Remembering Kennedy

Friday marked a sombre anniversary in American history. It was one of those days that remains as a sharp memory. It was the day in 1963 that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. It was 12:30 in the afternoon. In North Carolina it was 1:30 on a Friday afternoon. I was in the 1st grade and we had finished lunch not long before. The announcement came over the intercom. The teachers were in shock and tears. We students didn’t really know what had happened, except that it was bad. What was an assassination? The teacher had to explain it to us, after she composed herself. Shortly thereafter we were all sent home. Today, I am remembering Kennedy and his legacy, as are many in the US. Next year will mark another important milestone for the US, and we will get to why later.

Kennedy’s assassination was a coup. There is no other word for it. His death changed the course of the nation for decades after, taking us to where we are today in the US. Why I call it a coup will become clear as we go along. I am not alone in that conclusion. Every US President since has toed a certain line, and been hobbled, really. We don’t have to go over the details of the assassination. That has been covered endlessly since, with claims and counter-claims, obfuscation and outright lies, many theories about who committed the vile act, to the point where most Americans have come to the conclusion that it was the result of a conspiracy. And a lone gunman killed Kennedy? Right. And Epstein killed himself. There are eerie parallels. But that is another story.

What we want to cover here is what his death meant for the US and why he was killed, not so much who did it, although we will get to that, too. We want to look at the meaning for two reasons: Firstly, he was elected in a Metal (White) Rat year. Next year (2020) is such a year, and there is a presidential election. Why that matters is that important decisions are taken by US Presidents during those years, with policies that have/had the capacity to change the direction of the nation. But here is the thing: All of those Presidents so far have died in office.

So, who were these Presidents, elected in Metal Rat years, who died in office, and how did they die?

  • William Henry Harrison (1840): Died of illness. Ran on a platform of re-establishing the Bank of the US (State-owned central bank, liquidated the year after), and on a pledge to seriously reform executive appointments, a legacy of Jackson’s corruption.
  • William McKinley (1900): Assassinated. Presided over the expansion of American territory from the Spanish-American war and was seen as the President presiding over the start of the American empire. He is usually greatly underestimated, having been followed and overshadowed by Teddy Roosevelt.
  • JFK (1960): Assassinated. His legacy will be put forward in due course.

There have actually been seven Presidents who died in office. Aside from the three above, there was Zachary Taylor (1850), Lincoln (1865), Garfield (1881), Warren G. Harding (1923) and FD Roosevelt (1945). Two of those – Garfield and Lincoln – were assassinated. Being the POTUS can have its drawbacks. The other Metal Rat year in US history was 1780, and the US was in the grips of its Revolutionary War. There was no President that year, but there were some key battles that were won by the Americans in that year.

Kennedy’s presidency was elevated to that of a myth. His time in the White House came to be known as ‘Camelot’, the appellation given by his wife, Jackie Kennedy, soon after his death. The mythological reference stuck. It was an effort to lift the public mood after the grief over the event. But was his presidency that legendary, or was it lacklustre? Understanding that will take us to why he was killed.

Kennedy came to power on the heels of the McCarthy era of the ‘50s in the US, with echoes of what we are seeing today with the demonization of Russia and all the fear mongering over the rise of socialist sentiments in the US. Apparently now Russia is to blame for everything that goes wrong in the US. But that ignores what goes on in the nation’s own back yard. Just what were his policies, then, and why were they enough to get him killed? Here’s a brief outline:

  • He was anti-imperialist, and was against American involvement in the Iranian coup of 1953 and sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians after the creation of Israel
  • He had a vision of a ‘New Frontier’ for the US: “…a future that provided better housing and transportation for a new America; an America that supporting everyone from the farmers that kept the nation fed to the families living on the breadline. Hospitals, libraries, food stamps, and social security improvements were all on the agenda. It was an America that would actively work towards disarmament, while pushing to explore a universe that lay beyond our skies and in the space above it.” Who would be against that?
  • He sought rapprochement and cooperation with the Soviets in a number of areas, further seeking to mutually develop the poorer parts of the world, in what would have been an ‘international New Deal’
  • He wanted to break up the CIA, “in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds”.
  • He had begun to pull the troops out of Southeast Asia, with a complete withdrawal by 1965. That would have left no US footprint in Southeast Asia.
  • He introduced Bill 11110, creating a silver-backed currency that would have bypassed the privately-owned central banking system (Federal Reserve) for the 1st time since 1913.

To a progressive, these all sound like sound and good policies. Think where we would be today in the US had those been allowed to go forward. This isn’t being idealistic either. These are the sorts of policies that China and Russia are actively pursuing now, and have been for at least two decades. So, why would anyone disagree with them? Many Americans want those same sorts of policies instituted. To answer that, we go to the chart of the US. The chart is below (bigger):

There is a powerful aspect in the US chart that describes quite a bit about the actions of Washington today and what we might call the ‘deep state’, otherwise known as the military-industrial-congressional-surveillance state (Eisenhower’s MIC). In other words, it is the corporate private-enterprise state that underpins our current governmental system, speaking as an American. That aspect is the Sun/Saturn square. The late Grant Lewi perhaps described it best:

“You have ambition strongly marked, a sense of your own dignity and worth, and a determination to make the world recognize you. You have a tremendous inner drive, together with a well-formed purpose… You take advantage of every twist and turn of circumstance. A sort of shrewd hardness develops with the years, and the way of the world is an open book to you. You are steady, calm, persistent, wary, suspicious, and skepticala somewhat Machiavellian position…(somewhat?!) The danger is always that pride and an inability to flex with later circumstances will cause your downfall. You stick to the ship till it sinks, less from principle than from pride, and go down with flying colors, arrogant and defiant to the end…”

That is descriptive enough and pretty well describes the attitude of Washington in its foreign and domestic policies. But there is more. That aspect forms the base of a ‘finger of the world’ aspect with the Moon, outlined in the chart, which describes emotional depression, emotional inhibitions, fear, feelings of inferiority and increasing loneliness. Fear is used to great effect in motivating the US psyche. The Moon rules the 8th house of the chart – death, regeneration and international banking. And now we get to probably the best part.

Saturn rules the 2nd house of self-esteem and domestic finances. It is posited in the 10th house (national esteem and the sitting government). Saturn also rules reactionaries. We have the two rulers of the banking sectors in the US in that finger of the world, and they are in hard aspect to the Sun in the chart (leadership in general), the latter ruling the 9th house (foreign relations, the judiciary and foreign trade, as well as national ideals). And, the Sun is in Cancer, which is great for family relations, but it also crawls into its shell at the first sign of danger and tends toward isolationism.

So, in effect, when that aspect pattern dominates in the chart, as it appears to be doing now, we have reactionaries in control of the government, and reactions against any sort of policy that favors the public welfare, at the same time being very controlling in its foreign relations and trade. Hence, we see things like the trade war with China, sanctions against numerous nations and IMF debt slavery foisted on unsuspecting or desperate nations.

But there is another side to that US Sun. It is also conjunct the two benefics, Venus and Jupiter, giving a very high idealism, a positive outlook, an expansive vision and quite a humanistic turn, that is, when it dominates. That was Kennedy. It is also in the 7th house, which speaks of forming partnerships instead of coercive relations, given the planets involved. In the past we have seen the push-pull between the two, Jupiter and Saturn.

When the two combinations work in tandem they produce the astounding wealth that the nation achieved and which grew the middle class in the US to be the envy of the world. That began to be eroded with the onset of the ‘70s, the introduction of fiat currency, the petro-dollar and the first rumblings of what was to become neoliberal economics.

The saving grace in the chart is the Jupiter rulership of the Sagittarian Ascendant, representing the public mood and the general outlook of the nation. In the past, the US was seen as the ‘can-do’ nation, where nothing was impossible, with big ideas and an all-embracing outlook, signified in the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your hungry,” etc…).

FDR represented the Venus/Jupiter on the US Sun, with his New Deal and the United Nations. And JFK followed in his footsteps, until he got cut down. And what was FDR’s vision, lest we forget?:

Roosevelt was of the view that the “Big Four”, consisting of the US, Britain, Soviet Union and China, should all have an equal seat at the table for discussing a post-WW II world. The plan under Roosevelt was that these nations, under the principles of the Atlantic Charter, were to be responsible for the formation of a United Nations, which would oversee the banishment of colonialism world-wide and would bring the power of technological advancement to all nations in its place. Roosevelt was of the view that all nations should be supported in their development in order to ensure lasting peace and avoid another world war

Oh yes, and a fully regulated banking system, with consumer protection, and semi-socialism, with American characteristics. There is that dirty word. We like to call it ‘democratic socialism’ these days. It sounds nicer. As soon as Roosevelt died, the imperialists in Washington and the UK, the latter under under Churchill, took over. As soon as Kennedy was killed, they did the same with his proposed legacy. It was quickly forgotten, and Vietnam became an American nightmare. All of our wars since have gone the same way. But then, winning them isn’t the point of having them these days.

JFK’s Ascendant was on the US Saturn. His vision (the rising sign) caused great angst among the more Saturnine factions of American society – the bankers, the bureaucrats, ‘the establishment’, the arms manufacturers. In addition, his Pluto was on the US Venus, the latter ruling the 10th house, and his leadership style was thus seen as subversive to the existing model of what the powers-that-be thought should be the ‘presidential model’ – a more passive, more ‘Venus in Cancer’ approach – promoting the American dream (owning one’s own home and a car or two in every garage), so long as it doesn’t interfere with Wall Street. The role of the President, as seen by the MIC, has been described in an interview with Jim Garrison, New Orleans DA in the Clay Shaw trial, as follows:

“The President of the United States is a transient official in the regard of the warfare conglomerate. His assignment is to act as master of ceremonies in the awarding of posthumous medals, to serve when needed as a salesman for the military hardware manufacturers and to speak as often as possible about the nation’s desire for peace. He is not free to trespass on the preserve of the war interests, nor even to acknowledge that such an organism exists.”

Now, the US is fully in the grips of the Sun/Saturn square. Billionaires rule the nation. Public welfare is OK as long as it doesn’t hurt the corporate bottom line, the mainstream media reports what the moneyed class wants us to hear, and we essentially have a corporate aristocracy instead of a democracy.

“…America has become a two-party, one-ideology, dictatorship. This is what happens when billionaires control a country. It produces the type of foreign policies the country’s billionaires want, rather than what the public actually need. This is America’s Government, today. It’s drastically different than what America’s Founders had hoped. Instead of its representing the states equally with two Senators for each, and instead of representing the citizens equally, with proportional per-capita representation in the U.S. House, and instead of yet a third system of the Electoral College for choosing the Government’s Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief, it has become thoroughly corrupted to being, in effect, just one-dollar-one-vote — an aristocracy of wealth controlling the entire Government — exactly what the Founders had waged the Revolution in order to overthrow and prevent from ever recurring: a dictatorial aristocracy…”

This is all just conspiratorial talk, right? You might be wondering, then, who killed Kennedy, and why? It is fairly obvious, really. The CIA/MIC had the most to lose if he was allowed to live and continue his policies – to actually act presidential, as the chief executive. No President since has actually done so to any great degree.

Kennedy made powerful enemies. The powers-that-were at the time couldn’t have him going around breaking up their bread-and-butter organizations, making peace in the world, giving other nations the tech to value-add to their own resources and actually empowering a populace, or – blasphemy! – have us working in cooperation with communists?! Now, could they? The man had to be stopped. So, conspiracy? You tell me. But at the time, after people started to question the official narrative of his killing, the CIA directed the media to begin labelling such talk ‘conspiracy theory’. (See also here.) A case of blaming others for what one does oneself.

The statement was made at the start of this piece that Kennedy’s assassination was a coup. Does the US chart show it? The ‘assassination chart’, which is the US chart with directions, is below (bigger):

Yes, the chart is a bit messy. I’ll clean it up at some point, but the directed midpoints tell a clear story. Of particular note are the natal midpoints to Venus, the ruler of the 10th (the President). We see the death axis (Mars/Saturn), the illness axis (Saturn/Neptune) and the revolution axis (Uranus/Pluto) all there. That is quite a combination of midpoints, and represents at the same time the extreme power the office can wield, as well as the powers that can be arrayed against it. One of the more interesting interpretations of the Uranus/Pluto midpoint is “putting the gun to someone’s head”. Regardless of the planet at those midpoints, it represents a truly revolutionary potential and also a terrible responsibility. It has exhibited both at varying times.

On the day of Kennedy’s assassination there was a direction of the Saturn/Uranus midpoint to the nation’s Venus, at the same time activating all those aforementioned midpoints. Saturn and Uranus, the past and the future, clashed, and the future was snuffed out, at least for the next decades. The more fatal meaning of the Saturn/Uranus reads as, “the use of force, interventions in one’s destiny, the limitation of freedom, violent people.” Transiting Saturn was sesquisquare the nation’s Venus that day, showing the heaviness of the national mood and the pain of the event, as well as the stifling of the office. And the progressed Moon (ruling the 8th house), was squaring the Meridian axis from the 1st house. It was a day of destiny for the United States.

Then, there was a direction of the Sun/Uranus midpoint to the Midheaven, one of the ‘revolution midpoints’, showing sudden upsets, emotional upheavals, and is connected with catastrophes and accidents, sudden setbacks and rebellions.

But perhaps the most telling factor in the chart, coming together with all the others (and there is much more we could say) was the transit of Pluto to the midpoint of the Sun/Saturn square, which showed the subversive action taken by the people represented by the square, described before, also pointing to inhibitions, hereditary afflictions, karma and separations. And the methods used? – those are shown by the Mars/Pluto direction to Saturn: the tendency to proceed in a ruthless and brutal manner. By the next month after the event, the progressed Moon was opposite the US Venus, and the coup was then complete. Johnson was ensconced, cowed and compliant. Vietnam was escalated.

Why is all this important, then, having happened almost 60 years ago? That goes back to the Metal Rat year, the year of important decisions. The world is changing drastically and quickly. True there are rebellions in many nations, but they are rebellions against what many would call Pax Americana, against corruption in their respective regimes, calls for a better life, calls for what JFK and FDR would have wanted for them. But more importantly, in this election year as in the last, there are calls within a very significant percentage of the American public for a re-examination and re-implementation of FDR’s and JFK’s policies. We see the same sort of sentiments rising in the UK, with an important election next month, and throughout Western Europe.

Suppose someone like Bernie Sanders were to be elected. Given all the preceding, how far would he get? Especially given the make-up of the US Congress? And if Trump is re-elected? Well, we see what he has done. In increasing and approving pay-outs to the Pentagon, support for repressive regimes, war against China and so forth, he has toed the line like every President since Kennedy. The only cure for what ails the US will be for Jupiter to take over via the US Ascendant, speaking symbolically. The last time that happened was during the Vietnam War. It would take a revolution. No one man or administration will change such a deeply entrenched system as we have in the MIC.

Frankly, no such revolution is showing in the US chart in the next couple of years. However, this election (3 Nov 2020) will cause deep questioning in the American psyche. There will be a direction of Pluto to the US Midheaven then, and we will see scenes similar in the US to what we have witnessed thus far in the Brexit fandango in the UK. And near the following election, the directed Pluto will square the US Venus and thereby all the associated midpoints. We may have to wait a few more years for the people to have finally had enough and then to demand the changes they seek.

I have often wondered what America would be like had Kennedy survived and gone on to fulfil a second term, and he likely would have. No Vietnam. No endless wars. No CIA. Great developments in Africa. Probably no 1967 war and Israel with its two-state solution ensconced. It’s not so far-fetched. Yes, there would have been stiff resistance to those policies. Probably not all of them would have been successful. But who knows? Another chance is coming, though. There is also the chance of an even darker future. I prefer the former over the latter.

Kennedy was no white knight. He was far from perfect. He, too, had to toe a certain line and make deals with devils to get anything done. Yes, he was idealistic. But then, that is America at its best, coupled with the realism of experience. I remember well that day in 1963. I also remember a kinder, secure and prosperous nation. I have seen it slide, too. The next President, whoever it is, has a huge task before him/her. Whoever that person is, without the support of enough of the nation, the US will continue its slide further and further from the ideals of the Founders. We hold the thought that the soul of the US will prevail in these intervening years, the soul as represented in its people – the majority, instead of the few.

Featured pic from JFK Library

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