SEC

The Gilded Age of Robber Barons Giving Rise To Muckrakers

Posted on by Helena

First half of 2026, small business bankruptcies jumped by 50% compared to 2025.  Large corporate bankruptcies are at levels of 2010 during the recession. Personal bankruptcies continue to increase by 10% to 11% 2025 and 2026.  Trump is too busy with all his Wars to pay attention to America priorities ~according to him. But These Are The Golden Years. In history, the Golden Years were touted from 1924 thru 1929 before the stock market crashed and the Great Depression took hold. Is that what Trump is alluding to?

Before the Golden Years we had the Robber Barons.  In 1859, the New York Times coined the phrase as applicable to the Vanderbilts who extracted shipping tolls. The term coincided with the wealthy, the powerful, and the unethical who used exploitive practices to amass wealth. 

Muckrakers: Investigative Journalists who began a campaign of informing the public of the corruption imposed by our Government beginning in 1900.  Turning away from the journalism of time – sensationalism, the Muckrakers uncovered and exposed. Teddy Roosevelt embraced the Muckrakers – creating the label from Pilgrims Progress.  Today, we have degraded significantly wherein lies, propaganda, sensationalism, and abject libel are the basis of most of our MSM.

The Robber Barons tactics included unfettered consumption and destruction of natural resources, influencing high levels of government, wage slavery, squashing competition by acquiring their competitors, and the creation of monopolies and trusts to evade taxes and control markets. It became known as The Gilded Age.  In addition to the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Carnegies were notable for their corruption – The Big Club is centuries old – not decades.

Trump has amassed a small fortune from his wars, but it pales in comparison to his Pay-For-Play Pardons. Get out of jail free cards are being handed out like candy canes. IF you can afford them given the price tag is $2 million – technically, a form of extortion.  These ‘pardons’ release these convicted criminals from restitution amounting into the billions as taxpayers who were defrauded now get nothing.

The original purpose of presidential pardons was to provide mercy, fix legal mistakes, and help the country heal after a crisis. Mercy denotes forgiveness in order to serve the public interest. But Trump’s pardons have been about serving the Trump interest. It isn’t about mercy, it is about lining his pockets – it is illegal and will never be prosecuted any more than Trump intends to prosecute any former political figures.

Ruining the legacy he maintained during his campaign, the drudging up of the 2020 election is irrelevant to Taxpayers. The Biden economy is irrelevant. Demonizing Democrats is yet another boring eyeroll. Trump’s Advisors would seem to have an IQ factor in the double digits as Trump pushes forward on behalf of the Israeli Military Industrial Complex.  Boeing has a backlog of orders pushing 6180 unfilled orders that many countries are now looking to cancel outright. Lockheed has a backlog of $230 Billion.  Northrup has a backlog of $104.69 Billion. All records.

Part of the backlogs are due to the unavailability of Rare Earths – a risk factor due to Trump’s refusal to bend to China. Just as in the Strait Was Open – before Trump, Rare Earths were plentiful – before Trump.  Service members are coming home crippled or in caskets – because of Trump. Grids are at risk because money is redirected to weapons and wars. All of which become an exponential number in futures. Playing catchup is ALWAYS a formidable challenge. The weapons inventory depletion can no longer be ignored. Catchup could take years leaving American industries in the twalette as alternative sources mean losing contracts and ‘respect’.

The idea that Trump would hand over more THAAD and Patriots to Zelenskky is preposterous at this juncture. But the choices for agency heads is Trump’s overall downfall given their abject incompetence when addressing the issues they are assigned to direct. In that vein, Jay Clayton, with zero intel experience, has been nominated by Trump to take over the open position as Director of National Intelligence.  Clayton is a lawyer who served in the SEC during Trump 1.  During his tenure insider trading was ignored, and he voted with Democrats 1/3 of the time. Leading us to presume The Don Cartel needed Clayton to layoff investigations concerning his family.

According to some complaints filed by the SEC recently, it appears to be aligned with Martha Stewart style reparations; Someone profited by $4600 on Insider Trading… Another is a judgement to pay $1970 in 2 installments.  And yet another final judgement for tax evasion wherein the defendant is not charged any penalties but must pay what he owes plus interest. 

 EXAMPLE:  SEC reported total receipts for FY 2025 – $17.9 billion, the majority of which was from receipts from a 2009 case.

This is similar to Kash Patel taking credit for cases that were finalized well before he took office by making the claim “The FBI has rescued…” while failing to mention it is a cumulative number over a decade. Or, “While working with such and such police department, we collectively…”. It is a form of manipulation formerly attributed to manufacturer ad campaigns which highlighted performance stats and comparables that didn’t exist to sell a product.  In this case it is Patel ‘SELLING’ himself.

Trump is a Robber Baron.  Every Lawyer he appoints to head a government agency is onboard the Piracy Train and LAW is nonexistent.  He has created an Empire Run By The Cartel while telling the peasants to get over ourselves and accept the slop doled out to us.

 

DARK POOLS: The Next Unregulated Bubble

Posted on by Helena

The Day The Music Died…

In 1979, then Democrat President Jimmy Carter, flanked by a Democrat Congress chaired by Walter Mondale and Tip O’Neil, passed an SEC Regulation allowing what are known in Wall Street as Dark Pools.   Tip O’Neil was a major advocate of Universal Healthcare and Roosevelt’s New Deal. Mondale is still working for Dorsey and Whitney, a law firm in Minneapolis where Democrat Presidential candidate, Amy Klobuchar, is also employed.

This SEC pronouncement allows investors to anonymously purchase large blocks of securities actively traded on any exchange without the trade being listed. As such, the real price of any given stock is inaccurate and might not reflect the pooled purchase or sale for several days or more.   These ‘after hours’ trades are not public, are typically only available to select high wealth investors including banks and hedge funds, and are considered a stealth parallel to public exchanges while having far fewer regulatory and disclosure requirements.

Initially, they represented a minor force in the markets – roughly 2-3% of trades.  But the passage of the regulation has been the mainstay for banks and Wall Street to run amok.

Dark Pools are likely to be the next Financial Crisis.   Banks have already been cited and fined for fraudulent trading and misinforming clients, but they don’t care, the fines are a fraction of the revenues.

In 2007 as SIV’s (Structured Investment Vehicles) began to stumble invoking the Financial Crisis, Dark Pools began to grow substantially and are now thought to represent perhaps as much as 50% of market trading. Today most pools are owned by mega banks including; Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Bank of America, etc…

Having negotiated their way out of the price fixing Libor scandal of the 1990’s during the Clinton regime, banks then created the next buble, SIV’s, and when the banking crisis revealed the schematic fraud of SIV’s banks demanded bailouts, and Dark Pools became the nouveau riche fashion statement.

Today, banks actively trade their own and each others shares in massive Dark Pool bundles manipulating prices and using the shares as collateral for loans.   In essence an elaborate Ponzi scheme, but more importantly a vast money laundering platform as well.

Banks argue that Dark Pools are actually beneficial because fees are lower and all investors win… Except those who don’t have the billions it takes to become an investor.

By the end of 2008 when the bank collapse was at its height and the last SIV’s had shuttered, Dark Pools began to rise. With Bush’s Federal Reserve bailout funds of $700 billion authorized to get these poor banks back on track, they simply redirected the funds into a new Ponzi bubble paid for by US taxpayers.

Follow The Money.

IN 2000, Jeffrey Epstein became Director and Chairman of Liquid Funding Ltd, in partnership with Bear Stearns.   According to Paradise Papers, the partnership was registered in Bermuda and went out of business in 2010.  Liquid Funding was a SIV.

Bear Stearns was worth $20 billion before the Financial Crisis, within a few months that capitalization had tanked to $235 million when Chase Bank bought them March 2008.

It is likely Epstein’s wealth was dramatically affected during this time frame as well – of course at the heels of his initial indictment in 2006.

Of course, if banks are manipulating their own prices with Dark Pools, it goes without saying that equities are also onboard capitalizing on manufactured profits.

But all of this manipulation ultimately finds at its core The Federal Reserve.

In 2007, the assets of the Federal Reserve were valued at $869 billion – by 2017, those assets had risen to $4.5 trillion with the help of Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen.   A rather remarkable feat created under the monetary policy of ‘quantitative easing’.  But it was the “Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999” that gave the Federal Reserve the authority to determine ‘appropriate’ financial activities for bank holding companies and member banks.   It was signed into law by Bill Clinton.

Gramm was a senior advisor to John McCain during his presidential run. Breaking ranks, Leach endorsed Obama with Madeleine Albright and was subsequently appointed to Obama’s 9th Chair for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Both Gramm and Bliley were initially Democrats.

It would appear that the Corporate world at large much approved of the deregulation imposed by the Chair of the SEC in 1979 – Harold M. Williams.   It is worth noting that the SEC is an independent agency within the federal government and as such operates outside the executive office of the President.   It was created as a part of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The SEC and the Federal Reserve will often work jointly.