2012, May 19 Saturday History Call

2012, May 19 Saturday History Call

Opening Meditation: Cheryl Croci
In preparation for the eclipse on Sunday, May 20th
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R: what is happening now has not happened for thousands and thousands of years!
● Jeremy Scahill was on Bill Maher's Friday night show: the war criminals need to be arrested
● Young Turks: said the same thing
● Camp Loveway: talking about the new moon, etc and ramifications for the arrests
● they were asking callers what was happening in their lives, about the eclipse, and what they are doing re: occupying heart, or other things –
● whatever slight move anyone makes towards the healing of humanity might not seem like much, but it's an avalanche – for each act of compassion, kindness, overwhelms the darkness
● this day in 1519, the people of Mayan and Aztec nations were expecting Quetzalcoatl, and got the Spaniards and Pesarao instead
● The people were expecting Q and got something different: was 1519 the right date for arrive of Q or is it now?
T: It was the right date, but the ankle biters took the event over. Tomorrow is the big portal and represents the return of power to the people from the empire. Time to talk of teaching only love.
R: got on the air & talked of Merk and the Lady of the Sun and the 14 Kumaras who showed up
● what he sees is affecting everyone: the energies are so overwhelming
● spoke with KOS today – it's like a miracle, as R does not talk to him often
KOS: what I have been doing in terms of keeping this man and his family alive
● the hate speech is increasing at such a deep level
● He said of the Travyon Martin case that the police force in that town needs to be gutted
● As need to happen in to Oakland & the Anonymous call being about systematic ethnic cleansing in US – has to do with the ankle biters in Congress
● KOS talked of Bono who got his share of Facebook and will share his proceeds with the people in Africa to change that story – paying it forward: the least among us is the most important story!
R: heard the Santa Fe Mayor David Cos talking of food banks in Santa Fe, how they help those with nothing; the people at the food banks know who Rama is; people understand they need to get to a more conscious level of what they eat; Mayor talking about local organic food for homeless people!!!
T: in 1980s Brezinski invited Bono to be head of IMF; Bono said no; he out $ millions of his own money into Facebook; when it went public he got $1.5 billion to take to Africa
● Bono's work got the attention of many; he is Irish, part of the Haplo group, Sananda did walk through the corridor of the Haplo groups by way of Egypt to Mt Carmel to Babylon to Greece to the Iberian Peninsula – groups of the people who were the followers of the day stayed on the different lands as they travelled & built the children's teachings in those places – each group is a study in itself
● The Iberian Celts are related to Sananda; Greek people an extension of the Egyptians; his original orientation was Ethiopia which is the whole continent of Africa before it separated from Pangea; In Mu there were off planet beings that nuked ancient Lemuria too
R: remembers vividly – some of the ankle biters where the Elohim who turned to the dark side
T: the ankle biters have more abilities by far than any of the Annunaki
● Rick Scott [Gov of Florida] is an ankle biter, like Brezinski [info from KOS]
R: KOS said that Zimmerman's father was coerced into saying it was not Trayvon Martin's voice when he was crying for help; KOS said this entire police force is going up in flames as this was part of a premeditated plan to kill this child long before this night: 49 calls to this station – they made him a sacrifice they wanted to get away with
● KOS said lack of communication has to do with the bigger story that we see on the big screen - ● the angry people who feel Obama has not supported them
T: Re: Trayvon – KOS said Rick Scott is connected with another ankle biter - G Bush Sr, Jeb Bush, Marvin Bush;
● this is revenge of the Sith; even all the stuff with Ref Wright – thinking of everything they can as they see they are closer and closer to the end.
● Like McCain when Barack had all members of Congress in a committee for 7.5 hours to get the health plan passed – all of them were there with a big stack of stuff hours to get the health plan passed:
●Barack said “I thought I might just repeat and remind you, I AM the President” - they were just sitting there acting like gods
● they know they have not been successful in getting rid of him, they will be gone!
T: Hillary in Syria – another car bomb, huge – 9 people killed
● Koffi Annan and head of peacekeeper troops – it was one of their intelligence bases
● Al Assaud has been saying for a long time there is a terrorist besides me doing it – it's Hillary
●they are identifying her as Al Queda – all CIA – she is covert status CIA, Moussaud
● the Nazi Scherff family [George Sr, George Jr. Jeb, Marvin, Neil Bush] & Black Pope are all involved
● QE2 is the false queen - usurped the true Stone of Scone; all will be told as Lady Di and Dodi get to tell what they know brings in the Merovingian lineage and Jeshua and Magdalene
R: Teran talking of frequencies and the unique things that are happening in various ways;
● how the big folks in the big stories have violated their oaths of office and enhanced their bank accounts with quintillions of dollars.
● Brings up the financial fiasco: Teran talked about we should not condemn Greece for what they did, and we should help them. Time to forgive the debt, begin again –
●where NESARA comes in and many economists are bringing this up – Dr Robbi Battros
an economist from India who comes on Thom Hartmann's show speaks of this; he brings in Deepok Chopra who says we need to go to a wisdom economy, intellectual ideas – brings in movie Thrive
R: asked KOS what about story of Will Smith and his son and the Situation Room: Obama said “I can neither confirm nor deny if that conversation happened, but if it did happen, it happened in this room.”
● KOS said “what else do you need, sir?”
● R: “My briefing orders from the Captain; it is time”
● KOS said “I will be giving you your briefing orders momentarily and I'm not kidding!
Obama is representing the Office of AA Michael, Planetary Prince of this Universe which is huge! ● Brings in Captain Ashtar, Lord Sananda – this is very very close
●Asked Teran and KOS – can you give me a sliver? What else do you want? If this conversation happened, it happened. Next conversation is How do you like your tea, sir?

Right, Left and Center – Robert Scheer – talked about to Obama's speech about hunger in the world and that he was in tears during the speech One of the most important speech he ever made as it comes from the place of who would Jesus bomb? Who would Jesus deny?
● Brings up the story that Bill Maher brought up on Friday night – a huge, huge, huge misqualified story occurred separating mind and heart: Magic Mittens will not bring up certain information about his past – this brings up the direct connection to the Tribe of Dan & Lucifer & the Mormonites
●Palestine was never Israel and the Admiral was there as were we all – will soon hear about it.
● All this brings in the cosmic story that only a few people talk about – Stan Lee who invented Marvel comics and the X Men gave money to Bill and Hillary's re-inaugeration campaign in '95, 96; also just happened to be the Keen's Savings and Loans story that got re-invented with John McCain
and a string of murders
T: Bobby Brown, Whitney's ex-husband was on to say re-opening Whitney's case
● KOS: Donna Summers was a hit!
●Whitney knew too much that Michael Jackson was alive; so did Donna [she may have been introduced to the circle of lobbyists; unless you play the way they want, you get killed]
● Did Dionne Warwick introduce Whitney to drugs or what? Dionne was also involved with OJ Simpson murder
R: it is a small circle called Hollywood, called CIA and so on and so on
R: the new Battleship movie: a negative connotation of galactics showing up: turning transformation to the negative

T: Mayan calendar: yesterday the blue eagle, today the blue Monkey, CHUEN
●balance needs for work and play; be sensitive to needs of others; practice discernment without becoming mistrustful
● Yesterday was an 8; today is #4 – CAN – about measure - yellow self-existing seed;
definition of form; clarity of form; the 4 primary wave functions: gravity-attraction; electro magnetic radiation; strong force-psychic transmission; weak force-psychic receptivity
●discusses the background of chiropractic & tensile strength

Reading from her notes:
●QE2's Jubilee Lunch: Bahrain's King was invited to dine at Windsor, yet has been under attack for
human rights violations. There was a protest outside the castle – someone said he was a criminal; he has used our chemical warfare devices to kill people in Bahrain
●Still not on intel wires about her stepping down yet still was on a non-descript source
● Queen of Spain did not come due to row over Gibralter
● Also someone from Swaziland
●the Bahraini monarchy is 200 years old
●Falcon 9 failed – a private launch – the high chamber pressure was in engine 5 so the computer program did what it was supposed to do

● autism in children in Mexico
have an app for the computer called find the letter – by touching a key, they can find the letter
●In use for 6 months, there is sp,e success: as the children are completely focused, they remain seated, they are not acting out and they are happy!
●A company called Mind Hug is making the various apps.
● Once the kids master one app, they go to the next one as they build on each other
[60% of boys born in New Jersey are autistic, thanks to the pollution there]
[one in 108 in the US have autism – she explains how – mercury poisoning in the womb space and in the mother's blood – it's in the water & in sea food – both mercury poisoning and radiation in seafood ]
● Soy cannot be a substitute: ALL soy, whether it is modified or not, has anti nutrients that build up in the system and in the blood; they stay lodged in the system and prevents the assimilation of minerals - without the minerals, we cannot absorb other nutrients
– this is a conscious genocide!
●We've been stubborn and everyday people say “Lucky, lucky you that you have time to eat this stuff [ organic food] because we don't have time; I work 3 jobs and barely see my kids much less myself!” It's like living in a gerbil cage , , ,

●Egypt's slums Ashwateat name of “the slum” in Egypt: they are all over Egypt
●dogs, people, kids, rats all live and die together – no street names: means something random
●flimsy houses with no foundation, no plumbing, no water
● anyone who watched Oprah on her own site OWN: she went to slums in India – a 6x6 room – she saw a family of 6 people – had a toilet for 1000 people in a section; it was clean; there was water
● the one in this documentary - 8 people crammed in one room – toilet was in a tiny corner; waste was put out between the houses which causes the collapse of the houses
● Reporter: smell is unbearable – want to throw up after filming for 4 hours – no sewer system – yet a reality for decades
● People think money has been stolen from the people of Egypt; only hope is that Egypt's next president will do something to change the conditions: children don't go to school – no shoes to start with
● Want running water, basic housing; people's right to freedom, bread,
[a palace to live in the slums of Harlem!!!]
India: further fall in the rupee – talks of wealthy skimming off the money
●further fall will prevent more imports fruits and veggies are 4x more expensive; people starving to death
●80% of India's oil is imported [importing oil from Iran to help the Iranians] fuel prices may also rise if gov't does away with subsidies
Sri Lanka: 3rd anniversary of end of the civil war – will carry out an investigation of rights violations
Bangkok: Red Shirts are singing and dancing in the Thai capital to celebrate the 2nd anniversary of a military crackdown of mass protests and the breaking up of the Red Shirt sit-in; will soon find out if ICC will hear their case brought by the Red Shirt organization against the president who sent in the military to break up the rally and use live ammunition
Bengazi: people going to the polls, first one since Ghaddafi is gone
Italy: student killed in a car bomb, others injured – it's like revenge from the west
Syria: a car bomb explodes in a city – 9 killed, hundreds injured
China: the blind activist is on his way to NY, and his family is with him
●members of his extended family [brother] were half beaten to death by the police
●Last Monday, she saw him talking on the phone to Congress!
DR of Congo: people leaving their homes where gov't soldiers are fighting with the rebels
● The Gov't forces beat us up; we are tormented; they ate our cows and destroyed everything!
● Uganda has opened its borders to these ones – initial challenge has to do with shelter – 8,000+ people are there
● The ICC wants to arrest the General Bosco who started – no one is sure where he is now, though he used to live comfortably in Goma, a town in Eastern Congo where people are mainly Tutsis - Bosco and his men are Tutsies; the people felt safe with them
Yemen: in the capital & other cities, the people are demanding change, freedom and social justice
seems the voices are falling on deaf ears [it's a Hillary operation!]
Sudan & South Sudan: seems they are going to talk about peace

Tara: wherever she listened, she heard the ICC being called in to help – good news
●The people who get these reports are in danger of their lives all the time

Reading: The Great American Bubble Machine by Matt Taibi [SEE BELOW]

Astrology: Richard
● this eclipse also involves Mercury and Jupiter, so the actual physical lineup is from the earth to the moon, to Mercury; behind Mercury is the sun; behind sun is Jupiter. Beyond Jupiter is Alcyone.

● an unusual line-up: earth moon Mercury Sun, Jupiter - all lined up in the direction of the circle of the zodiac in late Taurus, early Gemini

sun = electrical spiritual component
moon= magnetic feeling component
Mercury = operating on mental plane; iwill go into Gemini and continue to work the energies
So we have for next week additional energies
● About half an hour after midnight on east coast, sun will conjunct Mercury
● 8 hours later moon will line up with Jupiter – conjunct
● Sun goes into Gemini at 11:16 am, and Moon catches up and aligns with sun at 7:47 pm
● this is a very unusual connection: glad it's happening in Taurus which is a grounded energy to help us stay grounded and centred for a while longer.
● This changes as we move into Gemini
● Monday could be a little emotional
● We need to remain grounded and centred; as we do and pay no attention to the stories, should be just fine!
● Wed, Thursday – moon in Cancer; it will oppose Pluto in early morning of Thursday
Moon opposing Pluto usually kicks out something
● Friday – moon in Cancer in day; at 6 pm goes into Leo [good time to party: a social aspect!]
● Mercury square Neptune [Divine Wisdom]
● Mercury catches up and conjuncts the sun in 8 days; it will be between Sun and retrograde Venus
the rumours of Venus retrograde in Gemini in early June
on June 3, Mercury in 22 Gemini, trines Saturn – lots of intellectual work to be done in coming times
June 4th - Full moon eclipse; Neptune goes retrograde
June 5th – Venus conjuncts the sun, moon conjuncts Pluto,
● In terms of orbital mechanics: Venus conjuncts the sun every year; but due to the tilt of the orbits, things are always different – last year's sun conjunct Venus event, the sun was higher than Venus
● when Venus crosses the face of the sun, similar to North Node and South Node of the Moon:
● having an eclipse of the sun by Venus [a 120 year event]: the one tomorrow [May 20th ] is an eclipse of the sun by the moon: it's only because of the orientation of the orbit and Venus relative to the sun gives us the 120 year event where Venus eclipses the sun - it won't look like a lunar eclipse because Venus us much further away than the moon
● what it means – the solar spirit has a straight shot through the aura, the electro-magnetic field of Venus and then strikes earth
● think of a small electrical appliance: a blender – plug it in the wall, plug it in for 120 volts
● this is like plugging the blender into the big power plant – 15,000 volts sent across country without a transformer!
● Here we're talking not volts but frequencies – this will be a major download –
● Will be visible in Hawaii, Pacific North west, western Canada, north Asia, Korea, Japan,
● this will happen in the middle of sign of Gemini – 15, 16 degrees
● key word for Gemini is “I think” - it's mutable and slippery: discernment, discrimination – it's a mixing energy Gemini – a wonderful energy for the liars and propaganda - This is the Age of Propaganda
● All the planets are inter connected this week; the Great Stellum
● 3 channels through which the energies are moved downward to us:
● Pluto - Divine love
● Neptune - Divine wisdom – Mercury, Jupiter
● Uranus - works with earth and Saturn
Ri: if have inner dialogue and need to quiet, may be hard, especially in first part of the month
Caller: listening to Richard who is saying left brain, right brain – will this affect in a difficult way people who are bi-polar?
Ri: yes, Gemini is the relationship between right and left brain, even though it is heavily weighted to logic; it could unify many of our bi-polar conditions – we will be able to see both sides of a particular situation – depending on the individual could bring them back to unity, or could to the other way - Divine Will will still be in charge
Caller: working with people who are bi-polar: thinking they will have a bad time till we're over the bump
Ri: yes, until we get past the summer solstice: Gemini brings up indecisiveness: we can think & think & think until our little grey cells are exhausted! If not in synchronicity with the energies, will be worse off: people with nervous conditions are affected - keep a close eye on your clients!
● A good opportunity to exercise self-discipline: the tendency is to off on tangents and re-act and follow impulses – a time to pull in discipline techniques
T: why we pulled in the Serapis Bey material
Caller: interested in that material – people around time of full moon -
a friend had a friend who was bi-polar and committed suicide
Ri: week of 4th will be tricky

Reading: Centre for Media and Democracy releases a new report [SEE BELOW]
R: all of last week, Ed Schultz and John Nichol talking about Scott Walker
● he has a huge defence fund: why? Has blood on his hands

Caller: comments on material in Drudge Report
T: it was Goldman Sachs who got Greece into trouble & then worked to keep it under cover
Caller: what will the energies do?
T: a 1.3 billion country [India] falling off the cliff
● They are lying when they say China is doing well – yet they are inter-dependent with US and they depend on us
● the timing is perfect
● To repeat what Rama has been hearing: Noor, etc [see Friday] – there's a 3 day banking holiday
Caller: we've been through 3 days things before and nothing happened!
T: not so – every time we went through a 3 day time, lots of things happened – couldn't do it all at once – 3 day weekends have been busy – this time, we are poised
Caller: but sees the banks still in place
T: can't do them one at the time- has to be a full frontal take-down
●this was planned before they started in 1979 and knew they would not relent
Caller: generals in Pentagon have local marshals ready to arrest these guys?
T: chances are will need Federal marshals to get help to do this; it's a world- wide operation; these are inter-galactic war criminals & they will go all the way
R: they are like Loci in the movie Thor ; the book The Children of Odin is the basis of the movie - about the Nordics, the galactics with a close relation to the current situation
● Loci is like Lucifer – Mittens is a sad comparison to the real Lucifer
Ri: Loci is a trickster energy; still a lot of slipperiness going on; even though there are lists of people who are to leave their positions, but due to structure of the financial cabal, the light will have to do a sweep and collect them all up in the same week – Gemini a great month to do it, brings up truth
Caller: now G8 is over, will give attention to NATO meeting in Chicago.
● The leaders of the demonstrators were rounded up by law enforcement under the law that was supposed to be struck down – the NDAA
● they did that before it even began : went to where they were staying. Later some got released
T: That's not the whole story
Caller: it was the leaders who were picked up
T: Noam Chomsky's article: everyone is a leader in Occupy: arresting leaders won't stop things
● Concerned about the long distance sonar device – sonar cannon
Caller: another one that they aim at people
T: most equipped, militarized police force in the world – because it's the seat of power of QE2 and Israel– it's the heart of North America! QE2 used Chicago Tribune for that; Mayor is Rahm E
Caller: thought Rahm would be arrested once he left as Obama's advisor?
T: has to happen all at once; also the Occupy movement is critical to
Ra: we have to be the calm, cool cucumbers in the room when Joe the plumber gets excited
Caller: would like to see the energies walking people up
T: change is happening at an internal level in ordinary people
● the dark ones are at the point of internal combustion – love them more; the energies ARE affecting them
● also remember that there is an international warrant out for the Koch bros

T: rt.tv way more outspoken than Amy Goodman!
RI: earlier this week on RT.tv, a lady interviewer interviewed Sybel Edmunds – SE wrote a book, sent it in for redaction; it was not back within the 30 days, so she took it to Russia and published it.
Reading: CMD Releases New Report “ALEC Exposed in Wisconsin:The Hijacking of a State” Watchdog Groups Call for Attorney General Investigation of ALEC Lobbying Activities [SEE BELOW]
Reading: New Moon Solar Eclipse in Gemini: Brothers and Sisters [SEE BELOW]

Audio: interview of Sybel Edmonds, editor of boilingfrogspost.com TO BE LISTENED TO!!!!

What happened about the info to get out there and what they did.
● FBI begged her to take the job after 9/11 – they needed translators – a contract linguist
● In first weeks, she found all kinds of cases – some just bungling, others more serious
● In 1996, FBI Chicago, FBI New Jersey – has high level investigations – discovered high level officials in Congress, Pentagon, Rand Corporation – the agents wanted to turn these cases over to justice department due to what they found
● In 1999, they were told to pursue the congressional aspect as it was leaning more to Republican involvement and leave out the Democrats!
● Then when Bush Jr took over, he ordered ALL FILES be closed
● Main Stream Media portrayed her as a poor petite woman who was fired / whistleblower
● never asked important questions about WHY she was an enemy of the state when she had only been working there for 6 mos! She was only a translation specialist
● Initially story was out by FBI that she was under investigation by FBI
● Idea was to make whistleblowers aberrations
● then Leahy and one other said no that is not so but it took them a while to say so

The Conference Call
T: there are 90 guns for every 100 people in the country – the United States
● There are 100,000 Nazis who were never tried at Nuremberg
● in addition to that the Khazars were encouraged to come here and be raised as Nazis

Caller: about the relationship between the original Constitution and the number of guns in the US today: why, how did this occur?
T: At the beginning of the US, there were no guns in anyone's house: there was a sovereign militia force – and guns were kept in an armoury for a time of need.
Caller: when did that change – after WWII?
T: Not sure exactly

Tara gives the following invocation:
From the point of Light within the Mind of God
Let Light stream forth into the minds of men;
Let Light descend on earth.

From the point of Love within the Heart of God
Let Love stream forth into the hearts of men;
May Christ return to earth.

From the center where the will of God is known
Let purpose guide the little wills of men,
the Purpose that the Masters know and serve.

From the Centre which we call the Race of Men
Let the plan of Light and Love return
And may it seal the door where evil dwells.

Let Light and Love and Power restore the the Plan on Earth
Let Light and Love and Power restore the the Plan on Earth
Let Light and Love and Power restore the the Plan on Earth.

Reading: Signs of Christ copyright 1979, in Flagstaff, AZ ISBN 0-9609710-0-9
this work is respectfully dedicated to Helena Petrova Blavatsky
a collection of writings by Harold Bay???
P 311, Ch 7 The new group of world servers

● Sedona is connected to Lake Titicaca on the same ley line. There's an energy beneath Lake T, & is a stone from another planetary star system which keeps us anchored to that star system
● The article was sent to her by a shaman from the Hopi Tribe – this happened years ago when they were still living with Mark – she also left a crystal that they keep on their altar
All servers must keep alert
the 1st initiation -
new relationships are subjective and may yet have little recognition in phenomenal
● Essenes were ashrams in the physical
● what the writer is describing is a form of the approach of Occupy
● this group is a channel for the 2nd ray love wisdom of the Christ
● Disciples are assembling all over the world – not on the physical plane

After the Conference Call

Music:

T: good news to know that Sybel Edmunds' book is published

Reading: finishes New Moon/Solar Eclipse in Gemini - Brothers and Sisters [SEE BELOW]

Reading: Crop Circle Decoded-Return of the Maya’s Quetzalcoatl on May 20, 2012? [SEE BELOW]
Rama also spoke of a 2 minute video on the same subject

Reading: 2012, May 17 Fire-Eclipse Portal 2012 by Tyberonn [SEE BELOW]

Reading: The Pineal & Crystal Bio Stargate: Mechanics of Law of Belief [SEE BELOW]

Reading: Aluna Joy ~ Receiving Our New Bodies – The Holy Of Holies [SEE BELOW]

Audio: Ancient Aliens: Temples of Gold - Season 3, Episode 4
● One of the subjects is Serapis Bey and the Sphinx
● discussion of source of gold, its value to humanity

Reading: rest of Chapter 2, The Truth Shall Set you Free – Swami Purna
● As knowledge is added to fear, enlightenment ensues.
● Millions of females are fighting against the conditioning of males
● Throughout the world, people are conditioned to think they are fighting for the right.
Eg religious wars, race
● This conditioning prevents people from thinking clearly; people are unable to know what is right.
● The human ego has been deluded by the feeling that it is powerful
● I am the boss, I will be served - enjoys asserting itself
● the sound of a distorted ego, bloated with pride and self-concern
● what is really being shown is the sense of inferiority which creates the need to put on a disguise
● a healthy ego can expand itself, realizing its godlike qualities; evolvement to state of godliness

Closing: Rainbird
4 deer – gentleness, loving

Music: a young girl singing: from PBS Great Perfomances

2010, April 5 The Great American Bubble Machine
From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405

By Matt Taibbi April 5, 2010 3:58 PM ET

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
Invasion of the Home Snatchers
By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …
This article appeared in the July 9, 2009 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.
The Feds vs. Goldman
They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.
If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went — and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long — including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.
BUBBLE #1 The Great Depression
Goldman wasn't always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids —just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to smalltime vendors in downtown Manhattan.
You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman's first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there's really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman’s disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s.
Wall Street's Big Win
This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an "investment trust." Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game.
Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investmenttrust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hogwild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund — which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah — which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.
The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isn't hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred.
In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled "In Goldman Sachs We Trust," the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leveragebased investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market's historic crash; in today's dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion. "It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity," Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. "If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."
BUBBLE #2 Tech Stocks
Fast-forward about 65 years. Goldman not only survived the crash that wiped out so many of the investors it duped, it went on to become the chief underwriter to the country's wealthiest and most powerful corporations. Thanks to Sidney Weinberg, who rose from the rank of janitor's assistant to head the firm, Goldman became the pioneer of the initial public offering, one of the principal and most lucrative means by which companies raise money. During the 1970s and 1980s, Goldman may not have been the planet-eating Death Star of political influence it is today, but it was a top-drawer firm that had a reputation for attracting the very smartest talent on the Street.
It also, oddly enough, had a reputation for relatively solid ethics and a patient approach to investment that shunned the fast buck; its executives were trained to adopt the firm's mantra, "long-term greedy." One former Goldman banker who left the firm in the early Nineties recalls seeing his superiors give up a very profitable deal on the grounds that it was a long-term loser. "We gave back money to 'grownup' corporate clients who had made bad deals with us," he says. "Everything we did was legal and fair — but 'long-term greedy' said we didn't want to make such a profit at the clients' collective expense that we spoiled the marketplace."
But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's cochairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.
Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national clichè that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy — a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline The Committee To Save The World. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy — beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his
old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.
The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than potfueled ideas scrawled on napkins by uptoolate bongsmokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for mega-millions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.
It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.
"Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting guidelines that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public," says one prominent hedge-fund manager. "The company had to be in business for a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took these guidelines and threw them in the trash." Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: "Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share."
The problem was, nobody told investors that the rules had changed. "Everyone on the inside knew," the manager says. "Bob Rubin sure as hell knew what the underwriting standards were. They'd been intact since the 1930s."
Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida who specializes in IPOs, says banks like Goldman knew full well that many of the public offerings they were touting would never make a dime. "In the early Eighties, the major underwriters insisted on three years of profitability. Then it was one year, then it was a quarter. By the time of the Internet bubble, they were not even requiring profitability in the foreseeable future."
Goldman has denied that it changed its underwriting standards during the Internet years, but its own statistics belie the claim. Just as it did with the investment trust in the 1920s, Goldman started slow and finished crazy in the Internet years. After it took a little-known company with weak financials called Yahoo! public in 1996, once the tech boom had already begun, Goldman quickly became the IPO king of the Internet era. Of the 24 companies it took public in 1997, a third were losing money at the time of the IPO. In 1999, at the height of the boom, it took 47 companies public, including stillborns like Webvan and eToys, investment offerings that were in many ways the modern equivalents of Blue Ridge and Shenandoah. The following year, it underwrote 18 companies in the first four months, 14 of which were money losers at the time. As a leading underwriter of Internet stocks during the boom, Goldman provided profits far more volatile than those of its competitors: In 1999, the average Goldman IPO leapt 281 percent above its offering price, compared to the Wall Street average of 181 percent.
How did Goldman achieve such extraordinary results? One answer is that they used a practice called "laddering," which is just a fancy way of saying they manipulated the share price of new offerings. Here's how it works: Say you're Goldman Sachs, and Bullshit.com comes to you and asks you to take their company public. You agree on the usual terms: You'll price the stock, determine how many shares should be released and take the Bullshit.com CEO on a "road show" to schmooze investors, all in exchange for a substantial fee (typically six to seven percent of the amount raised). You then promise your best clients the right to buy big chunks of the IPO at the low offering price — let's say Bullshit.com's starting share price is $15 — in exchange for a promise that they will buy more shares later on the open market. That seemingly simple demand gives you inside knowledge of the IPO's future, knowledge that wasn't disclosed to the day trader schmucks who only had the prospectus to go by: You know that certain of your clients who bought X amount of shares at $15 are also going to buy Y more shares at $20 or $25, virtually guaranteeing that the price is going to go to $25 and beyond. In this way, Goldman could artificially jack up the new company's price, which of course was to the bank's benefit — a six percent fee of a $500 million IPO is serious money.
Goldman was repeatedly sued by shareholders for engaging in laddering in a variety of Internet IPOs, including Webvan and NetZero. The deceptive practices also caught the attention of Nicholas Maier, the syndicate manager of Cramer & Co., the hedge fund run at the time by the now-famous chattering television asshole Jim Cramer, himself a Goldman alum. Maier told the SEC that while working for Cramer between 1996 and 1998, he was repeatedly forced to engage in laddering practices during IPO deals with Goldman.
"Goldman, from what I witnessed, they were the worst perpetrator," Maier said. "They totally fueled the bubble. And it's specifically that kind of behavior that has caused the market crash. They built these stocks upon an illegal foundation — manipulated up — and ultimately, it really was the small person who ended up buying in." In 2005, Goldman agreed to pay $40 million for its laddering violations — a puny penalty relative to the enormous profits it made. (Goldman, which has denied wrongdoing in all of the cases it has settled, refused to respond to questions for this story.)
Another practice Goldman engaged in during the Internet boom was "spinning," better known as bribery. Here the investment bank would offer the executives of the newly public company shares at extra-low prices, in exchange for future underwriting business. Banks that engaged in spinning would then undervalue the initial offering price — ensuring that those "hot" opening-price shares it had handed out to insiders would be more likely to rise quickly, supplying bigger first-day rewards for the chosen few. So instead of Bullshit.com opening at $20, the bank would approach the Bullshit.com CEO and offer him a million shares of his own company at $18 in exchange for future business — effectively robbing all of Bullshit's new shareholders by diverting cash that should have gone to the company's bottom line into the private bank account of the company's CEO.
In one case, Goldman allegedly gave a multimillion-dollar special offering to eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who later joined Goldman's board, in exchange for future i-banking business. According to a report by the House Financial Services Committee in 2002, Goldman gave special stock offerings to executives in 21 companies that it took public, including Yahoo! cofounder Jerry Yang and two of the great slithering villains of the financial-scandal age — Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and Enron's Ken Lay. Goldman angrily denounced the report as "an egregious distortion of the facts" — shortly before paying $110 million to settle an investigation into spinning and other manipulations launched by New York state regulators. "The spinning of hot IPO shares was not a harmless corporate perk," then-attorney general Eliot Spitzer said at the time. "Instead, it was an integral part of a fraudulent scheme to win new investment-banking business."
Such practices conspired to turn the Internet bubble into one of the greatest financial disasters in world history: Some $5 trillion of wealth was wiped out on the NASDAQ alone. But the real problem wasn't the money that was lost by shareholders, it was the money gained by investment bankers, who received hefty bonuses for tampering with the market. Instead of teaching Wall Street a lesson that bubbles always deflate, the Internet years demonstrated to bankers that in the age of freely flowing capital and publicly owned financial companies, bubbles are incredibly easy to inflate, and individual bonuses are actually bigger when the mania and the irrationality are greater.
Nowhere was this truer than at Goldman. Between 1999 and 2002, the firm paid out $28.5 billion in compensation and benefits — an average of roughly $350,000 a year per employee. Those numbers are important because the key legacy of the Internet boom is that the economy is now driven in large part by the pursuit of the enormous salaries and bonuses that such bubbles make possible. Goldman's mantra of "long-term greedy" vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.
The market was no longer a rationally managed place to grow real, profitable businesses: It was a huge ocean of Someone Else's Money where bankers hauled in vast sums through whatever means necessary and tried to convert that money into bonuses and payouts as quickly as possible. If you laddered and spun 50 Internet IPOs that went bust within a year, so what? By the time the Securities and Exchange Commission got around to fining your firm $110 million, the yacht you bought with your IPO bonuses was already six years old. Besides, you were probably out of Goldman by then, running the U.S. Treasury or maybe the state of New Jersey. (One of the truly comic moments in the history of America's recent financial collapse came when Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, who ran Goldman from 1994 to 1999 and left with $320 million in IPO-fattened stock, insisted in 2002 that "I've never even heard the term 'laddering' before.")
For a bank that paid out $7 billion a year in salaries, $110 million fines issued half a decade late were something far less than a deterrent —they were a joke. Once the Internet bubble burst, Goldman had no incentive to reassess its new, profit-driven strategy; it just searched around for another bubble to inflate. As it turns out, it had one ready, thanks in large part to Rubin.
BUBBLE #3 The Housing Craze
Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.
None of that would have been possible without investment bankers like Goldman, who created vehicles to package those shitty mortgages and sell them en masse to unsuspecting insurance companies and pension funds. This created a mass market for toxic debt that would never have existed before; in the old days, no bank would have wanted to keep some addict ex-con's mortgage on its books, knowing how likely it was to fail. You can't write these mortgages, in other words, unless you can sell them to someone who doesn't know what they are.
Goldman used two methods to hide the mess they were selling. First, they bundled hundreds of different mortgages into instruments called Collateralized Debt Obligations. Then they sold investors on the idea that, because a bunch of those mortgages would turn out to be OK, there was no reason to worry so much about the shitty ones: The CDO, as a whole, was sound. Thus, junk-rated mortgages were turned into AAA-rated investments. Second, to hedge its own bets, Goldman got companies like AIG to provide insurance — known as credit default swaps — on the CDOs. The swaps were essentially a racetrack bet between AIG and Goldman: Goldman is betting the ex-cons will default, AIG is betting they won't.
There was only one problem with the deals: All of the wheeling and dealing represented exactly the kind of dangerous speculation that federal regulators are supposed to rein in. Derivatives like CDOs and credit swaps had already caused a series of serious financial calamities: Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings both lost fortunes, and Orange County, California, was forced to default in 1994. A report that year by the Government Accountability Office recommended that such financial instruments be tightly regulated — and in 1998, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a woman named Brooksley Born, agreed. That May, she circulated a letter to business leaders and the Clinton administration suggesting that banks be required to provide greater disclosure in derivatives trades, and maintain reserves to cushion against losses.
More regulation wasn’t exactly what Goldman had in mind. “The banks go crazy — they want it stopped,” says Michael Greenberger, who worked for Born as director of trading and markets at the CFTC and is now a law professor at the University of Maryland. “Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and [SEC chief Arthur] Levitt want it stopped.”
Clinton's reigning economic foursome — “especially Rubin,” according to Greenberger — called Born in for a meeting and pleaded their case. She refused to back down, however, and continued to push for more regulation of the derivatives. Then, in June 1998, Rubin went public to denounce her move, eventually recommending that Congress strip the CFTC of its regulatory authority. In 2000, on its last day in session, Congress passed the now-notorious Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which had been inserted into an 11,000-page spending bill at the last minute, with almost no debate on the floor of the Senate. Banks were now free to trade default swaps with impunity.
But the story didn't end there. AIG, a major purveyor of default swaps, approached the New York State Insurance Department in 2000 and asked whether default swaps would be regulated as insurance. At the time, the office was run by one Neil Levin, a former Goldman vice president, who decided against regulating the swaps. Now freed to underwrite as many housing-based securities and buy as much credit-default protection as it wanted, Goldman went berserk with lending lust. By the peak of the housing boom in 2006, Goldman was underwriting $76.5 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities — a third of which were sub-prime — much of it to institutional investors like pensions and insurance companies. And in these massive issues of real estate were vast swamps of crap.
Take one $494 million issue that year, GSAMP Trust 2006S3. Many of the mortgages belonged to second-mortgage borrowers, and the average equity they had in their homes was 0.71 percent. Moreover, 58 percent of the loans included little or no documentation — no names of the borrowers, no addresses of the homes, just zip codes. Yet both of the major ratings agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, rated 93 percent of the issue as investment grade. Moody's projected that less than 10 percent of the loans would default. In reality, 18 percent of the mortgages were in default within 18 months.
Not that Goldman was personally at any risk. The bank might be taking all these hideous, completely irresponsible mortgages from beneath-gangster-status firms like Countrywide and selling them off to municipalities and pensioners — old people, for God's sake — pretending the whole time that it wasn't grade D horseshit. But even as it was doing so, it was taking short positions in the same market, in essence betting against the same crap it was selling. Even worse, Goldman bragged about it in public. "The mortgage sector continues to be challenged," David Viniar, the bank's chief financial officer, boasted in 2007. "As a result, we took significant markdowns on our long inventory positions … However, our risk bias in that market was to be short, and that net short position was profitable." In other words, the mortgages it was selling were for chumps. The real money was in betting against those same mortgages.
"That's how audacious these assholes are," says one hedge fund manager. "At least with other banks, you could say that they were just dumb — they believed what they were selling, and it blew them up. Goldman knew what it was doing."
I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you're actually betting against — particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer — doesn't amount to securities fraud.
"It's exactly securities fraud," he says. "It's the heart of securities fraud."
Eventually, lots of aggrieved investors agreed. In a virtual repeat of the Internet IPO craze, Goldman was hit with a wave of lawsuits after the collapse of the housing bubble, many of which accused the bank of withholding pertinent information about the quality of the mortgages it issued. New York state regulators are suing Goldman and 25 other underwriters for selling bundles of crappy Countrywide mortgages to city and state pension funds, which lost as much as $100 million in the investments. Massachusetts also investigated Goldman for similar misdeeds, acting on behalf of 714 mortgage holders who got stuck holding predatory loans. But once again, Goldman got off virtually scot-free, staving off prosecution by agreeing to pay a paltry $60 million — about what the bank's CDO division made in a day and a half during the real estate boom.
The effects of the housing bubble are well known — it led more or less directly to the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, whose toxic portfolio of credit swaps was in significant part composed of the insurance that banks like Goldman bought against their own housing portfolios. In fact, at least $13 billion of the taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, meaning that the bank made out on the housing bubble twice: It fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets.
And once again, while the world was crashing down all around the bank, Goldman made sure it was doing just fine in the compensation department. In 2006, the firm's payroll jumped to $16.5 billion — an average of $622,000 per employee. As a Goldman spokesman explained, "We work very hard here."
But the best was yet to come. While the collapse of the housing bubble sent most of the financial world fleeing for the exits, or to jail, Goldman boldly doubled down — and almost single-handedly created yet another bubble, one the world still barely knows the firm had anything to do with.
BUBBLE #4 $4 a Gallon
By the beginning of 2008, the financial world was in turmoil. Wall Street had spent the past two and a half decades producing one scandal after another, which didn't leave much to sell that wasn't tainted. The terms junk bond, IPO, sub-prime mortgage and other once-hot financial fare were now firmly associated in the public's mind with scams; the terms credit swaps and CDOs were about to join them. The credit markets were in crisis, and the mantra that had sustained the fantasy economy throughout the Bush years — the notion that housing prices never go down — was now a fully exploded myth, leaving the Street clamoring for a new bullshit paradigm to sling.
Where to go? With the public reluctant to put money in anything that felt like a paper investment, the Street quietly moved the casino to the physical-commodities market — stuff you could touch: corn, coffee, cocoa, wheat and, above all, energy commodities, especially oil. In conjunction with a decline in the dollar, the credit crunch and the housing crash caused a "flight to commodities." Oil futures in particular skyrocketed, as the price of a single barrel went from around $60 in the middle of 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008.
That summer, as the presidential campaign heated up, the accepted explanation for why gasoline had hit $4.11 a gallon was that there was a problem with the world oil supply. In a classic example of how Republicans and Democrats respond to crises by engaging in fierce exchanges of moronic irrelevancies, John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be "very helpful in the short term," while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out.
But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the short-term flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short-term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling — which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.
So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.
As is so often the case, there had been a Depression-era law in place designed specifically to prevent this sort of thing. The commodities market was designed in large part to help farmers: A grower concerned about future price drops could enter into a contract to sell his corn at a certain price for delivery later on, which made him worry less about building up stores of his crop. When no one was buying corn, the farmer could sell to a middleman known as a "traditional speculator," who would store the grain and sell it later, when demand returned. That way, someone was always there to buy from the farmer, even when the market temporarily had no need for his crops.
In 1936, however, Congress recognized that there should never be more speculators in the market than real producers and consumers. If that happened, prices would be affected by something other than supply and demand, and price manipulations would ensue. A new law empowered the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the very same body that would later try and fail to regulate credit swaps — to place limits on speculative trades in commodities. As a result of the CFTC's oversight, peace and harmony reigned in the commodities markets for more than 50 years.
All that changed in 1991 when, unbeknownst to almost everyone in the world, a Goldman-owned commodities-trading subsidiary called J. Aron wrote to the CFTC and made an unusual argument. Farmers with big stores of corn, Goldman argued, weren't the only ones who needed to hedge their risk against future price drops — Wall Street dealers who made big bets on oil prices also needed to hedge their risk, because, well, they stood to lose a lot too.
This was complete and utter crap — the 1936 law, remember, was specifically designed to maintain distinctions between people who were buying and selling real tangible stuff and people who were trading in paper alone. But the CFTC, amazingly, bought Goldman's argument. It issued the bank a free pass, called the "Bona Fide Hedging" exemption, allowing Goldman's subsidiary to call itself a physical hedger and escape virtually all limits placed on speculators. In the years that followed, the commission would quietly issue 14 similar exemptions to other companies.
Now Goldman and other banks were free to drive more investors into the commodities markets, enabling speculators to place increasingly big bets. That 1991 letter from Goldman more or less directly led to the oil bubble in 2008, when the number of speculators in the market — driven there by fear of the falling dollar and the housing crash — finally overwhelmed the real physical suppliers and consumers. By 2008, at least three quarters of the activity on the commodity exchanges was speculative, according to a congressional staffer who studied the numbers — and that's likely a conservative estimate. By the middle of last summer, despite rising supply and a drop in demand, we were paying $4 a gallon every time we pulled up to the pump.
What is even more amazing is that the letter to Goldman, along with most of the other trading exemptions, was handed out more or less in secret. "I was the head of the division of trading and markets, and Brooksley Born was the chair of the CFTC," says Greenberger, "and neither of us knew this letter was out there." In fact, the letters only came to light by accident. Last year, a staffer for the House Energy and Commerce Committee just happened to be at a briefing when officials from the CFTC made an offhand reference to the exemptions.
"I had been invited to a briefing the commission was holding on energy," the staffer recounts. "And suddenly in the middle of it, they start saying, 'Yeah, we've been issuing these letters for years now.' I raised my hand and said, 'Really? You issued a letter? Can I see it?' And they were like, 'Duh, duh.' So we went back and forth, and finally they said, 'We have to clear it with Goldman Sachs.' I'm like, 'What do you mean, you have to clear it with Goldman Sachs?'"
The CFTC cited a rule that prohibited it from releasing any information about a company's current position in the market. But the staffer's request was about a letter that had been issued 17 years earlier. It no longer had anything to do with Goldman's current position. What's more, Section 7 of the 1936 commodities law gives Congress the right to any information it wants from the commission. Still, in a classic example of how complete Goldman's capture of government is, the CFTC waited until it got clearance from the bank before it turned the letter over.
Armed with the semi-secret government exemption, Goldman had become the chief designer of a giant commodities betting parlor. Its Goldman Sachs Commodities Index — which tracks the prices of 24 major commodities but is overwhelmingly weighted toward oil — became the place where pension funds and insurance companies and other institutional investors could make massive long-term bets on commodity prices. Which was all well and good, except for a couple of things. One was that index speculators are mostly "long only" bettors, who seldom if ever take short positions — meaning they only bet on prices to rise. While this kind of behavior is good for a stock market, it's terrible for commodities, because it continually forces prices upward. "If index speculators took short positions as well as long ones, you'd see them pushing prices both up and down," says Michael Masters, a hedge fund manager who has helped expose the role of investment banks in the manipulation of oil prices. "But they only push prices in one direction: up."
Complicating matters even further was the fact that Goldman itself was cheerleading with all its might for an increase in oil prices. In the beginning of 2008, Arjun Murti, a Goldman analyst, hailed as an "oracle of oil" by The New York Times, predicted a "super spike" in oil prices, forecasting a rise to $200 a barrel. At the time Goldman was heavily invested in oil through its commodities trading subsidiary, J. Aron; it also owned a stake in a major oil refinery in Kansas, where it warehoused the crude it bought and sold. Even though the supply of oil was keeping pace with demand, Murti continually warned of disruptions to the world oil supply, going so far as to broadcast the fact that he owned two hybrid cars. High prices, the bank insisted, were somehow the fault of the piggish American consumer; in 2005, Goldman analysts insisted that we wouldn't know when oil prices would fall until we knew "when American consumers will stop buying gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles and instead seek fuel-efficient alternatives."
But it wasn't the consumption of real oil that was driving up prices — it was the trade in paper oil. By the summer of 2008, in fact, commodities speculators had bought and stockpiled enough oil futures to fill 1.1 billion barrels of crude, which meant that speculators owned more future oil on paper than there was real, physical oil stored in all of the country's commercial storage tanks and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve combined. It was a repeat of both the Internet craze and the housing bubble, when Wall Street jacked up present-day profits by selling suckers shares of a fictional fantasy future of endlessly rising prices.
In what was by now a painfully familiar pattern, the oil-commodities melon hit the pavement hard in the summer of 2008, causing a massive loss of wealth; crude prices plunged from $147 to $33. Once again the big losers were ordinary people. The pensioners whose funds invested in this crap got massacred: CalPERS, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, had $1.1 billion in commodities when the crash came. And the damage didn't just come from oil. Soaring food prices driven by the commodities bubble led to catastrophes across the planet, forcing an estimated 100 million people into hunger and sparking food riots throughout the Third World.
Now oil prices are rising again: They shot up 20 percent in the month of May and have nearly doubled so far this year. Once again, the problem is not supply or demand. "The highest supply of oil in the last 20 years is now," says Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan who serves on the House energy committee. "Demand is at a 10-year low. And yet prices are up."
Asked why politicians continue to harp on things like drilling or hybrid cars, when supply and demand have nothing to do with the high prices, Stupak shakes his head. "I think they just don't understand the problem very well," he says. "You can't explain it in 30 seconds, so politicians ignore it."
BUBBLE #5 Rigging the Bailout
After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.
It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson green-lighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.
Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.
Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict of interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.
The collective message of all this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."
Once the bailouts were in place, Goldman went right back to business as usual, dreaming up impossibly convoluted schemes to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital. One of its first moves in the post-bailout era was to quietly push forward the calendar it uses to report its earnings, essentially wiping December 2008 — with its $1.3 billion in pretax losses — off the books. At the same time, the bank announced a highly suspicious $1.8 billion profit for the first quarter of 2009 — which apparently included a large chunk of money funneled to it by taxpayers via the AIG bailout. "They cooked those first quarter results six ways from Sunday," says one hedge fund manager. "They hid the losses in the orphan month and called the bailout money profit."
Two more numbers stand out from that stunning first-quarter turnaround. The bank paid out an astonishing $4.7 billion in bonuses and compensation in the first three months of this year, an 18 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008. It also raised $5 billion by issuing new shares almost immediately after releasing its first quarter results. Taken together, the numbers show that Goldman essentially borrowed a $5 billion salary payout for its executives in the middle of the global economic crisis it helped cause, using half-baked accounting to reel in investors, just months after receiving billions in a taxpayer bailout.
Even more amazing, Goldman did it all right before the government announced the results of its new "stress test" for banks seeking to repay TARP money — suggesting that Goldman knew exactly what was coming. The government was trying to carefully orchestrate the repayments in an effort to prevent further trouble at banks that couldn't pay back the money right away. But Goldman blew off those concerns, brazenly flaunting its insider status. "They seemed to know everything that they needed to do before the stress test came out, unlike everyone else, who had to wait until after," says Michael Hecht, a managing director of JMP Securities. "The government came out and said, 'To pay back TARP, you have to issue debt of at least five years that is not insured by FDIC — which Goldman Sachs had already done, a week or two before."
And here's the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008?
Fourteen million dollars.
That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion — yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year.
How is this possible? According to Goldman's annual report, the low taxes are due in large part to changes in the bank's "geographic earnings mix." In other words, the bank moved its money around so that most of its earnings took place in foreign countries with low tax rates. Thanks to our completely fucked corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, even while they claim deductions upfront on that same untaxed income. This is why any corporation with an at least occasionally sober accountant can usually find a way to zero out its taxes. A GAO report, in fact, found that between 1998 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of all corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all.
This should be a pitchfork-level outrage — but somehow, when Goldman released its post-bailout tax profile, hardly anyone said a word. One of the few to remark on the obscenity was Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money," he said, "the left is hiding it offshore."
BUBBLE #6 Global Warming
Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.
Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade.
The new carbon credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.
Here's how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy "allocations" or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions. President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.
The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.
Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief of staff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank's environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson's report argued that "voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate change problem." A few years later, the bank's carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won't be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, "We're not making those investments to lose money."

The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utah-based firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in green-tech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energy futures market?
"Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee.
Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.
"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedge fund director who spoke out against oil futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine."
Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees — while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.
It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.
But this is it. This is the world we live in now. And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal excusing them from homework till the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay. And maybe we can't stop it, but we should at least know where it's all going.
This article originally appeared in RS 1082-1083 from July 9-23, 2009.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 17, 2012
CONTACT: Sara Jerving
608-260-9713, sara@prwatch.org
CMD Releases New Report
“ALEC Exposed in Wisconsin: The Hijacking of a State”
Watchdog Groups Call for Attorney General Investigation of ALEC Lobbying Activities
MADISON -- Today, the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released a new report that details the exclusive network of corporate lobbyists and special interest groups that influence the Wisconsin legislature through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
“This report reveals details of the extraordinary influence of ALEC and its agenda on the Wisconsin legislature and our laws over the past 16 months,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. “This corporate-backed agenda undermines the rights of Wisconsin families while advancing the agenda of huge corporations and special interest groups.”
Six weeks ago, corporate members of ALEC started jumping ship when it became known that Florida’s “Stand Your Ground Law” -- linked to the Trayvon Martin shooting -- spread to over two dozen states via ALEC. So far, 14 corporate members and 45 legislators from other states have quit the organization.

"We document how global corporations are buying influence with Wisconsin legislators through potentially illegal gifts called ALEC ‘scholarships,’" said CMD Law Fellow Brendan Fischer, the report's author. "ALEC’s corporate members are not only giving Wisconsin legislators thousands of dollars of campaign contributions, they are also buying flights and hotel rooms. These gifts undermine Wisconsin’s reputation for clean government and strict ethics rules designed to protect the voices of Wisconsin residents in our state's democracy."

CMD asked the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board in March to determine whether ALEC member legislators receiving gifts of flights and hotel rooms from ALEC's corporate members violates state ethics and lobbying laws. Now, CMD and Common Cause in Wisconsin are asking Wisconsin’s Attorney General to look into ALEC’s lobbying activities.

"It is time for the Attorney General to determine that ALEC is primarily a corporate lobbying group masquerading as a charity," said Common Cause in Wisconsin Executive Director Jay Heck. "ALEC's corporate members fund the organization to access and influence state legislators, and it is unacceptable to get a tax deduction for doing so."

Here are some of the key findings from the new report:
32 bills or budget provisions reflecting ALEC model legislation were introduced in Wisconsin's 2011-2012 legislative session;
21 of these bills or budget provisions have passed, two were vetoed;
More than $276,000 in campaign contributions were made to ALEC legislators in Wisconsin from ALEC corporations since 2008;
More than $406,000 in campaign contributions were made to ALEC alumnus Governor Walker from ALEC corporations over the same time period to his state campaign account;
At least 49 current Wisconsin legislators are known ALEC members, including the leaders of both the House and Senate as well as other legislators holding key posts in the state. Additionally, the Governor, the Secretary of the Department of Administration, and the Chairman of the Public Service Commission are ALEC alumni; and
At least 17 current legislators have received thousands of dollars of gifts cumulatively from ALEC corporations in the past few years, in the form of flights and hotel rooms filtered through the ALEC “scholarship fund” (complete “scholarship” information is not available).

ALEC describes itself as the largest "independent member association of state legislators" in the country, but over 98 percent of its nearly $7 million in annual revenue comes from corporations and sources other than legislative dues, which are $50 a year. Representatives from America’s largest corporations, including Koch Industries, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Reynolds, and Altria/Phillip Morris fund ALEC and sit on its private sector governing board.

The full report can be found at ALECexposed.org. The letter to the Attorney General can be found here (PDF).
2012, May 18 New Moon/Solar Eclipse in Gemini - Brothers and Sisters
http://www.bigskyastrology.com/new-moon-gemini-brothers-sisters/
by April Elliott Kent
A couple of years ago, I spent a few months happily devouring Alexander McCall Smith’s series of novels about The #1 Ladies Detective Agency. The series follows the adventures of Precious Ramotswe, the first lady detective in a small town in Botswana. What makes the series singularly appealing is the peek into a gentle way of life that is passing away (and for all I know, might never have existed, in much the same way Mayberry represented an idealized version of 1950s rural life in the United States). For instance, whenever Mma Ramotswe wishes to invoke “the old ways” and establish immediate rapport with a countryman, she simply calls the other “sister” or “brother.”
In astrology, ties between siblings are represented by Gemini – the sign of this New Moon – and by the third house of the chart. Naturally, not everyone shares the same idea about what it means to be a brother or a sister. As an astrologer, I’m supposed to be unflappable; but in many years of astrological counseling I admit I’ve been truly shocked by stories of sibling rivalries, of betrayal and estrangement, even incest. Such stories have made me feel all the more fortunate for having shared close bonds with my brothers and my sister. We don’t always get along, of course. But without them I can’t imagine who I would have become. And I imagine the same could be said even for those who have a toxic relationship with their siblings.
Brothers and sisters teach us our earliest lessons about relationship. When we become infatuated with ourselves, they cut us down to size. When others bully or mistreat us, a sibling is usually prepared to defend us. Siblings teach us the talismanic power of words, of promises and proprietary claims, of nicknames and teasing. Identical twins are famous for developing secret languages no one else can understand, but if you spend ten minutes with any pair of siblings who are reasonably close you will quickly encounter an impenetrable fog of in-jokes and verbal shortcuts.
Not surprisingly, Gemini also rules communication – the skills of encoding and decoding messages, of understanding our world and making ourselves understood. Our interactions with siblings teach us how to argue and negotiate, how to twist the knife, how to tell a joke, and how far we can go without completely alienating someone. Brothers and sisters teach us how to curse with real distinction, how to outwit authorities (especially our parents), and how to navigate the dynamics of competition.
Our brothers and sisters teach us how to interact with others and by extension, they teach us who we are. By negotiating a role for ourselves among our siblings, we define ourselves. To a lesser extent this is also true of our neighbors (also ruled by Gemini and the third house of the horoscope), to whom we’re also yoked by common turf, mutual interests, and subtle competition. Few of us would admit that we feel pressure to “keep up with the Joneses,” but it’s difficult not to compare your old jalopy and crabgrass-infested lawn to your neighbor’s bright new sedan and expensive landscaping. We naturally compare ourselves to those whose circumstances closely resemble our own – just as we might compare ourselves with a brother or sister.
This New Moon in Gemini is a Solar Eclipse. Eclipses tend to poke at sensitive spots in the psyche; this particular bruise may be sibling-shaped. When a family loses a sibling, through estrangement or death, it’s like losing spokes on a wheel: it may still turn, but the vehicle becomes wobbly. One of my brothers died suddenly and young. Our mother died two years later, and as devastating as that was, I realized that the loss of a sibling is in many ways an even graver tragedy. After all, as my mother once suggested, you can reasonably expect to someday lose your parents, but subconsciously we expect our siblings – our partners in crime – to walk with us to the end of our journey.
Whenever I gather with my sister and our remaining brother, we speak of our parents and we miss them; but our departed sibling is there with us, tingling like an amputated limb. A couple of weeks from now, the three of us will make a pilgrimage to our hometown, together there for the first time since we left for good, over forty years ago. Our brother didn’t much like the old haunts. If he were alive, he’d probably dig in his heels and refuse to go. In death, he doesn’t have that option. Like it or not, he’ll be there with us.
Few people in our lives get the opportunity to influence us when we are so malleable as in childhood, when brothers and sisters leave their hand prints on us as they might in wet cement. But the truth is that while the emotional connection may be less compelling, we share similar bonds with people who share our neighborhoods, our communities, our alma mater, our mother tongue, the country of our birth. Before I meet up with my siblings in our hometown, I’ll join hundreds of my astrological brothers and sisters for a big conference in New Orleans. For a week, we’ll luxuriate in spending time with others who speak our peculiar language, like expatriates who’ve found each other far from home and converse enthusiastically in the mother tongue. And like siblings, we’ll spat among ourselves about that language, how best to interpret its symbols, whose voices deserve to be heard and celebrated. There will be rivalries, laughing, sharp words, in-jokes, and tingling, phantom limbs.
At this Gemini New Moon and Solar Eclipse, we celebrate our brothers and sisters – our siblings by birth, as well as siblings under the same Spirit. When we call each other “brother” or “sister” we, like Mma Ramotswe, invoke the bonds of sharing, memory, and community. We summon visions of a native landscape on a sun-dappled summer’s morning; of weeping in front of a television on November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001; of childhood dreams of a remarkable future. When we call those who share our day-to-day lives “brother” or “sister,” we acknowledge the simple truth that we are family. That we make each other what we are, and we are more alike than we know. And although we may not always get along, who would we be without one another?
©  April Elliott Kent. All rights reserved.

2012, May 19 Crop Circle Decoded - Return of the Maya’s Quetzalcoatl on May 20, 2012?
http://www.in5d.com/return-of-quetzalcoatl.html

A recently decoded crop circle predicts the return of the Mayan deity, Quetzalcoatl on May 20, 2012.
East Kennett July 22, 2010 10 pyramids with 5 levels.  Middle shows an eclipse and astrological events, transit of Venus, annular solar eclipse visible in the Pacific on May 20th, 2012.  On may 20, the Maya sun Kinich Ahau aligns with the Tsab (the sun king will align with the Pleiades <Tsab to the Maya>).
On May 20th, during the annular solar eclipse of the Pleiades, the sun, the moon, Earth and the center of the galaxy will align. This is the same alignment that some people expect on December 21, 2012.
Near the center of the formation, there are 16 feathers that refer to the fact that 16 days after the eclipse, the transit of Venus across the sun will occur on either June 5th or June 6th, depending on which side of the Earth you are on.
In East Kennett’s formation, there are 17 feathers beside the eclipse symbol that indicate the same day that Venus will transit across the sun.
33 big circles.  This also refers to the conjunction of Venus to the sun.  In other words, when Venus aligns with the Sun King in an event that occurred on August 16, 2011.  In this crop circle, the feathered serpent is going through the center of the solar system.  On the right is Venus and on the left is Earth. This is the conjunction between Venus and the Sun on August 16, 2011.  This formation may also represent Ophiuchus, the 13th zodiac sign, located near the center of our galaxy. December 21, 2012 at 11:11 am, when the sun is aligned with the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, is when many believe a new beginning of our history will occur.
The Aztec god, Quetzalcoatl, went to the heavens and said when he left that he would come again, and would bring his children.
Venus and the Maya
Venus: (Lamat Glyph, Venus), Chak Ek' was the astronomical object of greatest interest, the Maya knew it better than any civilization outside Mesoamerica. In Maya myth, Venus is the companion of the sun. This no doubt reflects the fact that Venus is always close to the sun in the sky, rising not long before sunrise as morning star (Ah-Chicum-Ek') or after sunset as evening star (Lamat). They thought it was more important than the Sun. They watched it carefully as it moved through its stations, it takes 584 days for Venus and the Earth to line up in their previous position as compared to the Sun. It takes about 2922 days for the Earth, Venus, the Sun, and the stars to agree. The Maya made daytime observations of Venus. Venus had a psychological effect upon the Maya, it has been shown in the Dos Pilas staircase, that the Maya were timing some of their wars based on the stationary points of Venus and Jupiter, (The famous Star War between Tikal and Dos Pilas,  Naranjo and allies). Humans were sacrificed on first appearance after Superior Conjunction when Venus was at its dimmest magnitude but they most feared the first Heliacal Rising after Inferior Conjunction. In the Dresden Codex, the Maya had an almanac that displayed the full cycle of Venus. Venus cycles were the mean synodic Venus year of 584 days and a "great cycle" of 37960 days (the lowest common multiple of the Tzolkin,  and the Venus year, equal to 104 calendar years or 2 calendar rounds). In Rio Azul's tomb 19  the Lamat or Venus Glyph is beautifully painted.  A "star war" is a full-scale war planned in accordance with specific astronomical events, usually the first appearance in the morning sky of the planet Venus. The heliacal rising of the brilliant "star" in the pre-dawn sky was considered by the Maya as a highly evil portent. As such it was an appropriate herald of warfare, at least on the part of the attacker. (Schelle)
source

On May 20th 2012 our moon, sun, and the Pleiades will align, and if an "authority" tells you it's dangerous to watch this event I would recommend believing the opposite, sun-gazing in general is beneficial at sunrise/sunset, so with the moon blocking significant parts of the sun on May 20 it wouldn't likely be any more "dangerous" than sun-gazing
What does this all mean?
Perhaps nothing. Predictions come and go. Whether this date marks the return of Quetzalcoatl or not, you are still here for a specific purpose or mission. Like any other information, use your own discernment. If nothing else, it's fun to think about and who knows... perhaps Quetzalcoatl will return on this date?
Time will tell :)

2012, May 17 Fire-Eclipse Portal 2012 by Tyberonn
May 20th - Fire-Eclipse Portal 2012
a message from Archangel Metatron channeled by Tyberonn
17 April, 2012

The remaining Equinoxes, Solstices & Eclipses that lie ahead in the countdown to the Ascension are 'Frequencial Gateways' . The auspicious vectors are not constrained by linear time nor by the dimensional access limitations within your current space-time paradigm. And while we have told you many areas in your planet are already in 5th dimension, during the Equinoxes of the precedent 3 years to the Ascension, the threshold to greater dimensionality is opened much wider.

As such, we tell you that a unique portal from the 12th dimension is enabled thru the Cosmic Trigger Crystalline awakening of that 12th Wave that will manifest on May 20, 2012 and reach its apexial completion on the OM Wave of the June Solstice of 2012. The energies will be powerful and intense....yet offer amazing up-shifting codes.

Indeed it is a mandatory prerequisite rigor of the New Earth. Both humanity and indeed the physical earth require and petition this crystalline up-shift reformation in order to transcend the duality dimensional paradigm that would otherwise entomb them in the cyclic duplicity of descending polarity juxtaposition.

The twelfth dimensional opening of the Solar Eclipse of May 2012 will be the most prolific synthesis of 12th dimensional energy to eventuate on earth since the Golden Age of Atlantis, some 35,000 years ago as measured in your present linear- time paradigm. 

AAMetatron
May 20th - Fire-Eclipse Portal 2012

"The Great Pleiadian Eclipse Alignment", Ring of Fire, Full Solar Eclipse
On May 20, 2012, for the first time in 26,000 years, our Sun and Moon and the constellation ... You cannot miss this glorious event! Gather where you can, meditate and open the heart to receive this transitional energy...an energy bearing sacred codes !

The incredible 'Ring of Fire' solar eclipse is coming in less than 4 weeks. It's the first annular eclipse visible in America in almost 18 years, and there will not be another for over a decade. It has incredible significance. It is a portal of tremendous energy and will spawn magnificent energy feeds. It is precisely why the final phase of the heralded ' Cosmic Trigger' is occurring on this Eclipse of 2012.

On 20 May 2012, what will occur is nothing less than spectacular. This Eclipse is spectacular, not only visually, but in its mega-energy. The Sun and Moon ( New Moon) will be precisely conjunct with the stunning Central Star of the Pleiades, in the constellation Taurus.

The Pleiadian star system is, in fact, our core essence, our ancestral home. That is why it has been recognized by the Ancients from LeMuria, Atlantis, to the Hopi. revered cosmic objects in history, poetry and mythology across all cultures. The Pleiades were recognized in the language of many of the indigenous people of the Americas, including the Maya, Toltec, Aztec, Ayameria, Lakota, Navajo and Hopi. Known as the home of the Star-People, of Star Nations by the campestral & mystical societies all over the world, including Australia, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

The Eclipse brings in the Cosmic Trigger. This is the influx of Ascension energies that will complete in a series of downloads between the following dates of significance:

May 20 - Solar Eclipse,
June 4 - Lunar Eclipse and
June 20 Mid-Year Solstice.

What will happen is the Crystalline Transition. Crystals coded with the Mastery of the benevolent Pleiades & The Crystalline Council of Light & Ascended Masters. It begins on May 20 and completes on the Solstice.
  
The Pleiades are, in fact, among the first stars mentioned in ancient recorded astronomical writings, first noted in the Asian annals of 2357 BCE in China. Alcyone, referred to as 'Lucida' or Most Brilliant Star, then being on the Vernal Equinox.

The beginning of the year gave rise to the title 'The Great Year of the Pleiades' for the cycle of precession of about 25,900 years. 2012 is, of course, the year of the 'Precession of the Equinox.
Ascension Symptons - AA Metatron

"In the Ascension, you will regain the enhanced template that enables you to transmigrate the Torus of realities and, as such, reverse the spin of the spiral, by anti-spin of the Life Vortex and return to your Divine Source consciousness within Crystal-Coherent Light . The Cosmic Trigger is the enabler, changing the matrix. It is not haphazard; it is not circumstantial, but deliberate of Divine Creatorship in a logic beyond even your imagination. It is beautiful beyond comprehension.

All is quickening; time is accelerating as the Ascension draws center within your individual & group experiences. The year 2012 will be intense and will have periods of calibration that may throw humanity out of balance temporarily.

Accordingly, as the duality planet recalibrates itself into the Crystalline Field, it will also reshape the experience of mankind, of visible and invisible forces of nature and that of the face of the Earth itself. Every astrological pattern, every date of Eclipse, Solstice , Equinox and Lunar Phase is extremely powerful in 2012. These are being exponentially amplified by Coronal Mass Ejections, Solar Winds.

Humanity will feel the impact of these through what is termed 'Ascension Symptoms', and these may be experienced as mood swings, dizziness, insomnia, anxiety, lethargy, apathy and fatigue. For each advancing energy will require physical, emotional and mental adjustment to the higher frequencies downloaded.

It is akin to a training course, one designed to increase humankind's capacity to operate in higher resonant energy. The intensives will ebb & flow, in a continual momentous pattern, gaining in inertia through the 12-12-12, the 12th Wave of the Ascension. It is indeed an auspicious time.

You may at times feel as though you are taking one step backward before taking two steps forward... something akin to a miniature Saturn Return! But keep in mind, the two steps forward will occur.

Do not despair, for the symptoms will pass quickly, and the benefits are a stronger 'you'. The key is understanding what is happening, and persevering ... .and maintaining a positive energy and an intact Auric Field. "

AA Metatron

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2012, May 18

The Pineal & Crystal Bio Stargate
Mechanics of Law of Belief

Archangel Metatron via James Tyberonn

Greetings Masters !!
I am Metatron Lord of Light, and I greet you in Unconditional Love.
In this gathering, we discuss a fine aspect of Conscious Creation, the Law and mechanics of manifestation. We speak of the Bio-Crystal Stargate computer: the Pineal.
The Pineal
Through the ages it has been known that the Pineal is the interface between the higher dimensions and the physical realm. It can be said then to be the gateway between the ego personality, brain and the Divine Mind. It has been termed by metaphysicians such as Descartes and Edgar Cayce as being the 'Seat of the Soul'. In a very real manner of speaking, the Pineal Gland is a 'Bio-Stargate'. It is a bridge from physical to non-physical, from duality to higher dimension. It is extremely complex, and is the screen from 3d brain to Infinite Mind.
The pineal is the agent of advancing knowing into reality manifestation. The pineal works with the pituitary to open the bridge, the gateway between the physical and nonphysical, between brain and mind. Whatever knowledge you allow yourself to believe can only become a reality by the pineal first opening the gate to the Divine. It does this by interpreting the frequency of thought into a thermal bio chemical electrical current throughout your body and opening to mind.
Your human brain transforms the thoughts you generate into thousands of bio-chemicals every second. Not every thought of the ordinary brain reaches into Higher Mind, as we have explained.

Crystalline Pineal Filter
The issue most humans have in not changing their beliefs is blind acceptance of mental 3d programming. You can think positive thoughts, think positive change, but if in your deeper mind you doubt they will occur, then they will not.
Every emotion you feel, very moment of joy and fear produces a chemical enzyme in your body. Some become springboards, others as obstructions. Each passes to the Pineal. The Pineal is a finely tuned calcitic crystal that is piezoelectric, somewhat in the manner of quartz. It is a frequency screen, a filter of sorts.
According to the frequency of a thought or emotion, the Pineal is the guardian of what goes into the creative portal of Divine Mind. This is in a very functional manner, a protection mechanism that prevents some negative thoughts from being manifested. But it also prevents any thought that has a negative field from entering. Negative thoughts including fear, doubt and the like. But understand it works both ways. Accordingly any intent that you strongly or subtly doubt, cannot enter into belief programming. Do you understand?
Doubt is one blockage that prevents manifestation of your desires. If you doubt, you do not believe. Doubt in the brain creates a bio-chemical reaction. It activates a neuron carrier in the brain that flows from the Pituitary gland to the Pineal and blocks the 'gateway' (Pineal entry) from opening. The doubt is there because you do not believe.
As we have mentioned, the survival aspect programming of the Personality Ego brain utilizes 'fear' in duality as a warning system. However, the duality aspect, the double edge of that sword, is that fear out of context can reach into many negative emotions including depression,doubt, hatred, jealousy and self contempt. These are at their root, negative aspects of fear, and fear creates static in the auric field, and can lead to auric bleeding. As taught in the Metatronic Keys, the human Aura must be integral to amplify into Mer-Ka-Na. A fissured or disrupted energy field is unable to optimally operate in the Law of Creation.
Bio-Chemical Process
The belief thought-images that surround you are co-created in mass fields by all of humanity in agreement in the macro. Individually they are projected according to your light quotient. These manifest into physical reality.
This involves a physical process. Thought frequencies are digitally received and are immediately propelled bio-chemically within the brain.
Mental enzymes are connected with the pineal gland. The Pineal gland receives them as geo-coded transmissions. Each image, each thought, being interpreted and sorted according to its energetic signature. They must pass through the program parameter of belief after reception at the pineal. Your brain screens what is determined as real or unreal. Believable or unbelievable according to the light quotient programmed into the brain. The bio-chemicals produced are produced with acceptance ingredient or rejection ingredient. These are allowed to open or close the gate to higher mind accordingly.
These bio chemicals are sent as coded neurons, and are the delivery mechanism of this thought-energy, containing all the codified data necessary for translating any thought or image into physical actuality, or not.
Thoughts that are congruent with belief move to reproduce the inner image within the brain and through each nerve fiber of the body physical. These then are the initial fires of gestation for forming the new reality.
The next step is through clear mind intent, the force of will, will driven by the acceleration of emotion and feeling.
This done, the physical body releases the objective in a digital code to the sublime body, the intact Auric Field in a semi solid, congealed light code, projected and accelerated from the chakric system.
The Aura must be intact and optimal in 13-20-33 cycle and reach. It then passes through the Mer-Ki-Va to Mer-Ka-Va to Mer-Ka-Na field. All propelled by will. The clarity and intensity you insert behind the thought-desire or goal determines to a great degree the immediacy of its materialization. Once you learn the mechanics of conscious creation it is essential then to utilize the engine of genuine desire with image visualization and emotion to complete the process of physical manifestation.
The Law of Conscious Creation
There is no physical object about you, nor any experience in your life that you have not created. This includes your physical form, your body. Masters, there is nothing about your own physical image that you have not made. In fact if you were able to view self in other life sojourns, you would be surprised at how many similar physical characteristics you create in what would be termed sequential lifetimes.

When you have Divine Wisdom, you can create kingdoms unlimited. When you have knowledge, there is nothing to fear, for then there is no thing, no element, no principality, no understanding that can ever threaten or enslave or intimidate you. When fear is given knowledge, it is called enlightenment.
You have a natural rhythm of existing in the physical and non physical. It is your waking and sleep state. Dreams are one of your greatest natural therapies and assets as connectors between the interior and exterior realities and universes.
Your normal consciousness benefits by excursions and rest in those other fields of nonphysical actuality that are entered when you sleep, and the so-called sleeping consciousness will also benefit by frequent excursions into the physical matter waking state.
But let us tell you that the imagery you see in both is at its base, mental interpretations of digital frequential fields of core consciousness units. The frequency that your brain receives is actually a digital code, a crystalline pattern of symbols (akin to what you may term as X's and O's), that you interpret and translate into images and feelings.
It is not so difficult for you to accept that you create your dreams, as it is to accept that you also create your physical reality, but you do both. You also determine if both or either are real...or not.
We say again...doubt and fear are two major blockage frequencies that prevent manifestation of your desires. In an very real sense, all negative emotions are at primal core, fear based. Overcoming fear, and replacing it with LOVE, particularly true acceptance and love of self, is a key frequency needed to Master duality. The Pineal is the system of entry into divine, and it is a complex crystalline computer that screens frequencies. This is the forgotten information. It is time to remember, time to know. It is 2012. Shadow is being removed.
 I am Metatron and I share with you these Truths. You are Beloved.
...And So it is...And it is So...

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2012, March 13 Aluna Joy ~ Receiving Our New Bodies – The Holy Of Holies
Aluna Joy |  March 13 2012

Thoth the Atlantean, Ascended Master Serapis Bey with Aluna Joy
The following is the second message that we received in Egypt this past March 2012 over Equinox. You can find our other messages on our website at www.alunajoy.com under the “Articles for Personal and Planetary Transformation” link. It might be a good idea to read them in order as each message builds upon the previous one. We are sharing this message here with you just as we received it, in present time, with very little editing. We do this for a very important reason. We know that the messages that we receive are not just for our groups, but are for others as well. The Atlantean/Egyptian Masters and the Star Elders assure me that the message and the corresponding energy will be transmitted to you. So as you read this, you might want to imagine that you are with us. Also, always view the photos on the website that we share, as photos also hold some energy of the sites.
(The group gathered in the heart center, the holy of holies, of the Luxor Temple. Aluna suggested that we offer our hearts to the heart center of this site as a way to connect with the wisdom and truth that is anchored here.)

Temple at Luxor
Our hearts are the center point on this pilgrimage in life. The site of Luxor represents our heart’s center point for this entire pilgrimage . . . this is what the ancient ones are saying. It is important that we have our center points, our hearts, opened and anchored. They are asking us to do this, because WE are going to build an entire new body, just as the Earth is going to build a new grid.
This is the heart of this temple. This is where they started building this temple. They always build from the center out . . . the center being the heart. So we need, at this point in time, to start in rebuilding in our center, our new hearts, our holy of holies. The ancient ones discovered this heart center on the Earth’s grid by an ancient form of alchemy and began building. When we were at King Tut’s exhibit, remember that he had a sarcophagus in a wood box, which was in another wood box, which was in yet another wood box. It is like stacking Russian dolls. By doing this, they were building energy from the inside out.
We have been building a new heart for the last few months, and the Ancient Ones say that now we are we are going to begin to build a whole new body. It will build this new body within a new spherical geometry that will also be multi-poled and multi-dimensional. This will allow us to live in this new world, and help us live in the present moment in unity consciousness. We began this pilgrimage at the heart of Luxor, because this entire temple represents the chakras of the human body. So, at this moment, our DNA, containing our cellular memory, is collecting information and using this ancient alchemy to build this new body.
There is a heart, holy of holies, in every temple, and we will start in every heart center in every temple that we will go to. As we do this, we are going to build a whole new body build on descending frequencies. We have started at the crown chakra in Giza, and we will re-build ourselves from the stars down to the earth . . . from the crown chakra down to our root chakra.
So they ask you now to offer your heart to this process and this temple. When you offer your heart to this place, you have an exchange of the pure heart that was anchored here. When you offer your heart, you are offering your old heart so you can receive the new one. (Please… as always . . . only do this process if it feels right for you. Also, please use the photo of the site to help you connect with the energy.)
Ascended Master Serapis Bey is one of the masters that anchored Luxor’s energy before Atlantis fell. Serapis Bey and the Ascended Masters will give us a new orientation point and a new heart; this will be our starting point to build a whole new body.
Luxor was built with the geometry of the old, ancient, Atlantean temples. The only other one that was built this way is Hatchetsup. At the time of the fall of Atlantis, Serapis Bey moved the Ascension Flame to Luxor, Egypt. They worked to recreate the pure energy of pre-Atlantis. They were hoping that they could capture some of this pure energy, but they failed to do this 100%. It is our job now to bring the rest of the light back into us.
The fall of Atlantis was also a shift of an age. The world was going to ascend up to another frequency. It failed back then, but we will not fail now. Underneath this temple, there is still a powerful etheric record of this energy and the original ascension flame. It is still holding that holy of holies, that heart of hearts, for us now.
It is perfect that we are starting our pilgrimage in the holy of holies in a temple that represents the human charka system and is the heart of the chakra system that lines up and down the Nile. This new body we are building will be our new vehicle for a next world, frequency, etc….
So check into your heart now . . . . Has everyone felt like they have given their heart to the process?
Group member Alice: A guardian is checking us out. He noticed that it is US here now. So he is thanking you, Aluna. But also saying… “Go on, go on. Get on with it! What are you waiting for?” Now he is actually standing up, and as he pushed his chair back, I could hear the chair legs scrape on the floor. I ask “Are you leaving?” But he isn’t. I feel this is him recognizing us now. He likes you (Aluna) and is agreeing with everything you are saying.
Aluna continues . . . When the etheric guardians like you, they automatically invite you into a deeper place in the site’s energy, and they create space for us. Notice that the physical guards and the guys with the guns either disappear or allow us to do this work in a protective way. We get our space. This happens a lot, yet it never ceases to surprise me.
Okay, I am reminded of something . . . yesterday, in the Cairo museum, Sehkmet, the Goddess of magic and healing, said “When are you coming back? Come back.” I think some of what she meant was for us to come back to who we really are; not to whom we have been, but to whom we really are. Now here in Luxor, the Masters are saying that we are building a new body, and they are giving us a new heart. They have been shifting the orientation of our hearts for months and months now, but they never said that they were giving us a new body until just now. So I don’t know what the side effects will be with this . . . but I am sure that time will tell.
So we want to thank the guardians for acknowledging that our hearts are pure and filled with the best intentions. When we walk into a site, it is important to introduce yourself to the guardians . . . who you are, why you are here, etc…. Tell them your name and inform them that you are here out of the goodness of the light and your heart. Let them know that you are a servant of light and came here to help humanity, and what you learn here you will take out into the world to share. When you do this, the guardians realize that you are not just trying to TAKE energy from this place but that you want to expand it. A lot of people come to these places, and they steal energy, because they are still in their ego. They think they can do something to the temple to make it better than it is, or that they want to activate it, because they think it is inactive. This is an insult to the guardians of the sites. These places don’t need activating. The stones might be in ruins, but the temples have never stopped emitting amazing energy.
So when we come in to a sacred site, and we recognize that it is still whole and pure and that it is still functioning, the guardians recognize this and open doors for us to work with the energy. They do this because we are humble, and they see that we are working with an open heart. It is a test that we must pass in each site that we enter into. When they see that we are coming from the heart, they will download what we need.
So here is what they want us to do. Are you ready? As we walk out of this temple, we will be walking through the chakras of our new body. We are building a new architecture in our body (so using the image here . . . imagine yourself walking out of this temple, through and into our new chakras and thus building your new body.) Now there is something about a grid-like pyramid over the top of us as well. This is going to maintain impeccable energy so you can create the perfect body in the energy field that is conducive to this.
The physical sun is also working like crazy, and this will activate us as well. People will get chest tightness during solar flares; but solar flares actually clean us out and raise up our frequency. It brings everything to the surface that is not of the light. This is why we have nightmares or have old issues that come up, because we need to finish cleaning the body’s old memory. They tell me that everybody here (and those that will read this) are in good shape and are ready for this. We are ready for what is next, and we came here for what is next; otherwise we wouldn’t have showed up in Egypt in a time that it scares most tourists off.
Temples are built with chambers within chambers and sometimes will have small chambers all around the holy of holies. These are like energy cells that hold energy for the center point. At Dendara and Philae, there are little chambers all the way around their holy of holies that are like energy cells that hold energy in the temple. Luxor and Hatchetsup do not have this as they were built to hold pure Atlantean energy. Here in Luxor there is a holy of holies, and there is an outer center, and another outer center. It is like walking through a body of light.
It is always interesting to pay attention to the geometry and the architecture that is in sacred sites. It is appropriate to start in the center and work our way out of a site, because that is how they built them. It is a rebirth for us. If you work the site the other way and start from the outside door and work your way in, you are actually doing it backwards and may be even de-volving yourself. But if you come directly into the center point, the heart of the temple, and work your way out, it actually is the proper way. We need to do this with our bodies as well. With every intent, begin with the heart first, then add in the intellect and the physical mean to make it happen. Let everything be birthed from your heart fist.
Group member NancyAnn: And in the womb, the heart chakra is active in the beginning before there is the organ of the heart, and even the heart cells exist before there is a heart even pulsing together. So the heart is literally beginning even before the development of the embryo.
Aluna continues . . . So you notice that when we open our hearts, and get in this space, that we get space and it quieted down. Guards said “Thank you”. This can work for you as well when you are out in your 3D world. Just keep your hearts open and all doors will be open to you. Simple!
(Now see yourself walking out of the temple and being re-born!)

There are a couple of Atlantean beings hanging out in Luxor. Above is Thoth the Atlantean but disguised in a stone that looks like Ramses. He has told me a lot over the years, and I will share a bit of it here . . .
Thoth tells us that . . . All energy here in the chakra system has a failsafe protection so no one could get to use until they could match the frequency. When Atlantis began to fall, the “powers that be”, learned how to get around this. There was a flaw in the system, so they could use the power and hold it to control the people instead of using it to free the people. This energy that we have been given here today is to free us, and not to control us. Atlantis fell, because this powerful energy was used with a mis-use of power and ego. The ascension of the age failed and, everyone that survived the fall of Atlantis moved into another cycle without the evolutionary jump that one experiences at a shift on an age. But we learned many good things and will not fail again.
After Atlantis fell, Serapis Bey, Thoth and others tried immediately to rebuild the temple here at Luxor, and the one at Hatchetsup, so that they would emulate what they had captured in Atlantis. They tried to recapture the energy and recreate temples, because they didn’t want to lose the pure energy. It didn’t work 100%, because they had moved into another age and things were working differently. Our geologists already know that magnetics drop, frequencies raise, magnetic poles shift and things change during the shift of an age. We are at the same time in our own cycle now where Serapis Bey and the others were at during the fall of Atlantis. We are ending a 104,000 year cycle. We are starting back over again. What Serapis Bey, Thoth and others did back then is a lesson for us, because we don’t want to hang on to the old world that we are leaving behind. We might waste a lot of time trying to recreate what we had instead of learning about the new energy. Trying to hold on will not work, because the laws of nature will change with the shift of the age.
So now the Guardians of this site, and Masters and Archangels working with us are going to give us a new heart and hopefully they will give us new eyes to see, and new minds to learn as well. Who knows how this is going to play out. But today we know for sure that they gave us a new heart, a personal holy of holies, so we can re-build from this center point.
Luxor temple could only be activated by a group on the same frequency. Here in this outer area there would be multiple people using many alter stones. They put their hands on these stones to activate the energy and then they could do anything with the energy. Anything that their minds focused on would manifest if their minds and hearts were in sync. They all had to be unified. Of course, the “bad guys” got ahold of this somehow, like they are trying to do again in this cycle. But they are not going to survive their attempts as the failsafe program has no back door for them to get in anymore. That was fixed 26,000 year ago.
They are not going to be successful controlling us much longer, and we are already seeing a houses of cards tumbling down all around the world. Even last year, Egypt fell in just a few days. Anything that is out of alignment with the truth will fall away, and the only thing that will be left is the truth. So the trick is to not hold on to any of the old stuff that is falling away from us now. This is part of a divine plan that you agreed to or you would not be here at this time. We will not fail.
“To read more about Thoth and the Emerald Tablets – http://www.crystalinks.com/emerald.html.
The Ascended Master Serapis Bey is the Chohan of the Fourth Ray, the white ray of purity. Serapis Bey emphasizes harmony and discipline. Disciples in his retreat are assigned to work on projects with others, teaching them the importance of serving together harmoniously, supporting one another. His many lifetimes exemplify his devotion to purity of motive. Serapis Bey served on Atlantis as a high priest. Before the sinking of Atlantis, he moved the ascension flame to Luxor, Egypt. Serapis Bey and his disciples are fierce and immovable in their dedication to purity and to the disciplines required for the ascension.
Amenhotep III-Serapis Bey as the Divine Architect is believed to have begun his rule at about the age of nine. It is likely that a relative acted as regent for him until he came of age. As an Egyptian Pharaoh, Amenhotep III, and his wife Tiye are known as the founders of monotheism in Egypt, a practice continued and expanded by one of Amenhotep’s sons, Akhenaten, an incarnation of the Ascended Master Lanello. Amenhotep III’s extensive building projects included the construction of the temples at Luxor on the Nile and a large number of other projects in Nubia. He also initiated comprehensive building projects at the Temple of Karnak.
When Amenhotep III died, Egypt was a strong and powerful country with a great deal of influence in the international world. His son, Akhenaten, extended Amenhotep’s reformation of the many-faceted Egyptian religion, emphasizing the worship of ONE God, represented by the SUN.
ALUNA JOY YAXK’IN is an internationally known author, spiritual life coach, sacred site guide, alternative historian, ordained minister and modern mystic. She inspires and encourages others to recognize and accept their own authentic divinity and connection to God. In the Inca world, Aluna is considered a Qawaq (cow-wak) Clairvoyant, or seer of living energy. Those who know Aluna, call her a modern mystic and/or a psycho-geographical healer. Aluna simply considers herself a Spiritual Archaeologist using her Clairvoyant/Clairsentient gifts to read ancient history of sacred sites. Copyright © 2012 – Permission is granted to copy and redistribute this article