mercury's social qualities and eighth house mysticism and power.

     The Cold War, the Korean War and the beginning of the Vietnam conflict mirrors the previous Mercury cycle's conflicts at the Alamo and almost continuous warfare with Native Americans.

     Inventions, income and education similarly followed the Mercury cycle pattern.  Again building upon Saturn's infrastructure improvements, the economy innovated and grew.  From labor-saving kitchen appli- ances to life-saving medicines, the quality of life was elevated.  Television, however, was the most dramatic and lifestyle changing.  Median family income more than doubled from 1947 to 1979 to $45,900 (current dollars).  This cycle also saw a tremendous education elevation as family wealth propelled baby-boomers into colleges and universities   Yet, again there were economic reversals .  The country experienced difficult double-dip recessions in 1957 and 1960-61 .

     There was also Mercurial social commotion during its cycle.  The first Mercury cycle's urbanization and westward migration became this second cycle's automobile-enabled migrations to Sunbelt cities and expan- sion to the suburbs.  These shifts were stimulated by mental Mercury's increasing white collar employment, which, for the first time, exceeded factory jobs. 

     Again, this more affluent and learned society addressed social issues, but in this second Mercury cycle, TV brought the world into living rooms.  The first televised debate gave John Kennedy the presidency.  His New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society liberalized society further with social programs, including Medicare and Foodstamps.  (Kennedy's powerful Mercury in the eighth house matches the U.S. chart.)  And finally, a century after the end of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement began the process of bringing Blacks real freedom and equality.  Great Society programs and the Civil Rights movement are the dual qualities of this fourth example of how, Imbalances and inequality among groups stimulate conflicts to reintegrate the culture along shared democratic values.  We can also see this reinte- gration as a larger liberal movement to again reign in big business and its accompanying repressive social/religious values.

     Mercury with foreign Rahu in the eighth house of the occult brought the 1960s Eastern mysticism, chiefly from India, to break away from stifling Protestant and Catholic churches with their puritanical beliefs.  This included breaking sexual taboos in the Sexual Revolution.  Yet, the Fundamentalists, in Southern and Midwestern strongholds, stuck with their Evangelical Christianity.  Further, as they had many times in the past, Evangelical Christians would arise again, for a country's underlying religious belief system, passed from generation to generation, doesn't bend to the winds of social change. 

     If there is one label to typify and describe Ketu's second cycle is is Counterculture.  Although initiated at the end of the Mercury cycle in 1965 by Vietnam protests, Eastern mysticism and hard rock music, it wasn't until otherworldly Ketu's began its cycle that mass culture began to truly transform.  A button-down culture broke away with long hair, jeans, drugs, sex, and of course, rock & roll.

     Increasingly strident Vietnam War demonstrations and the ongoing Civil Rights Movement brought a political orientation. Ketu's insight then stimulated the environmental movement and the consequent rejection of corporate America.  All of these Ketu effects resulted from its quality of insight, serving to elevate con- sciousness.  This is the fifth example of how, Imbalances and inequality among groups stimulate conflicts to reintegrate the culture along shared democratic values.

     America did, however, make it to the Moon, but nothing much was found, and astronauts haven't returned.  That is typical Ketu-weird.

     As Ketu is placed in the second house of domestic harmony and food quality, nobody was happy at home, and drugs were ingested to achieve mystical states, to get closer to God.  However, median family income did continue to grow through 1979.

 (*A friend invited me to Woodstock, but I didn't want to camp out in a field with weird people for four days.  I forget now what I did instead.  I do recall, however, being invited to interview at IBM and feeling everyone there was a corporate clone.)

     As Venus's first cycle from 1853 to 1872 was convoluted for this planet's strengths and afflictions, this second cycle was no less troublesome.

     Recall Venus' Civil War was succeeded in abolishing slavery but failed to bring Blacks equality.  This Venus cycle saw the bitter end to the Vietnam conflict, the Cold War ending only to usher in terrorism and the first Gulf War saved Kuwait but left Iraq for invasion a decade later.

    Female Venus with Mars' combative energy stimulated the Feminist Movement, but there was an atten- dant increase in divorce.  Further, since this Mars is virulent, its signification for infectious disease also brought AIDS, ending the sexual revolution.

     Venus with Jupiter gives an affinity for foreigners, and this was expressed in NAFTA, the first major free trade agreement.  Yet, Venus also indicates enemies (competitors) and vehicles, which is why during its cycle Japan successfully invaded the U.S. automobile market, and the two oil embargos restricted vehicle travel.

     Yet, economically, Venus is a mixed influence.  Inflation, stalled productivity and the Arab oil embargos stifled the first half of this long twenty year cycle.  Jupiter expands Venus's creativity, and Mars indicates machinery.  This resulted in fundamental electronic machine inventions during Venus's cycle.  (Note: ad- vances during the previous Mercury cycle were predominately mechanical.)   Highlights are: cell phone (1979), IBM personal computer (1981), Microsoft Windows (1985), and the Internet (1990).  These not only stimulated the 1980s economy, but set the stage for the great growth in the upcoming Sun cycle.  

     Jupiter also influences Venus for overindulgence, and Mars adds greed and criminality. 

     As the 1880s greedy Gilded Age's business excesses began during first Venus cycle after the Civil War, this second Venus cycle initiated a boom during the Reagan years from 1981 through 1989.  Reagan's tax cuts for the wealthy and Venus's electronic advances stimulated multinational corporations, international trade, worker efficiency gains and corporate fraud.  However, these also initiated a long term shift to de- press real wages and force women into the workplace.  Median family income has drifted lower ever since.  (Recall median family income more than doubled during the Mercury cycle and through part of the Ketu cycle until 1979.)  This was redistribution of income in reverse -- from the poor and middle class to the rich.

     Government corruption began under Nixon's administration, forcing his resignation in 1974.  It continued with Reagan, but he managed to dodge the Iran-Contra cover-up. 

     This cycle was dominated by Bill Clinton's two terms which brought the longest and greatest economic expansion in America's history but ended with corporate fraud, the stock market bubble and his near impeachment. 

     As discussed in the first Sun cycle narrative, Jupiter's influence on the Sun brings warm and supportive efforts to enrich relationships and government, inventions and wealth.  Yet, Saturn's close aspect to the Sun injures these advances, stimulates conservatism and results in mistreatment.   This sets up a second rapacious Moon cycle.  Notable, but not fully recognized, was a resurgence in Fundamentalism, especially in the South under Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and other charismatic evangelical leaders.  Using their Scofield Refer- ence Bibles to effect, they: predict a fire and brimstone hell for sinners, demand Victorian Era puritanical values and promised Second Coming salvation exclusively to born-again believers.  Everyone else  -- Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, even Catholics.. -- would go to hell, and this exclusionary view bound the true believers even more tightly together in their spiritual war.

     The Fundamentalists' marriage to conservative Republicans was first expressed in the Newt Gringrich Republican Revolution, loudly promoted by Rush Limbaugh.  After Gingrich was disgraced, the emerging theocracy made another major foray with the impeachment attempt against Bill Clinton, which was really about sex.   However, it wasn't until born-again George W. Bush identified and appealed to Fundamentalists in the 2000 election that the alliance between conservative Republicans and Evangelicals emerged in a fully formed theocratic government.  (Bush actually first discovered this powerful technique in his father's 1988 campaign, when not knowing what to do with him, the younger Bush was sent to the Fundamentalist churches and found eager and welcoming audiences.) 

     This alliance used its power to turn back the clock on the tide of  reviled social liberalism --  initiated in the Progressive Movement (notably Teddy Roosevelt), greatly advanced under Franklin Roosevelt and expanded under the John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations.  Ask staunch moneyed Evan- gelicals, and they'll tell you, with fury in their voices, they could never forgive these liberals for ruining their Ann Rand laissez faire capitalism and making a moral Christian nation into pagans.  They especially detested the Roosevelt cousins, whom they viewed as turncoats to their upper class families.

     Below is a 1950 to 2000 graph of real gross domestic product per capita  -- how much money the economy generates divided by the population.  Dollars are the vertical axis and years from 1950 to 2000 are the horizontal axis.  

     This demonstrates how potent the U.S. chart is for creativity and wealth.  However, if one considers that median family income has been flat since 1979, one can only conclude that the income growth must be going to corporations and the wealthiest Americans who own the stocks.

    The theocratic partnership between conservative Republican businessmen and puritanical Christians (increasing concentration of wealth in an elite, government corruption and decreasing in family income) is a pattern first set in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  It began after the Civil War (part way through the first Venus cycle), continued through the Ketu and Sun cycles, peaked during the Moon cycle (the Gilded Age) and was stopped by popular protests and a four year recession during the Mars cycle.  Then, of course, the Progressive Era during the Rahu cycle began redressing these inequities. This pattern is repeating in the last part of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century

     As this historical analysis has journeyed to the present, the repetition of the planets' cycles has revealed how the the interplay of past karmas repeats.  As this final section compares the Moon's first ten year cycle with this second (and current) cycle and offers some conclusions, it is divided into two parts.

Comparison With The Moon's First Cycle -- 1879 --1888
     Consider first how the events and trends identified in the first Moon Cycle narrative fit with contemporary times.  Following is a synopsis of events and trends from 1879 through 1888.  These all fit well, amazingly well in fact, with what has been happening in America since 1999.  

     The powerful grab what they choose, with no governmental regulation restraining their running roughshod over the populace

     Monopolies, price fixing and worsening living conditions

     Government corruption, the wealthy elite buying off politicians

     Pork-barrel spending but also cutting public service spending

     Presidential election mudslinging and personal attacks

     Victorian Era asceticism, church attendance, hard work, extreme moral purity   

     Theocracy via a purity crusade resulting in Blue Laws

     Public obedience in work, accepting Blue Laws and not objecting to a class system

     The inception of public protests 

     While there is no need to restate the obvious by reciting comparable contemporary events and trends, the election results mystery should be addressed.  As discussed in the December 10 Celestial Wheel, the polling companies and astrologers all agreed Kerry would win.  His chart was simply more favorable than Bush's.  In this case, both Dasas and transits were analyzed, but the conclusion was wrong.  It shouldn't have been, and we may learn, soon or some months from now, that Bush again stole the election.

     American history summaries spotlight the election of 1884 (during the first Moon cycle) because it completely abandoned fairness and civility for dirty tricks and low blows.  Regardless of whether Grover Cleveland stole the election by voter fraud, his tactics, and those of his supporters, were so despicable that historians agree the campaign was an unfair contest.  This repeated in the 2000 and 2004 elections.  Recall the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth attack on John Kerry, which although proven to be all lies and distor- tions, cast sufficient doubt on his hero's war record to cost him substantial support.  That Kerry lost the election by rejecting getting down in the mud to effectively refute the personal attack, is not true, how- ever.  During the Moon's cycle, The theocratic partnership between conservative Republican businessmen and puritanical Christians is so potent that it overpowers both the public and democratic checks and bal- ances.  Further, it takes unfair advantage of the cultural glue that binds together the nation's democracy -- as described in the first Jupiter cycle narrative, This powerful inclination for consensus-building and and firmly bonded partnerships is the mainstay of cooperative and conformist U.S. culture.

     These twin influences of the rapacious Moon cycle and a cooperative culture combine to have allowed Bush to steal the elections in 2000 and 2004. 

     Further, this combination of power manipulating cooperation explains why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and other neoconservatives have been able to weather storms which would have broken administrations during other planetary cycles.  Recall that in the November 3 Celestial Wheel I stated,  ...as Pat Robertson recently told Paula Zahn on CNN (paraphrased), "Bush is blessed by God.  His mistakes don't matter."  What that statement actually means is that those folks are so powerful during the Moon cycle, the natural consequences of their actions don't operate.  Just considering the prisoner abuse scandal, which con- tinues, they brush it off as though it didn't matter.  They even appointed the author of the absolutely illegal and immoral policy, Alberto Gonzales, to the post of Attorney General  -- the nation's highest law enforce- ment officer.  Is anyone but me incredulous at this gall?  Clearly, many are, but also clearly, no group or institution (Congress or the courts) is willing, or has been thus far able, to rebuff that audacity.

Conclusions
     There is another analytical tool which should be reviewed, for it gives insight into these two Moon cycles.  The May 24, 2004 Forecast, #52  The Jupiter/Saturn Conjunction -- A New Twenty Year Era, applied the Vedic Astrology concept that Jupiter and Saturn, the planets of social evolution, conjoin every twenty years to set-up a new twenty year era.  The current Jupiter/Saturn era began in May of 2000 in Aries.  Below are summary quotes of the twenty year cycle ending in 2020.

     In the U.S. chart, the Jupiter/Saturn conjunction in Aries is the fifth house, signifying government, which confirms the prediction.  The imperial America posture of the neoconservatives is thereby diametrically opposed to this irresistible globalization process and therefore must fail.

     By comparison, the April 18, 1881 Jupiter Saturn conjunction, during the first Moon cycle, was also in Aries.  However, in that chart, the Sun and Venus join Jupiter and Saturn in Aries.  Since again this is the U.S. chart's fifth house of government, those governing gained incredible power.  This made the first Moon cycle's Gilded Age's theocracy as irresistible as this second Moon cycle's globalization cannot be stopped.

     Events during the last four years encourage this conclusion.  America's imperialism is not just a continuing failure, notably in Iraq, but it is also resisted globally.  No matter how powerful the U.S. may be, or believe itself to be, five percent of the world's population cannot dominate for long  the other ninety-five percent.  America's military is already stretching to the breaking point, and Bush's fiscal policies are bankrupting the economy.  I have predicted many times that Iraq, Bush's great misadventure, will cause his downfall.

       We are not the downtrodden, uneducated and immigrant dominated America of the 1880s.  As also stated in the December 10 Celestial Wheel, We are: the largest age group, the most educated, the most spiritually conscious, most experienced at protest and most motivated to protect our young adult children and protect ourselves in our coming old age.  We also have the internet, which I believe to be an emerged mass consciousness that can be our sword for peace and equality.  We aren't wimps, unless we fail to heed our inner-voice call to spiritual citizenship.

     Perhaps we will, sooner than we could believe, thank our nation's first ally, France, for again being a friend to our people.  As the world's second oldest democracy and a former colonial power, the French are in a unique position to resist Bush and thereby help America regain its liberty.  Watch the news reports.  It's obvious France is the major antagonist to America's neoconservative bullies.  We would be wise to follow France's lead, take heart in their bravery and continue our tradition of protest.

     Future Forecasts will built upon this foundation of understanding the United States chart.

    Live free or Diebold.