Vote. When you don't vote, you make it easier for Wall Street funded politicians to concentrate power at the center. Who gains from low voter turnout? >Special interest groups (can spend their money more strategically). >Political parties (can energize their base and not answer to everyone). >People who prosper from the way things are (market-makers, Robinhood getting FTD penalty exception at NSCC, etc.).

So after all of that, what is the point? It is not that every short seller is bad, McCabe even said so on yesterday's call and I completely agree. It is not that every regulator is corrupt. It is not that every journalist is bought. It is not that every anonymous account is part of some coordinated operation. And it is certainly not that every disagreement proves wrongdoing. The point is much simpler... Markets only work when people trust the record. Investors need to know that ownership can be reconciled. Issuers need to know that the market around their securities can be understood. Regulators need enough visibility to identify anomalies before they become multi-year forensic exercises. And when something does go wrong, the documentary record has to survive long enough for somebody to reconstruct what happened. That should not be controversial. For more than 65,000 families, #MMTLP stopped being an abstract market-structure debate a long time ago. It became personal. And for me, helping bring some resolution to those families has become very personal too. But the bigger issue now extends beyond MMTLP. Because the next generation of markets will be much faster. More automated. More fragmented. More international. More tokenized. More AI-driven...and increasingly 24/7. If the existing plumbing has blind spots, adding speed does not eliminate them, it will magnify them. That is why Congress should care. Not because Congress needs to choose a side in an internet argument. Congress has to ask whether the infrastructure governing modern markets is capable of protecting confidence in those markets as they evolve. The American Dream depends on something surprisingly basic: -An entrepreneur should be able to build a company. -An investor should be able to invest in it. And both should have confidence that the rules, the records and the referees work the SAME way regardless of who is on the other side of the trade. That is the gold standard. Nothing more exotic than that. So after four years of arguments, FAQs, FOIAs, hearings, research, litigation and now discovery, my view is simple: Follow the documents and reconcile the records. Separate allegation from fact and let the evidence lead wherever it leads. In the NWBO case the market makers and trying everything to keep things under a seal, same thing happened with MMAT... Assuming each of these defendants have a story, the record has to reconcile them. Documents don’t care who you know. Metadata doesn’t recognize the velvet rope. Discovery doesn’t care which entrance you used. It just wants the passenger manifest. Markets can survive short sellers. They can survive bad trades. They can survive bad companies. What they cannot afford to lose is confidence that the same rules apply to everybody. Read the MMAT/NWBO/QNTM etc filings... and please tune in on Friday's podcast, share it with colleagues, friends, family, as well as your congress representatives & staffers... and i would like to thank media investigative reporters like @laralogan and @annvandersteel who cared enough to dig, and continue to uncover how this all went down. The rest is commentary.

After nearly four years, Next Bridge Hydrocarbons Chairman and CEO Mr. Greg McCabe is breaking his silence and speaking publicly about MMTLP and Next Bridge Hydrocarbons.

In the news: @BlueLedgerAI Emerges from Stealth to Strengthen Trust in Public Markets prn.to/4doM91H Exciting times ahead with @tianastoddart Tiana Stoddart aka elf, and @dshukla72 Prof. Dhirendra Shukla. More to follow in the coming weeks. #BlueLedger

The SEC Stat Padding Has Begun. What a Shameful Charade. The SEC just announced it “charged 38 entities” with filing false Forms ADV. Thirty-eight separate complaints, filed in one federal court, on one day, against a pile of apparently overseas shell operations that, by the SEC’s own admission, wouldn’t even respond to a records request. These aren’t 38 investigations. This is one investigation, sliced 38 ways, and a trivial one at that: a clerk cross-checking addresses on a form. No victims made whole. No fraud unraveled. Every SEC alum knows exactly what this is. This is earnings management. This is channel stuffing. Ironically, this is exactly the kind of period-end financial engineering the SEC hauls CFOs into court over. If a public company booked 38 “sales” to counterparties who won’t return calls, timed to land in the last quarter, the SEC of yesteryear would call it what it is. But the SEC of today mimics it all instead. So why now? Because the SEC’s fiscal year ends September 30, and SEC Chairman Paul Atkins is on track to post the worst enforcement numbers in SEC history. FY2026 is pacing toward roughly 120 SEC enforcement actions, a pathetically low level with no modern precedent. Atkins is desperate to inflate his case count. So he manufactured 38 no-show ‘cases’ at zero cost, zero effort, and zero benefit to a single investor. Atkins arrived promising a leaner, more honest, less headline-driven SEC. Instead we get the oldest trick in the SEC playbook, gleefully deployed, just so Paul Atkins can point to a padded case count that has nothing to do with protecting a single retail investor. Watch what happens between now and September 30. Count the “multi-defendant” filings. Then ask whether a single one made the market safer, or just made the SEC’s annual report look better. Here’s what gets me. I served in the SEC’s Enforcement Division for almost 20 years, including the entire stretch that Atkins sat as an SEC Commissioner (2002-2008). Paul Atkins was awesome back then. He was the one who bristled at numbers games and who treated case-count theater and end-of-year window dressing as exactly the kind of chicanery the SEC exists to punish, not practice. And he said so, out loud, to staffers like me. But look at him now. The man who once called out this nonsense is the man signing off on it. Thirty-eight paper defendants, one courthouse, one afternoon, five weeks before the books close. Atkins knows precisely what kind of ruse this is. His hypocrisy knows no bounds. The Stark Reality: When a company does this to its numbers, it’s charged as fraud. When the SEC does it to its own numbers, it’s trumpeted in a press release. We see you, Paul Atkins. And the people who walk the SEC hallways see you. You’re not fooling anyone. The agency that demands integrity in every number filed with it should be embarrassed by the cooked numbers it files about itself. And no one should be more ashamed than Paul Atkins, who once proudly stood for exactly that integrity. It’s all in plain view: sec.gov/newsroom/press-relea…

U.S. Military Veterans Appeal Directly to Trump to Help Uncover the MMTLP Financial Scandal thegatewaypundit.com/2026/08…

Next Bridge Hydrocarbons Provides Update on Continued Efforts to Engage Regulators prnewswire.com/news-releases…

"The stock market": where MMs and shorties get to keep your money when the price falls.