Saturn-Pluto 2020: the era of the Multinational Corporation

Politically, the UK is in disarray. The Prime Minister is barely hanging on at the head of a minority government. And the opposition is headed up by a charismatic leader who wants to take us back to the seventies – to socialist policies that led to the ‘winter of discontent’. There are no new ideas on the table.

And a similar theme is apparent across the western world. The US is being led by a very strange man, full of sound and fury, who was elected on his promise to redress the unemployment caused by globalisation, but who is not able to get anything done. And there was a resurgence of left wing politics, in the form of Bernie Sanders, during last year’s election.

Angela Merkel’s position in Germany, since the election, parallels that of Theresa May in the UK. Her party slumped in the election, and there has been a far-right resurgence (as there has been in the US; in the UK, Brexit has also legitimised elements of the far right.) I predicted at the start of the year that Merkel would go, based on her transits. That hasn’t been the case, but in any case the transits aren’t giving her more than a few years at most.

Spain is in the midst of a constitutional crisis, as Catalonia moves towards declaring independence unilaterally. Greece continues in economic crisis, as it has been for years. And France in its desperation has elected an untested youngster as President (after a far-right resurgence in its election), much as Obama was elected on a huge wave of hope in 2008. At best these Redeemers, like Obama, don’t get much done. Already Macron’s popularity has reached record lows for a new President, as the position goes to his head (what would one expect?) and he adopts the trappings of royalty.

Across the West, many people are feeling desperate, as the old economic certainties evaporate. This has led to a rise in political leaders promising redemption. But we are not yet desperate enough to have the dictatorships that are the usual outcome.

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Astrologically, we are at the end of the square from Uranus to Pluto, and awaiting the conjunction of Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn in 2020. This square has torn apart the old stability, and the root of the problem, as far as I can see, is globalisation, along with wealth moving from West to East. In the West, as a consequence, we have built up huge debts, while generations have been consigned to unemployment.

Saturn-Pluto will be an affirmation of the new world order that is coming into being, while its sign of Capricorn has a particular emphasis on the powers of big corporations and government.

With the lack of new ideas, and with Saturn-Pluto being just over 2 years away, it is starting to look like what we have now will be the new norm. I asked myself the other day, what is the presiding political force in the world? And I think it is the multinational corporations, in the West, at any rate. And I think this will be the principal meaning of the new Saturn-Pluto cycle: an era in which big corporations rule the world. That is why the governments have no new ideas, and why they are so ineffective: it is because they are increasingly no longer in charge. Our democracies merely give an illusion of control.

The last Saturn-Pluto cycle, which began in 1982, started this process. It was the era when Margaret Thatcher ‘freed’ the markets, took away the rules that had been sensibly introduced from the 1930s onwards. And America soon followed suit. It led to these ongoing bubbles and crashes, because unrestrained greed is not a good principle on which to run an economy. And it led to the increasing power of the corporations and the financial institutions that often own them.

But it’s not ‘them’. Let us not make the mistake of thinking there is some dark force ruling the world that is not ourselves. That is the basic mistake, based on simple psychological projection, of conspiracy theorists. 

It gives institutions more power than they have, and ourselves less. It is usually rooted in a feeling of powerlessness and issues around (male) authority. After all, it is the shareholders who run the big corporations. And the biggest shareholders are often the pension funds. My pension, your pension (if we have them)! At any rate, it is the man or woman in the street. People have the power to switch pension providers. Or not use Google. For example.

But that is not the way humanity works on a collective level. We feel powerless, and we want simple certainties and to be told what to think. This makes us feel secure. And the big corporations, and the governments they (effectively) run, are only too happy to provide that.

What is the principal function of a government? Panem et circenses, bread and circuses. Appeasement. We don’t realise just how controlled we are. What the government and the big corporations need are wealth producers who don’t rock the boat. (Student debt is very effective at tying people in to this system.) People who work hard and conform to the collective ethic feel good about themselves, they belong, they are respectable: and they feel even better about themselves in comparison to the people who aren’t like that: the losers, the unemployed, the disabled, the third world, foreigners, you name it. This is the not very pretty shadow of ‘respectability’. We all have some of this.

But it’s always been like this, to a greater or lesser degree. There are periods, like the 60s (and its Uranus-Pluto conjunction) when something else comes in that stirs things up for a while, and then we go back to our sleep.

We have just had things stirred up again by the Uranus-Pluto square. And there seemed to be different possibilities for a while. The free speech and level playing field of the internet. The occupy protests. The Arab uprisings against western-controlled puppet governments.

But I think much of that is closing down again, for now. I’m not being dystopian. It’s just how these huge collectives that we now live in work. Orwell was right, if you think of governments and multinationals as the same thing.

It is because of globalisation that the corporations are able to have even more power: even empires like the US and the EU are increasingly unable to control them. Look at what a struggle it has been for the EU to try and control Google, for example. And if you push them too hard, they’ll just take their business, or favours, elsewhere.

So I think this is the Saturn-Pluto era we are entering: an era in which the world is run by the big corporations. It is already happening. And the big corporations do not care about people. If they did, they would be at a competitive disadvantage. The individuals within them may care, but the organisation itself cannot afford to. That is why you get psychopaths in charge, who can be very good at appearing to care.

So the gig economy, in which people have less or no job security, is here to stay. The rising inequality is here to stay. And the greater ability to keep an eye on people and influence them, through mass surveillance and data collection, is just beginning. This will be the new Saturn-Pluto norm.

And of course, the coming AI revolution, in which the mass of humanity will be increasingly dispensible, will cement a world that is run and owned by the privileged few. In which people live brainwashed by the virtual reality of the internet.

But that will happen under Pluto in Aquarius, ‘the empowerment of the robots’. The last time Pluto was there, in the late 1700s, we saw the first wave of mechanisation, the Industrial Revolution. But we also saw rebellion against that, for Aquarius is a sign of rebellion.

Pluto enters Aquarius in 2023. I don’t think we will take this new world lying down. The neo-Luddites. That is where I have hope.