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Robert Gover (born November 2, 1929)

grew up in an endowed orphanage (Girard College in Philadelphia), attended the University of Pittsburgh on athletic scholarship (swimming the butterfly), received a degree in economics, worked as a journalist, became a bestselling novelist by age 30, lived most of his life in California where he began his study of astrology, and now resides in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. His latest novel is Two Brothers. He describes it as an “economic novel.” One brother becomes a millionaire, the other a skid row bum. A third character was an economics professor till he studied astrology—he was subsequently confined in an insane asylum. Robert’s first novel, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, is a satire on racism and remains a cult classic. He has published 10 novels and 2 works of nonfiction, including Time and Money: the Economy and the Planets. He can be reached at gocycles@aol.com.

Corporate Persons, Money and the

Planets By

Robert Gover, USA

he stock market crash of 2008-09 focused many on a fact of life they had not previously given much

thought to: The mysteries of money. Money is defined as what we use to buy and sell things and how we measure wealth. It’s now as necessary to our survival as air and water. But why does it seem to accumulate in some places like the blizzard of 2010 hitting Washington, while avoiding other places? Why do a few swim in an ocean of it while billions of others die from a lack of it? Major redistributions of wealth have occurred when Pluto moves through early Capricorn where it now is. The wealth of the Incas and Aztecs was transferred to Spain under this astrological signature. And now, it seems, the money of the USA and Europe is rushing pell-mell to Asia. It takes erratic Pluto an average of 248 years to orbit the Sun. In the late 1490s and early 1500s, when Pluto inched into Capricorn, mega-tons of gold and silver were shipped from the “New World” to Europe, where this dramatic increase in money had a revolutionary economic impact. Meanwhile, uncounted millions of Native Americans died from diseases imported from Europe. That must have been history’s biggest trade imbalance.

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2 The next time Pluto arrived in Capricorn, the USA separated from its mother country and became an independent nation—and soon replaced the British Empire as the world’s dominant economy. The irony is that the USA rebelled in order to get out from under the crushing debt imposed by the Bank of England, and now the USA is over its head in debt. As Pluto moved into early Capricorn and squared Uranus in the 1750s-60s, the original 13 colonies along the Atlantic Coast grew resentful of the debt-creating money system forced upon them by England. British taxation to repay the King’s debt to the Bank of England threatened to create massive poverty in a land of plenty. Revolutionary passions grew during the French and Indian War, under a Uranus-Pluto square much like the one we will soon be under again. In 1767, Benjamin Franklin, in an attempt to prevent war, traveled to England and spoke to the British Parliament. When Britain’s rulers asked him to account for what they saw as amazing prosperity in the American colonies, he replied, "That is simple. In the colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to anyone." This outraged the Brits, for they had demanded colonists use only British money—issued by its central bank at interest—and had dispatched a group called The Lords of Trade and Plantations to harass the colonists’ multiple money systems case by case. Example: The Lords of Trade banished Massachusetts’ paper money and ordered that all taxes be paid in British coinage or commodities, causing an economic crisis. Prices fell and kept falling. Properties were sold at one-tenth their previous value and trade came to a halt. Today, the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, meaning other nations must acquire dollars in order to buy and sell oil and other internationally traded products. What the British Government was protecting is what we now call a privately owned central bank which lends money to the government at interest, to be repaid by the people. The King liked the idea of borrowing from a bank to fight wars, and later taxing his subjects to repay the bank. Most American colonists had no idea that they were a party to this deal between the Bank of England and the King and deeply resented the tax burden heaped upon them Resentment was not even diluted by the famous Biblical quote from Jesus: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” As Pluto slowly moved through Capricorn, the colonists decided they’d had enough of Caesars, Kings and other plutocrats. It was the resentment of colonists about being taxed to repay the British Government’s debt to the Bank of England that led to the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence signed on July 4, 1776, which most astrologers use as the USA’s birth date.

3 During the 1800s, big bankers from Europe made repeated attempts to establish a central bank in the new nation. Bankers and civil authorities engaged in a tug-of-war over who should control the USA’s money. A lot of bribes changed hands. In 1791, the Bank of the United States was founded and operated for 20 years till 1811. In 1816 a Second Bank of the US was founded and operated for another 20 years till 1836. Then, in 1886, came a remark by a Supreme Court Chief Justice that changed everything. Chief Justice Morrison P. Waite, as he heard a case, off-handedly said that corporations were persons, protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, passed by Congress after the Civil War to protect the rights of newly freed African American slaves. The case is known as “Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad.” Chief Justice Waite’s declaration had no direct relevance to the case. It came like an after-breakfast belch. It has never been overturned by Congress or any President. Ironically, another Supreme Court decision 10 years later, Plessey v Ferguson, further sabotage the Fourteenth Amendment by ruling that each ex-slave was only one-eighth of a person. Today gigantic global corporate empires are persons in the eyes of the law, just like Suzie Singlemon and Joe Sixpack, you and me. Astrologically, the USA’s natal money planets, Venus and Jupiter in the 2nd house, shown on the inner wheel, were afflicted when Waite made his insane utterance. Transits at the time of the Chief Justice’s remark are shown on the outer wheel.

4 Note the conjunction of Jupiter-Uranus opposite Venus, with this opposition square the USA’s natal Venus and Jupiter in Cancer 2nd house. At the same time, Neptune and Pluto were conjunct (a 495-year cycle), with both conjunct the USA’s Ascendant. (The Gemini Rising chart I use is not the one most American astrologers favor, which is the Sibley Chart, Sagittarius Rising. I reason that in the community of nations, the USA is not perceived as Sag. Rising generous and philosophical, but rather as the type of entity best described by Uranus in Gemini Rising—exceedingly headstrong and temperamental, by turns hero or outcast.) “Waite’s belch” opened the door for the blossoming of American corporations, which since have merged into global corporations. Prior to this, governments tightly regulated corporations, strictly forbidding them from influencing politics in any way. To read an in-depth analysis of how corporations became persons and the consequences of this absurdity, search “The Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood Versus Democracy” by William Meyers. Here’s a sample: “Corporate personhood allows the wealthiest citizens to use corporations to control the government and use it as an intermediary to impose their will upon the people. It is this basic about-face from democracy that should most concern us. But because of our corrupted legal system, corporate media, and corrupted elected officials, social activists usually focus their efforts on the bad, even horrible, results of corporate control of government and society.” And Noam Chomsky added, "It's ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They're totalitarian institutions—you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There's about as much freedom as under Stalinism." Waite’s belch also led to the next major development in American money, the creation of the Federal Reserve, the USA’s central bank, a private corporation which became the prototype for other nation’s central banks, and the Bank of International Settlements in Switzerland, the IMF and World Bank. It was on Jekyll Island in South Carolina during November 1910 that the idea for an American central bank was secretly conjured. Jupiter and Mars were opposite Saturn, and a Jupiter-Mars conjunction formed a grand trine with Pluto and Chiron. The stars were aligned for what some believe was the biggest heist in history. If the American public of the time had known what these bankers were up to, there would have been a horrendous outcry. Pulling it off were the world’s wealthiest bankers at the time: Morgan, Rockefeller, Rothschild, Warburg and Kuhn-Loeb. What they achieved on Jekyll Island was an end to competition among themselves. How? By selling Congress what we now call the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank.

5 The first leak that such a meeting had occurred didn’t surface till 1916 when B. C. Forbes, who would later found Forbes Magazine, was a young reporter for Leslie’s Weekly. In an interview, Paul Warburg slipped the news to Forbes, who wrote: “Picture a party of the nation’s greatest bankers stealing out of New York on a private railroad car under cover of darkness, stealthily hieing hundreds of miles south, embarking on a mysterious launch, sneaking on to an island deserted by all but a few servants, living there a full week under such rigid secrecy that the names of not one of them was once mentioned lest the servants learn the identity and disclose to the world the strongest, most secret expedition in the history of American finance. “I am not romancing. I am giving to the world for the first time, the real story of how the famous Aldrich currency report, the foundation of our new currency system, was written.” Congressman Vreeland called the Aldrich Bill to create the Fed “an ideal method of fighting monopoly. It could not possibly itself become a monopoly and it would prevent other banks combining into monopolies.” In public relations, big lies often work best. The right to create money is the most powerful monopoly possible. The Federal Reserve bill was enacted December 23, 1913, as most Congress persons were in a hurry to leave Washington and go home for Christmas. Almost simultaneously the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was created by Constitutional Amendment to collect taxes in order to repay money loaned by the Fed to the government at ever-compounding interest. This debt is now called the national debt. It is argued by some that, although the Fed is a privately-held corporation, it is really a quasi-government agency. It would seem so but since the elected officials who supposedly oversee the Fed need money to win reelection, and the Fed controls the nation’s money, the reality is that the Fed holds the whammy over the heads of politicians. Besides, the Fed is very secretive, and most politicians don’t know enough about money systems anyhow. Our democratically elected lawmakers made us taxpayers an unwitting party to this agreement between the Fed and the Federal Government, by sticking us with the bill for the national debt. We the people have become habituated to squabbling over the national debt rather than the system that creates it. Our total national debt is now said to be $12.1 trillion. And our federal budget deficit has exploded 350% higher from $454.8 billion in fiscal 2008 to $1.6 trillion in fiscal 2009. That’s a huge burden per capita and growing, and when we add personal and corporate debt, it’s overwhelming. Historically, when governments have been faced with such an overwhelming debt, they inflated the currency to repay with cheaper money. The greater the debt, the greater the chances that inflation may get out of hand and become hyperinflation.

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Notice that the USA’s natal Venus-Jupiter conjunction was between a Sun-Pluto opposition on the day the Fed was born, with Saturn opposite Mercury, waning from a conjunction of the USA’s natal Uranus in Gemini Ascendant, and applying to a conjunction with the USA’s Mars-square-Neptune. Given that the USA’s national debt is now around 70% of GDP, the question is, can the US Government inflate without triggering hyperinflation? Maybe it can. There are economic pressures indicating deflation rather than inflation—empty houses pushing down rents and home prices, high unemployment pushing down wages. On the other hand, food and other commodities are rising. Customer: “Wow, the price of milk has doubled in the past couple of months.” Checkout Lady: “Yeah, it has.” Customer: “Good thing the media tells us inflation is being held in check.” Checkout Lady: “Yeah, otherwise we’d think there is inflation.” The Fed is believed by most people to be part of the government, but in reality it’s an independent private corporation of bankers, who sell money to the government and other banks, and supposedly control the monetary system by controlling interest rates. One problem is that it lends only the principle and not the interest money that is to be repaid. To repay the ever-ballooning interest, new loans are necessary. Since over 97% of what we call

7 money is actually credit, this puts the US Government in the position of a credit card user who is in over his head “Suppose you want to spend more money this month than your income. This situation is called a budget deficit. So you borrow (i.e. use your credit card). The amount you borrowed (and now owe) is called your debt. You have to pay interest on your debt. If next month you don't have enough money to cover your spending (another deficit), you must borrow some more, and you'll still have to pay the interest on the loan. If you have a deficit every month, you keep borrowing and your debt grows. Soon the interest payment on your loan is bigger than any other item in your budget. Eventually, all you can do is pay the interest payment, and you don't have any money left over for anything else.” (www.federalbudget.com/) Because the Fed loans only the principal, it must loan more and more new money in order to assure repayment of interest on previous debts. It’s a gigantic Ponzi scheme. This, combined with what’s called “the fractional reserve system,” has brought slow but steady inflation to the USA. What cost a dollar back in 1914 when the Fed began operations, now costs at least a hundred dollars. By some estimates, real estate has gone up more than 1,000 percent. A property that cost $10,000 in 1914 is likely to cost two or three thousand percent more today. This slow but steady inflation “cooks the frog slowly.” Most people barely notice. As Pluto now moves through early Capricorn, square Saturn, the astrology indicates the Fed’s days may be numbered. For T Pluto is conjunct the Fed’s natal Sun, which is opposite its natal Pluto. T Pluto is also square Saturn, which will soon move into an opposition with Uranus, to create a grand cross pattern to the Fed’s natal Sun-Pluto opposition. The transformative effects of Pluto often happen over an extended period, for the old must be destroyed before the new can arise.

8 The news lately has been rife with stories about the Fed’s role in the recent bailout of financiers and bankers who were declared “too big to fail,” or what some people are calling “too big to jail.” From the perspective of bankers, everyone needs money and banks are where the money is. People have been borrowing from banks, and/or moneychangers, for millennia. What would we do without them? Here, we should more clearly define the difference between privately-owned central banks and publically owned national banks. India and China have national banks, or nationalized central banks owned by the government, and both of those nations are thriving, even as the USA—with a central bank owned by a private corporation with legal “personhood”—is struggling through the worst economic time since the great depression of the 1930s. Does it really matter who controls a nation’s money? Many bankers and financiers say it doesn’t. What matters is how a nation’s monetary system is managed. A privately-run central bank, being independent of government, prevents the whims of politicians from screwing up the system. On the other hand, privately–owned central bankers burden taxpayers with horrendous debt, especially when bankers see wars as their greatest source of profit. The creation of the Fed launched a century of wars. The more money governments borrow the more profits the banks make, and governments borrow most for wars or the threat of wars. Even if central bankers don’t get greedy and drive nations into wars, there is one very important difference between central and nation banks, defined by independent economist Henry C. K. Liu this way: “Central bankers are like librarians who consider a well-run library to be one in which all the books are safely stacked on the shelves and properly catalogued. To reduce incidents of late returns or loss, they would propose more strict lending rules, ignoring that the measure of a good library lies in full circulation. Librarians take pride in the size of their collections rather than the velocity of their circulation. ” Central bankers take the same attitude toward money. Central bankers view their job as preserving the value of money through the restriction of its circulation, rather than maximizing the beneficial effect of money on the economy through its circulation. Many central bankers boast about the size of their foreign reserves the way librarians boast about the size of their collections, while their governments pile up budget deficits. Paul Volcker, the US central banker widely credited with ending inflation in the early 1980s by administering wholesale financial blood letting on the US economy, quipped lightheartedly at a Washington party that ‘central bankers are brought up pulling legs off of ants’.” (Search “Banking Bunkum, Part 1 Monetary Theology” by Henry C. K. Liu.) Nikki Alexander sees the international network of private central banks as one huge usury parasite. “The usury parasite has infected 170 countries, feeding itself through the central bank syndicate, a shareholder-owned consortium of private banks, headquartered in Switzerland

9 at the Bank for International Settlements. Created in 1930, BIS obscures its transactions with an astounding array of legal immunities that prohibit any form of oversight or intrusion. It functioned as a Nazi money laundering operation in World War II. Today it serves as the cashier’s window for the global casino. Each central bank member has an exclusive monopoly on its government’s monetary system, with the power to create public debt and expand or contract the host’s economy at will. Coordinating their monetary policies with each other through the BIS, the central bankers meet behind closed doors, appoint their own governors and set their own rules. Their books are not subject to audit by the governments that host them. The IMF and World Bank are tentacles of this parasite that strangle governments with insurmountable debt, forcing these nations through ‘structural adjustment’ policies to rob their taxpayers, slash social programs, transfer public assets to private owners and sell the nation’s treasures to transnational predators at fire sale prices. Government treasuries are the parasite’s host. Flushing the global economy of this systemic disease begins with understanding how a central bank debilitates its host with suffocating debt.” (From “Restoring our Financial Sovereignty: A New Monetary System” by Nikki Alexander, March 19, 2009 "Information Clearing House") By the winter solstice of 2012—famous for “end of the world” forebodings arising from the end of the Mayan Calendar—the USA’s Venus, Jupiter and Sun in Cancer will be hit by a grand cross formed by Uranus-Pluto square .

People who have no understanding of the influence of the outermost planets on our economic activities will probably, by the winter solstice of 2012, be pointing fingers of blame in every direction. And no doubt there will be plenty of blame to go around from a purely

10 rational point of view. Politicians will be forced to stop going along to get along, and ask where the going along has taken us. I don’t think we can uproot the seed cause of our overwhelming debt problems till we deal with Chief Justice Waite’s belch of 1886 and the all-powerful corporate person created in December 1912, the Fed. Money has been described as the life blood of an economy. When the world’s economy creates a huge blood clot—the record disparity between the few Haves and the many Have-nots—major surgery is indicated. Since global corporate persons now control our mass media, and thus deliver the information that shapes our opinions—unless we divert to Internet sources—uncovering the tremendous consequences of Waite’s belch and the secretly-run Fed will be very difficult. Most Americans have been taught that the government prints whatever money it spends, even as they are also told the government owes $12 trillion and growing. Without knowledge of how the central bank system really works, most view it as a kind of Rubik’s Cube puzzle. This has led recently to such groups as the Tea Party, citizens who loudly protest that the government must cut spending and cut taxes. For decades, Americans have been told, explicitly and implicitly, that government “is the problem, not the solution” to whatever problems the nation has. In reality, government policies also shape whatever prosperity a nation has. So-called conservative politicians seem bent on proving that government is the problem by privatizing and outsourcing tasks that historically have been handled by government—trash collection, prisons, military hardware manufacturing, etc. Congressman Ron Paul, Republican from Texas, has shown that he understands how the monetary system really works. But latest word was that Ron Paul’s reelection is in doubt, for it’s a safe bet that his opponents will have the backing of big corporate persons, especially banks, with the most to lose should Ron Paul’s message spread. If the privatized Fed could be transformed into a public institution, we could then pay off the existing national debt and thereafter be free of it. A government-run Fed would make money by lending to banks, greatly relieving taxpayers. This threat to those who profit from the present money system has ramped up a massive public relations campaign, which works nicely to get “Teabaggers” and other folks voting for politicians and programs that worsen their situation. But we can hardly change the legal personhood of the Fed without overturning the world-changing effects of Waite’s belch. As one Congressman quipped, the government is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the big financial corporations. Should we surrender to the corporate takeover of government? I don’t think so. Given the series of astrological hits to the USA’s natal chart upcoming, circumstances will eventually overwhelm absurdity. Congress will be forced to revisit the personhood of corporations and kick down the door of Fed secrecy. With Pluto moving through Capricorn till 2024, and squaring Uranus for much of this decade, the stage is set for a second American Revolution. It need not be violent. What needs radically revised are laws, not the overthrow of a king or president. I expect—or

11 maybe I should say I hope—the coming revolution will be informational, not confrontational. Can Congress get out from under corporate personhood and again prevail over this global-spanning network of banks, which now constitute that corporate person we call the Fed? Or, to put the question another way, can Congress persons forego the bribes of corporate campaign contributions and nationalize the Fed? Can Congress return us to the intentions of our founders and regain control of corporations and our money system? To study the possibilities astrologically, we could do a dozen or more charts, using only transit-to-natal studies. But since the destiny of the USA as a nation is what’s at stake, I choose to boot up this one: The March 2015 Full Moon at noon hits the USA’s MC, indicating our reputation in the world as well as our national foundation will be emotionally impacted—simultaneous with a grand cross to the USA’s natal Sun-Saturn square formed by Uranus in Aires square Pluto in Capricorn. This grand cross will be within orb from late 2012 but will be most exact by 2015. Economically, we can expect to be at or around the bottom of another great depression at this time. (Search “Grand Cross and Great Depressions by Robert Gover.”) The time will be ripe for tough decisions, based on practical needs.

But which ideological perspective will determine what’s practical and what isn’t? The USA’s natal Moon will be in a grand trine with natal Mars and the Moon’s North Node, indicating the public will be well served. The opposition of T Jupiter to natal Moon isn’t a

12 negative either, as Jupiter will be trine Venus, which will be conjunct Uranus and Mars and sextile the USA’s Moon. Bullheadedness will be damped down by an opposition from Saturn to natal Uranus in Gemini. All in all, my reading is that the outcome of the upcoming clash between global corporate persons will be won by the momentum of democracy. To put it another way, politicians, journalists and the public will be forced by circumstances to grasp how the money system really works. Down through history government leaders and the wealthy have hobnobbed but until Chief Justice Waite declared corporations persons, corporations did not dominated governments. And given the top-down command-and-control nature of corporations, they cannot govern with the consent of the governed. Democracy has been on the rise around the world since the American Revolution, the first one. The above biwheel chart indicates that democratic momentum will prevail, and corporate personhood will become a temporary glitch in the long history of mankind’s dealings with money.