As Titanic America hits its biggest iceberg ever, the ballroom orchestra continues to play, conducted by the "Secretary of the Treachery," Henry Paulson, with a background drumbeat solo by "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke. Warren Buffet throws $5 Billion into the collection basket as a good gesture, even though he is sailing on another ship, sounder than anybody else's. Captain George, water seeping upward around his feet, sings a melancholy solo, pleading to tax payers that although he did everything "myyy waaay" the ship will sink if we do not turn everything over to all those who steered them into the frozen waters and fell asleep at the wheel. The Congress looks like it is angrily grabbing life rafts and yelling out questions as to who did what and how, as the gentlemen and women among them are throwing out ropes to rescue the innocents.
When my book, What Next was first published, I joined the descendants of Cassandra; those who are given the gift of prophecy with a hitch: nobody will listen. Most readers did not want to face the notion that planetary patterns point to the probability of the greatest depression in American history, if we did not wake up to the global gamblers who stole everything underneath our collective noses and would lose it in a legalized game of roulette. The subprime mortgage lending collapse is only the tip of the iceberg referred to above. Last May, the International Bank of Settlements reported a notional global derivatives sum of about $569 Trillion! This does not count the unaccounted for OTCs (over-the-counter) derivatives, many of which are so exotic, people can hardly understand how they work. Captain George's Iraq War will likely add up to a $3 Trillion dollar cost and the "Bail us out of the Titanic Plan" will create a debt that could add up to millions of honest but clueless citizens drowning in it. And it leaves Conductor Paulson still leading the orchestra, till the fat lady sings. We have ahead of us -- municipal bond defaults, states teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, and more spreading foreclosures and bankruptcies.
What Now?
My take is that we will all be in this crisis climate for a very long haul. Pluto going from Sagittarius into Capricorn suggests that we will whiplash from being to the right of Ronald Reagan to the left of Karl Marx. The bailout package is being proposed under Mercury retrograde, pointing to many alterations later on. The government will be printing money and controlling the system with various complicated (rather than transparent) machinations. We do not start emerging upward from this challenging, Bear Market cycle until around 2017. The next president will have to innovate, create an economy around a major rebuilding of infrastructure, new forms of non-fossil fuel energy, water management and conservation projects, local organic gardening and farming. For most people, the economy will rapidly go from global to local, eventually bringing manufacturing back into the U.S.A. as the result of a second "American Revolution" that, among other things, will mandate bringing jobs back into the country. The citizenry will likely become more involved in politics, necessary to the democratic process. After a lengthy conflict among the titans, the concentration of power in giant government or monopolistic corporate industry will eventually come to an end.
My advice is what I reiterated many times over the past four years. Pay off your debt. Get into gold and cash. Invest in energy, water conservation technologies, electric magnet trains, electric cars and farm commodities. Insulate your house for energy efficiency and renovate it to take in family members. Friends and families need to come back together and circle the wagons to help those who may lose their homes and their jobs. Get involved at the grass roots level in your local community, where you may have a better chance at restoring our long-neglected democratic way of life.
Beyond all this, maybe the Titanic needs to sink. We need to rebuild an entirely new economic system with a more equal playing field. Humanity is poised to move through a series of historic crises: the collapsing economy, the end of oil, and global climate change. In order to move forward, we need to come together to act in concert with the earth and in cooperation with one another. We have a profound choice to make: extinction, or evolution. This series of crises may be just what we need to move us forward and upward to a much grander and greater plan for humanity.