BlackRocked

I thought BlackRock sounded like an awesome company because I love both blacks and rocks, but turns out it’s a mega predatory corporation that collapes communities. 

If you have a retirement account, chances are it uses your hard-earned wages to purchase index mutual funds—tiny ownership slices of the 500 or 1,000 most valuable corporations in the U.S. And as BlackRock, Inc., cracks the top 250, there’s a good chance you already own a piece of it, whether you realize it or not.

In 2023, BlackRock ranked 229th on the Fortune 500 by revenue, but its influence is far larger. It manages over nine trillion dollars in assets—more than most countries’ GDPs—and is one of the largest shareholders in nearly every major corporation on the planet.

BlackRock is a private investment firm.
More specifically, it’s part of a financial ecosystem that includes private equity and asset-management giants—firms that pool money to buy, restructure, and “optimize” companies. In theory, they help companies grow. In practice? They often extract value by cutting jobs, raising prices, loading companies with debt, and squeezing every possible penny out of workers, consumers, and the environment.

Corporate values drive firms like BlackRock.

Corporate values are always amoral. Not evil—just indifferent. They honor one metric: profit. There’s nothing in there about love, compassion, empathy, loyalty, community, or stewardship. Just money and margins.

This is usually the point in my anti-corporatism j’essays where I start to lose people, and that’s because this stuff is intentionally confusing. Our leaders muddy the waters so we won’t ask obvious questions—like how we plan to sustain an infinite-growth economy on a planet with finite resources.

Fifteen years representing some of Minnesota’s most vulnerable residents as a human-rights lawyer taught me a simple truth: the eggheads in charge always aim to make things as confusing as humanly possible so we keep looking to them as authorities with the answers.

They know the system is mathematical madness. So rather than fix it, they distract us with fancy terms like “private equity,” “mutual funds,” “compound interest,” “structured finance,” “leveraged buyouts,” and “quantitative easing.” All different labels for the same operating principle:

Profit over people and planet.

Here’s the kicker: our leaders don’t obfuscate because they’re malicious. They do it because they’re afraid.

From where they sit, the system works just fine. It rewards them with money, status, and stuff. So why change a thing?

Their confusion campaign works. Most of us have no idea how corporations like BlackRock shape our world—or how their decisions devastate communities, usually out of sight and out of mind. Corporate values can feel like an abstraction…until they don’t.

As our society gets greedier, the consequences stop being theoretical. They start knocking on our doors.

A Minnesota example

Consider what happened with Minnesota Rusco, a small, long-running home-improvement company. A private equity firm owned by BlackRock bought the previosuly family-run company, rolled it into a larger portfolio, and began the usual “efficiency” moves—slashing costs, squeezing workers, and loading the business with debt. In the process, they hollowed out the company’s stability and culture.

In less than three years, BlackRock mismanaged Rusco into insolvency and implosion. One-hundred-thirty-one folks lost their jobs. Customers were left with unfinished projects. The local community lost a company that had served Minnesota families for seventy-five years.

BlackRock and its shell company walked away intact while everyone else paid the price—and they do it like this all the time.

This is how corporate values show up in the real world—not as an idea, but as community collapse.

Where your retirement fits in

We like to imagine that our 401(k) balances go up because we worked hard, made wise choices, and deserve the returns. But that’s just not how the universe works.

Every transaction involves an energetic exchange. Just because we don’t see the exchange doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Our retirement account balances go up because the companies we own through mutual funds extract value from workers, communities, and ecosystems. Companies like BlackRock make money by exploiting people and planet in the name of the almighty profit.

This is not sustainable.

Left unchecked, BlackRock and firms like it will profiteer our species straight into extinction. Someone’s gotta do the checking.

In loving awareness, I need your help, please and thank you.

I’m not one to hate—but if you own shares in BlackRock (and statistically, you probably do), then you’re prioritizing personal profit over people and the planet.

Which means you hella greedy.

Just like me and pretty much everyone else trying to make sense of this three-dimensional reality we’re sharing.

And unless we wake up and rapidly evolve the quality of our collective consciousness, we’ll continue to fold into a greedy future that reflects corporate values with surgical precision, and stories like what happened with Minnesota Rusco will become commonplace.

We’re all in this together. 

Are you ready to evolve?