Floods & the secrecy bill

Fri 17 June – Thurs 30 June

Sun in Gemini/ Cancer 21^st; Mercury in Cancer; Venus in Gemini; Mars in Taurus/Gemini 21^st

If the floods have left you reeling – and I don’t only mean the torrential rain-filled rivers that have been inundating the country from Mpumalanga in the north to Mossel Bay in the south, and the planet from Mississippi in the west to China in the east – I mean the flood of information that has been flowing while Sun and Mercury cruised through garrulous Gemini. You are forgiven if it has left you in two minds as to the truth and just what on earth is actually going on on this planet. I mean are they really about to pass the “Protection of Information Bill” aka the “Secrecy Bill”, which goes against South Africa’s constitution and threatens to undermine transparency by criminalizing whistle-blowers who try to expose corruption. Nobel prize winner and Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu, as well as the Nelson Mandela Foundation have called on their countrymen to stand up against it. The poor have a right to know where their millions went during the Arms Deal, bribes and all. I mean the bribes paid to President Zuma by Shaik Shabir which led to the most expensive corruption trial in post-apartheid South Africa and precipitated in the greatest split in the ruling ANC party for forty years.

With the Sun and Mercury now in Cancer the tendency to look to our roots emerges, the need to come to terms with our foundation, our home and hearth, our homeland, our heritage - from the ancestral surname we inherited from our father to the national culture we inherited from our forefathers, a culture currently in the hands of our leaders, the father figures who you would presume are doing their paternal and protective nurturing best to keep us safe as the dependents that we are, dependent on the system handed down to us. A system we hope to hand down to our children and grandchildren to keep them safe too. Does that include unusable, expensive weaponry bought through bribery and corruption by a self-interested ruling party despite rising unemployment, underemployment, poor housing and worse? Does that include lavatory-like football stadia painted a nice shade of elephant white while Fifa make their biggest profits in recorded history off a developing third world country? Does that include an Agenda 21 or so-called blueprint to advance sustainable development, while actually behind such trendy and PC buzzwords lies an agenda to implement centralized control over all human  life. After all, the term ‘sustainable development’ was first coined in 1987 by the vice-president of the world Socialist Party. Not that I have anything against socialism, or its implementation in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We can all see capitalism is currently buckling like a giant pyramid scheme with an over-inflated or puffed-up eye in the capstone, but when its global mission statement looks very much like something reflected in the old Soviet constitution, I begin to wonder… After all when a president like Clinton creates a “Council on Sustainable Development” by executive decree allowing the federal government to go about unopposed in tightening the noose on resources while at the same time Homeland Security laws allow them to lock anyone up who gets in their way without trial, then I begin to wonder just how much more I can say before I hear my own door being knocked down or that of any editor of similar such publications. America knew they were screwed when Clinton came between the Bush’s, and I know the smelly stuff has been flying for a while, but did somebody just turn up the fan speed?