 Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer You may be thinking "open sesame" or some Disney cartoon remake of the Alladin story, but what I am referring to is the huge Blackrock supercomputer called Aladdin (Asset, Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network) which is an electronic system built by BlackRock Solutions, the risk management division of the largest investment management corporation in the world. The one that is buying up massive tracts of land and real property driving up housing costs. Yeah, that one. In 2013, it handled about $11 trillion in assets (including BlackRock's $4.1 trillion assets), which was about 7% of the world's financial assets, and kept track of about 30,000 investment portfolios. As of 2020, Aladdin managed $21.6 trillion in assets. Just to put that in perspective New York State has the third-largest economy in the United States, with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of approximately $2.32 trillion as of 2024. This data point only makes sense from a social justice point of view if you go back to 1968. In that year TRW acquired Credit Data and began surveilling the financial transactions of basically everyone. Fast forward to 1996 and you have Bain Capital (Mitt Romney) buying TRW credit reporting and renaming it Experion. Today 3 credit reporting agencies determine if you can get a loan. They have a complete lock on us. Ever missed a credit card payment? Watch what happens!! Your score will drop 100 points from that one transgression. However this story is not about credit, but surveillance. Experion is like a handicapped version of Aladdin; which not only compiles financial data on everyone, every corporation and everything, but also an algorithm that uses predictive programming with data from many sources (including your social media feed and shopping data from places like Amazon and Walmart). Essentially, they can direct huge flows of money based on what they are seeing out in the world. What these flows of money mean is that they can move markets and manipulate democracy. If a president or a congress makes a law that would curtail their profit making it is entirely possible with 21 billion in assets Blackrock (alone or with other hedge funds) could create market volatility, tank certain sectors of the economy or just create problems with credit markets. The sad fact is that there is a very incestuous relationship between the banks and hedge funds as evidenced by the Archegos Capital Management incident that resulted in the loss of 100 Billion dollars. The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve have no controls on these folks. They are essentially the private government running the government. So ... what does this have to do with Quakerism and the work of OPJ? It all points to these questions:
As clerk of OPJ, I'd like to raise awareness of the fact that the US DOES NOT HAVE ONE SINGLE DATA PROTECTION LAW TO SHIELD US CITIZENS FROM THE ABUSES MENTIONED ABOVE. We need to have something similar to what the EU passed. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in effect since May 25, 2018, is the primary, strict EU law governing data protection and privacy for individuals in the EEA, with heavy fines up to €20 million or 4% of global turnover. It mandates explicit consent, data minimization, and grants individuals rights to access, erase, and move their data. Find out more about this issue here. ~ Joseph Olejak
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 Image generated by Meta AI This was the only message in meeting for worship today. It left me so upset and triggered.
Love for this too? What is the messenger referring to:
It is hard to express my revulsion for what has happened in the last year. As a Quaker who has worked for peace it is very hard to use the word love for any of this ... should I? My prefrontal cortex that controls my higher brain centers forces me to consider my values and what I hold dear and say no to violence, yet my lizard brain wants to pick up arms and fight the injustice. I'm neither happy nor proud to admit that, but it's right there alongside the revulsion. An inconvenient duality. I keep raising the question in my mind -- could I love Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Mao? Or any other crazed homicidal nut with a desire to hurt people. Don't we have a duty to protect these people? But how? My queries today are:
~ Joseph Olejak |
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February 2026
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