When they say 'stick to astrology'
A few gems from my original career — classical investigative reporting. I now lead a nonprofit investigative team called Chiron Return that covers medical and scientific fraud. And I write horoscopes.
Dear Friend and Reader:
Occasionally I still get a comment from a reader, “You should really stick to astrology,” meaning, stay out of science, technology and political reporting.
For me, writing a horoscope was planned as a spiritual vacation from nonstop, daily research and writing about the misdeeds of the the world’s most powerful corporations. (It became a lot more, including an approach to learning history and sizing up news events. You may read that particular story here.)
My journalistic specialty is the chemical business and associated fraud against government, the press, the public, and other enterprises that got caught in the web of lies. I generally cover people who not only lie, but who commit mass murder.
One day in the early 1980s, when I was 19, I took a drive to the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, about half an hour from where I was attending SUNY Buffalo. This was a mostly-abandoned, mostly evacuated neighborhood built on and around 23,000 tons of chemical and nuclear waste.
The result was an article about the state’s proposed resettling of the neighborhood, which to me sounded like a bad idea. But I got a taste of being lied to by government health officials, and busting those lies — and I wanted more. Here is a contemporary framing of that issue.
For the next seven years or so, I did several tours of duty in professional journalism — first as a municipal reporter; then editing newsletters covering education law, health professions education, and alcoholic beverage regulation. Then I came upstate, started a news service threw myself into covering the State and City University of New York systems (SUNY and CUNY).
New Paltz Chemical Incident — and Monsanto, Westinghouse and GE
While I was covering public higher education, an electrical accident in December 1991 contaminated much of a college campus where I was running a student news service. I took the next couple of years figuring out how this happened, and waging a journalistic takeover of the $50 million-plus attempted cleanup.
This article includes a summary, and here is an entire website devoted to the issue. This particular article provides an overview. The New York Times provided excellent coverage of my work on the issue.
While I was doing that, I met attorneys out west who were litigating against Monsanto, General Electric and Westinghouse. They provided me with the documents establishing just how the New Paltz incident happened, and the 50-year coverup of the toxicity of dioxins, PCBs and other industrial chemicals.
My findings were published most prominently as the cover story of Siera magazine. Two smaller articles were included — one about GE lying to its employees about the dangers, and another about Westinghouse shredding evidence of its crimes.
While a full history of the chemical industry would fill the local public library, its basement and its attic, PCBs or polychlorinated biphenyls are the perfect case in point. They provide a representative example of how one company can contaminate the entire planet and every living creature on it with one kind of chemical.
(When you support my writing, one of the things that includes is storing the tens of thousands of pages of documents that support his line of my research. I have one of the last remaining document collections that exists on paper.)
Real Estate Fraud: Land Trusts Stealing Land
One line of my work that’s gone on for a while involves exposing land trusts stealing the land of their neighbors. The focus of my investigation has been the Open Space Institute, the Monhonk Preserve, and a diversity of other organizations who claim their role is to save land undisturbed for the future.
What they are really doing is developing it into parks, charging day fees, cheating the public out of taxes, and then inviting thousands of people to trample through the woods. But how they get that land is my primary concern. I have documented a diversity of tactics — fake surveys, fraudulent deeds, filing incorrect tax maps, and pitting neighbors against one another — that result in massive takes of land by these organizations.
This article, called Moving Mountains, is the best representative sample of that genre. Another, called This Land is My Land, follows up.
These articles took a tremendous amount of time to research, because I had to learn the deed history of numerous rural parcels of land, sometimes dating back to 1799. And I had to learn the basics of deeds, deed recording and surveying (the rules, rather than the physical activity). Well, actually, I also learned how to spot metes and bounds, find the four corners of a property, and place it onto a map.
I continue to work on this issue to the present time. Moving Mountains took five years to unravel — and I was already familiar with the issues.
Covid Begins: Medical and Scientific Fraud
In early March 2020, I figured out that the “covid” pandemic story was not going away. So I convened a discovery team and began collecting coverage in a publication called Covid19 News. If you click through, you will see the complete history of my coverage, placed on top of a daily news blog that we still maintain.
In addition to a series of investigative features, I am the author of the Comprehensive Chronology that covers the “pandemic” back to its roots in the mid-2000s. This is a day-by-day audit that is focused on the fraudulent use of the PCR “test,” the creation of the genetic sequences of the non-existent viruses, and the history of the resulting social policy.
I do a weekly radio program called Planet Waves FM for the Pacifica Network that has included hundreds of reports about testing, the planned “pandemic,” and metagenomic technology. While there is excellent coverage since the inception, the best thing to do is start in the present and work your way back. If you want to start in the beginning and work your way to the present, I suggest reading the chronology.
Sam Bailey has done two excellent features on my work — one related to the chronology, and the other related to my analysis of “covid” as a digital phenomenon. Both of these provide solid factual background on the issues and on my work.
And I Still Write Horoscopes!
And after all this time, I still write the Planet Waves weekly and monthly horoscopes, as well as thoughtful astrological analysis set within the context of current events.
In this genre, one of my favorite recent articles is called Don’t Look Back, which covers the month of January 2020, its astrology and all that happened and did not happen in China. This is a stunning analysis of how two of the most outstanding events of the century — the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, and the Pluto-Eris square, coincided with the start of the global crisis.
To those interested in supporting my work, you may do so through Planet Waves (where you will find all kinds of astrology services), Chiron Return (the nonprofit that supports my investigative reporting) or through this Substack page.
And remember, astrology is not a belief system. It’s another tool we can use to figure out what’s happening.
Thanks for reading!
— Eric Francis Coppolino
Kingston, New York
Don't listen to those that say you should just stick to astrology, you're such an amazing journalist and a gifted astrologer as well. I love reading everything you write!
Thank you Eric for taking the time to pull together all of the strands of your work in one place on here. This is a great resource for people new to your work.