One day after the Sun ingressed Taurus — sign of material wealth and resources from the earth — the U.S. Treasury has announced that five women will grace the back of the $10 bill (Alexander Hamilton will remain on the front, perhaps helped in part by the smash-hit Broadway musical Hamilton.). Harriet Tubman, an African-American former slave who helped approximately 70 slaves to freedom, will replace slave-owning former president Andrew Jackson on the face of a new $20 bill.

CBS imagines what the Harriet Tubman $20 bill might look like.

According to The New York Times, other depictions of women and civil rights leaders will also be part of new currency designs.

What makes the timing of this announcement especially stunning is that Venus is heading for conjunctions to Uranus on Friday (just hours after the Scorpio Full Moon) and to Eris on Sunday. This puts Venus, ruler of Taurus and goddess of love, the feminine principle and, yes — MONEY — smack-dab into the Uranus-Eris conjunction, which is exact June 9.

It looks from here as though this confluence of Venus, Uranus and Eris is being illustrated by a significant, tangible and for many people perhaps unexpected change to one particular symbol of national identity: our currency. It’s a concrete, cultural phenomenon. And while it will not automatically make everyone think more inclusively, visual symbols have power. It is harder to ignore the role of women in shaping a nation when their faces look back at you each time you pay for groceries or gas for your car.

This most recent campaign to get women’s faces on U.S. currency began in late 2014 or early 2015, as a viral online campaign (how Uranus!) spearheaded by Barbara Ortiz Howard, the owner of an exterior restoration company, and Susan Ades Stone, a journalist. An article in The Atlantic from March of last year describes the process and includes an interview with these two founders of Women on $20s. Apparently changing the portraits on currency is at the sole discretion of the Treasury secretary and needs no Congressional approval.

That said, to date, only two women have appeared on U.S. currency in the Treasury’s history: the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, minted from 1979 to 1981; and the Sacagawea dollar, minted every year since 2000. Although, according to Wikipedia, the Sacagawea dollar “[has not been] released for general circulation from 2002 through 2008 and again from 2012 onward due to its general unpopularity with the public and low business demand for the coin.”

Martha Washington previously was the only woman whose portrait has appeared on U.S. paper currency. It appeared on $1 Silver Certificates, Series 1886, 1891 and 1896. Also, apparently Pocahontas appears in the engraving “Introduction of the Old World to the New World,” which was featured on several pieces of American currency. Only one Native American, Running Antelope (a Sioux chief) seems to have appeared on U.S. currency, on the $5 Silver Certificate in 1899. (See list of banknote portraits here.)

The additional bill redesigns will reportedly be announced in 2020, in time for the centennial of woman’s suffrage and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

The Times notes that, “It was unclear whether details of the unexpectedly sweeping changes would mollify some women’s groups, who had excoriated Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew for reneging on his 10-month-old commitment to put a woman on the face of the $10 bill, which is the one currently in line for an anti-counterfeiting makeover.”

“It’s yet another ‘wait your turn’ moment for American women,” political commentator Cokie Roberts wrote Wednesday in The New York Times.

Apparently there’s still no business like show business, at least in terms of Pres. Hamilton’s reprieve (he was also the first Treasury secretary). It remains to be seen whether Eris has any tricks up her sleeve regarding Lew’s backtracking on his commitment, or whether Venus in the mix will offer some receptivity.

The Spring Reading is now published. Order all 12 signs here or choose your individual signs here for immediate access. You may listen to a free audio introduction here.

By Amanda Painter

Today on Democracy Now! Amy Goodman interviewed Robin McDowell and Martha Mendoza: two investigative reporters working for the Associated Press who, over the course of 18 months, revealed the extent to which Burmese slaves are worked nearly to death on Thai fishing boats. And yes, the catch from those boats makes it into popular U.S. restaurants and supermarkets all the time.

Rescued Burmese fishermen raise their hands as they are asked who among them wants to go home at the compound of Pusaka Benjina Resources fishing company in Benjina, Aru Islands, Indonesia, April 3, 2015. Detail from a photo by Dita Alangkara / AP

The AP series is up for a Pulitzer Award, which will be announced sometime today.

McDowell and Mendoza — along with their photographer and videographer — traveled to the remote island of Benjina in Indonesia. As Goodman states, “They found workers trapped in cages, whipped with toxic stingray tails for punishment, and forced to work 22 hours a day for almost no compensation.”

Their quest began with painstaking digital research — and warnings from people that they would not get anywhere with the investigation. Slave-caught fish gets mingled on transport ships with legally caught fish; records are falsified regularly; people lie. Then they were told of men abandoned by these fishing companies on islands in Indonesia — men who had been tricked or sometimes even drugged or kidnapped. McDowell and Mendoza knew that they had to go to the island, and had to get photographic proof of men caged in the “company prison.” They did.

Even more amazingly, nine days after the AP team broke the story, Indonesian government officials decided to go to Benjina to investigate for themselves, and asked the AP reporters to go with them. The Indonesian officials interviewed not only the company site manager and others higher-ups, they took aside 20 Burmese fisherman and interviewed them.

Realizing it would be dangerous for these men to be left behind on the island, the officials told the reporters they’d be taking the men with them — obviously not realizing how many men were on the island. As word spread, men began appearing from the hills, the woods — hundreds of men who had not seen their families for years; one man had been enslaved there for 22 years. Eventually, more than 2,000 Burmese fishing slaves were freed.

Read or watch the entire Democracy Now! interview here, or read the full AP expose here for the whole, compelling story. But know this: McDowell and Mendoza were able to track slave-caught fish from Thailand to small U.S. chains such as Schnucks or Piggly Wiggly, and also to major chains such as Wal-Mart, Safeway, Kroger, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, major food distributor Sysco and many, many others.

In other words, if you have eaten fish whose national origin is not explicitly known, it is pretty much guaranteed that you have eaten slave-caught fish at some point. Why is this, when the U.S. has laws against importing goods that have been made or procured through slave labor or human trafficking?

Find out what the Mars retrograde will mean for you in Eric’s 2016 Spring Reading. You may pre-order all 12 signs here for less than $40. Includes video readings!

Because of the ‘consumptive demand’ loophole.

As Mendoza explains, “If there’s a consumptive demand for an item, then, even if it’s slave-produced, it can be allowed in. After we published a story about this, the entire Congress agreed to change the loophole. And about a month ago, Obama signed into law a measure that included a provision closing that loophole.”

That will help, but the fight will continue; not only in the fishing industry — where fishing in southeast Asia has been forced far offshore due to overfishing inshore — but in any industry that makes consumer goods sold cheaply overseas. Once again, it comes down to individual consumers to push for change and justice. McDowell explains:

“It almost doesn’t matter, to a degree, what governments are saying, what labor rights groups are saying, what human rights organizations are saying”; in other words, “it is really when the businesses that are buying and the consumers start screaming that things start to change. So I really believe the voice of the American consumer is the biggest impetus to change for these Thai seafood companies.”

In my column last week, I noted that Ceres landing on the Aries Point (early degrees of Aries) indicates that, “what genuinely nourishes the individual Self also feeds the collective, and vice versa.” Today Democracy Now! served up a story that fits the description perfectly — right down to it being feminine persistence (in the form of a four-woman team) bringing an underground, hellish story to light; a story about how your choices about where and what you eat do make a difference for entire groups of people across the globe.

By Amanda Painter

On the heels of the Wyoming primary, presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich are gearing up for the April 19 New York primary. While Sanders and Trump were born there and Clinton resides there now, Cruz and Kasich have no personal ties to the state; in fact Cruz — Mr. ‘New York Values Are Alienating’ — is not even campaigning in the Big Apple, choosing instead to focus his efforts on the West Coast.

Hillary, Bernie, Donald, Ted…but where’s John? (John who, you ask?) Why, John Kasich, of course — the third Republican still standing! Does anyone in New York even know anything about him?

So who’s going to take the biggest bite?

It’s not necessarily an easy call, partly due to the fact that New York has a ‘closed’ primary; meaning that anyone wishing to vote in it would have had to be registered as either a Republican or Democrat to vote in that party’s primary by this past Oct. 9. That’s more than six months, and this primary season has only gotten more and more impassioned with each month that has gone by.

NBC News says that Sanders has not fared as well as Clinton in ‘closed’ primaries:

Sanders lost all three primaries held so far this year that barred independent voters, and closed primaries dominate the final eight weeks of the primary calendar. Nine of the remaining 17 contests are closed primaries, including four out of the five biggest (New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey).

In New York, tight laws and early deadlines will compound the challenge for Sanders.

There is no same-day registration in the state. Independents or members of third parties who want to vote as Democrats had to change their party registration by October 9.

And new voters — another key Sanders voting bloc — had to register by March 25, just days after the Sanders campaign deployed their first paid staffers in New York and the day before they opened their first field office there.

Find out what the Mars retrograde will mean for you in Eric’s 2016 Spring Reading. You may pre-order all 12 signs here for less than $40. Includes video readings!

Luckily for Sanders, we have the Internet — and social media has been positively manic with political rants, memes and entreaties for months. Large numbers of Millennials seem to be genuinely fired up by Sanders.

So that lack of a field office might not be as damning as it would be for older demographics — assuming, of course, that first-time voters rallying behind Bernie in New York got the memo about the March 25 deadline in time.

But another key component of these contests – especially for the Democrats, apparently — has been early voting via absentee ballot. Not all states allow this, and some have significant restrictions on it; in other states, (such as in Maine) you just have to show up at City Hall by a certain date to vote absentee prior to an election or primary/caucus.

According to Seth Abramson at The Huffington Post, New Yorkers have not done much early voting — which might not bode as well for Clinton:

New York, like eight other states that have held primaries already, allows in-person absentee voting — but, critically, few are making use of it. According to the most recent polling in the state — a poll taken between April 4th and April 7th — only 8 percent of Democrats have already voted. Yet even these figures are suspect, as a poll taken by CBS between March 29th and April 1st showed very different results: at that point, zero percent of New York Democrats had already voted (the actual number being closer to zero than to one percent). Is it possible that hundreds of thousands of Democrats voted absentee between April 1st and April 7th? Sure. Is it likely? No.

And since early voting has favored Clinton in many states where same-day voting has favored Sanders by significant margins, this brings up a question: If Clinton does not have her usual early-voting cushion in New York, is the state really hers for the taking on April 19? Or might Sanders be more of a threat than people are giving him credit for?

It’s worth noting that more delegate-rich states with restricted early voting or no early voting are still yet to come this primary season.

But let’s face it: polls don’t tell the whole story, and they can often be spun to suit a variety of views. Here’s a point made by The Washington Post:

The nature of these primary contests is necessarily deceptive, prompting us to find patterns where none exist. (Blame evolution.) Sanders won a string of contests that favored him demographically and that happened to be bunched together on the primary calendar — just as Clinton won a string of contests that favored her demographically and that happened to be bunched together on the calendar. (And, no, the South didn’t vote first intentionally to help Clinton.) It’s just that Clinton’s demographically favorable states had a lot more delegates at stake.

Here’s WashPo again, on Trump:

If Trump doesn’t hit that 50 percent mark in New York, a state where he should do well, he’s in deep trouble. He’s in trouble anyway, still having to scramble through the remaining states to hit 1,237, but if he misses the mark in the friendly turf of his home state, he’ll have to do much better in California on June 7 than he does already.

Who won’t be helping Trump in his bid for New York delegates? Two of his three oldest kids. That’s right: siblings Ivanka and Eric Trump are not registered as Republicans, and missed that October deadline to switch their party affiliation. As The New York Post reports, Trump claimed ignorance on behalf of Eric and Ivanka:

“No. They had a long time to register and they were, you know, unaware of the rules, and they didn’t, they didn’t register in time,” Trump told “Fox & Friends” on Monday. “So they feel very, very guilty.”

“But it’s fine. I understand that. I think they have to register a year in advance and they didn’t. So Eric and Ivanka, I guess, won’t be voting.”

Trump joked: “Yes. No more allowance.”

So: Cruz fled to Cali; Kasich is… I have no clue about Kasich, I admit. I don’t even know what his platform is, but I cannot imagine it’s more terrifying than Cruz’s. If it were, he’d be a frontrunner in this Race for America’s Shadow Side that seems to be playing out among the Republicans.

Clinton had this bit of insight to offer New Yorkers this past weekend:

“I not only love New York and am incredibly grateful every day that I had the honor of being your senator, but I actually think New York values are really good for America.”

Which is great, but when you get former president and humanitarian icon Jimmy Carter publicly criticizing your tenure as Secretary of State — “When Secretary Clinton was Secretary of State, she took very little action to bring about peace. It was only John Kerry’s coming into office that reinitiated all these very important and crucial issues.” — you might want to try a little harder. (Of course, that’s not all Clinton has said to New Yorkers, but still: you can do better than riffing off of Ted Cruz, Hillary!)

Meanwhile, Sanders the non-religious Jew is heading to the Vatican to give a speech about the economy. Sure, he may have solicited for his invitation to visit Pope Francis. But he also had this to say, according to Democracy Now!:

You know, it goes without saying that I have my strong disagreements with certain aspects of what the church stands for, but he [Pope Francis] has been out there talking about the need for a moral economy — a moral economy — an economy in which we have the moral responsibility to pay attention to what he calls “the dispossessed.”

Now, are “the dispossessed” of New York hearing this? And more importantly: Did they register to Vote Democrat by the Oct. 9 deadline? We’ll find out on April 19.