The Cassandra Crossing was a disaster film of the mid-seventies. The plot concerns a terrorist on the run who boards a Continental train, unaware that, when he recently infiltrated a secret laboratory in the World Health Organization, he was infected with a contagious killer plague. Soon, people aboard the train are coming down with the horrendous virus. In the corridors of power, Burt Lancaster plots to divert the train to an abandoned concentration camp where the passengers can be quarantined, aware of the fact that the train will have to traverse the Cassandra Crossing - an old abandoned crossing with a dangerous, long unused bridge that's just waiting for a reason to collapse. In his mind, it is better to sacrifice 1,000 lives, instead of spreading the virus all over Europe. Richard Harris, a doctor on board the doomed train, believes those who are sick, are recovering, and he pushes for a different solution. The outcome is, as usually, heroic: Sofia Lauren pulls the emergency brake minutes before the crossing; half the train collapses at the bridge and half the passengers survive.
A dangerous crossing and an intriguing drama of highly sophisticated apocalyptic picturing, in which the spectator might want to investigate who was Cassandra. Well, Cassandra daughter of Priam, the king of Troy, was a prophetess, and the film's plot is actually the sum of astrological predictions for the year 2010.
The Organization
In the West, bankers, industrialists and politicians who, during the past decades, have obsessively pursued the goal of endless economic growth without ever assessing the real benefits they derive from that growth. Consumer spending became the biggest driver of the economies and was combined with poor political planning and lack of vision for the future. The offstage financial support of political parties by multinationals became an institution even in countries, which hadn't a tradition of this kind - the Siemens case in Greece is an example. In this context, as the sole opposition some poor environmentalists appeared, who are concerned more with the damage being done to wild life than with that being done to the human mind through exposure to degrading and soulless work. In the East, a new generation of politicians, who, immediately after the collapse of the communist block, ran towards the exploitation of political power in the new-born democracies and became rich in a few years irrespective of their orientation - left, center or right.
The Intruders
To my point of view, Pluto in Scorpio, in the decades 1980 and 1990, established the hidden power of the banking system and created a class of greedy "insiders" who, gambling huge amounts of money in an internationalized economy, ended up by creating the worldwide Bank Crisis. Moreover, international institutions like the EU, and their directives, became the alibi for the failures of inept national governments.
The Contamination
Set up as the supreme national objective, economic growth has promoted greed, impatience, ruthlessness and envy, destroying those fundamental virtues without which society cannot function satisfactorily. Now everybody speaks of the deepest economic crisis in the last eighty years. Its symptoms are common in all States: double digit unemployment, crisis in real estate, shrinkage of bank lending, bankruptcies, bank insolvencies (six new this week in the USA), reductions in GNP, high levels of household debt.
The Crossing
Cassandra was a prophet of doom and, despite the official proclamations that the crisis is fading, so far I have not found a single astrologer who does not believe that the worst is still ahead. The so called Cardinal Crisis of the year 2010, consisted of the square Saturn from Libra to Pluto in Capricorn and accentuated by the conjunction of Jupiter/Uranus in Aries (June 2010), will make the coming year as one of the most eventful years of the early 21st century. Saturn opposing Jupiter, from 2010 to 2012 on the Aries/Libra axis, reveals that the general climate of business contraction will continue. The Saturn/Pluto square shows an extended cycle of power struggles within business, political and professional organizations. Unfortunately, job cuts will not stop and the banking crisis, at the heart of the economic depression, will continue to be in force during 2010. Economic recessions in general often result in lower wages, higher unemployment and poor development of human capital. Adding insult to injury, Neptune, from the year 2012 onwards, will move into Pisces opposing Virgo - the sign of labor. This position signifies that in the next twenty-five years the working relations and the notion of work, as they are conceived today, will be transformed. This happened around 1850, when the massive emigration to the USA, on the one hand, and the events of 1848 in Europe, on the other, prepared the working class of industrial revolution.
The, not so happy, end
This T-square of mid-2010 introduces alarming mundane events and, during the next decade, it will lead to an expelling of long-standing political and business establishments. Next year's Cardinal Crisis lasts into 2012, and from that year, the coming Uranus/Pluto square begins with seven squares over a three-year period from 2012 to 2015. All these show high levels of stress on many nations and historic geopolitical implications. History, once again, is coming roaring down the road.
