Becoming a Presidential candidate - a serious one - is, as I've heard it described elsewhere, a polygraph test of the soul. Every last inch of your life from the moment of your conception is scanned and monitored by the entire nation - and by some extension, the world at large. Becoming a serious candidate for President informally relinquishes your right to privacy, and for a somewhat legitimate reason. Not only does everyone want to know the person who might lead the country and world at large, but they also want to know if they're on the level while their political opponents want to find anything with which to attack them.
There is no official law that declares a forfeiture to privacy or the public release of your tax returns if you run for President. It's more or less a social ritual that dates back over half a century, specifically in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. What IS against the law is profiteering off of public office, and we have a glut of federal and state laws that regulate how you conduct yourself even when applying for public office. Despite how much we crow for capitalism, we have a series of extraordinarily stringent rules regarding the government's comport (and evidently they are too lenient, as evidenced by our current political climate). If you run for any kind of public office, you'll get paid, you get benefits, but you are NOT allowed under any circumstances to use your office to turn a profit outside of what benefits and salary is provided to you. By holding public office, you dedicate yourself and your knowledge and skills towards benefitting everyone, to put country before self, the needs of the many before the needs of the few.
At least, that's how it should be. Between the massive amounts of money strewn about during political campaigns by big money donors and the disproportionately huge number of lobbyists (everything from oil to private prisons to fucking salt), there is an entire shadow industry in our government designed to bypass those rules that dictate how you behave when holding public office. Side note: did you know that Congress spends more time fundraising to keep their job than they do actually doing the job?
When it comes to the Presidency, the highest public office in the world, showing your tax returns became a mostly symbolic practice following the Watergate scandal; again, there's no law that says you have to do it, but it curries favor from the public by showing that you haven't used your office to benefit yourself (e.g. accepting bribes) and that you aren't a puppet bought out by a company that seeks to use you to change the laws to benefit them over everyone else(e.g. too many politicians and corporations to count).
It was a practice first employed by President Gerald Ford's campaign when he first ran a presidential campaign as the incumbent. He became VP after Spiro Agnew resigned in the midst of the Watergate scandal. Agnew pled no contest to the charges of money laundering and tax evasion, and to show the public that he was not guilty of the same thing as both his predecessors, when President Ford would later campaign as the incumbent, he set the precedent that candidates would publicly release their tax returns, showing how exactly they got their money and how much they're worth. It would be simply a symbolic gesture if it wasn't about money, and money is a mighty influence in our country.
Of course, Ford would not win the election, but his practice remained. The Watergate scandal has had long lasting scars on our country, how politicians compose themselves, and how the media covers them, for better or worse. All in all, though, the Watergate scandal was an internal orchestration, within not just our own government, but specifically one party.
The Russia scandal with the Entropy has been considerably bigger than that, just coming out of the gate. Each individual piece on its own exceeds the scale of Watergate, and there are dozens, if not hundreds of pieces in the Russian puzzle. To summarize all of it, the Entropy has been accepting indirect financial assistance from the Russians; not marching orders given to him directly accompanied by a giant brown sack with a green dollar sign on it, but a quid pro quo that has been accumulated over several years, going back for at least a decade. To connect all of the dots here would take a while, but in short, Russian billionaires tied close to Vladimir Putin have been buying assets and properties from the Entropy, seemingly absorbing all of the debts he has accumulated from his countless bankruptcies in exchange for his cooperation and, among other things, to give back the two Russian embassies in the US (that they've used for spying and have been in the past the very face of foreign espionage on US soil) and lift the sanctions on Russia.
Again, there's no explicit marching orders, no smoking gun or silver bullet or red thread that ties all of this together from what I can see or remember. All of this is inferred from the Entropy's past and present actions and comport with Russia, but the connections are too many and broad and go far too deep and among too many people in the White House to merely be a coincidence, but this is called Stupidgate for a reason.
Ultimately the thing that killed Nixon's administration was a simple and contextual "Uh huh" in a series of recordings thousands of hours in length, leaving him dead to rights in the Watergate scandal. But the Entropy is no Nixon. Nixon, for all of his underhandedness, was smart; this was the same guy who was able to identify the entire roster of White Sox players by face alone, including an obscure right-handed pitcher nobody knew about. The Entropy can barely be trusted to remember what day of the week it is, whose daily briefings have been reduced to the length of a tweet, who might be illiterate, who has lied about everything under the sun and openly encouraged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton's email, almost explicitly admitting to the charges of collusion in light of everything else that has been made public since Sunday. I think the only thing that has saved him from spending the rest of his life behind bars so far has been the intelligence of everyone who is working for and with him, from his personal handlers to the Russians themselves, even as the village idiot and his brood continue to poke holes in the hull of their own ship and declare himself immune because he believes he is king.
In light of this explosive scandal, I think it will bring about a series of new rules, should we survive this administration. The symbolic gesture of releasing your tax returns would no longer be symbolic, but rather the law, in light of the Russia scandal. This is what Ford's campaign staff pretended Watergate to be when they sought to assuage their incumbent of any rumors that would make him comparable to either of his predecessors. This is the worst-case scenario that every politician who releases their tax returns tries to avoid.
Even without the Russia scandal, the Entropy is clearly guilty on multiple charges of self-dealing and profiteering using a public office, but he has Houdini'd his way out of any legal consequences because of how many people are willing to be subservient to him and cover for him for one reason or another. The scale that this has escalated to dwarfs Watergate in just that aspect. Once he is removed and possibly imprisoned for, among dozens if not hundreds of other charges, high treason, we are undoubtedly going to see another huge shakeup in our political laws and comport. He created a new low for future politicians and madmen to stoop to, and we need to create a new set of laws to better defend ourselves and make sure something like this can't happen again.
That's assuming the blind moronic common populace can even think that far. We're in an age where the most amount of action in protest to something is a poll on change.org which is easily ignored.
The common people are too stupid, especially nowadays, and I foresee more and more governmental faces getting away with more and more absurd schemes, well thought out or not, because the people who WILL put their foot down are too few.
That's assuming the blind moronic common populace can even think that far. We're in an age where the
Uhm, what exactly do you propose? Problem is, those politicians still got and get elected :/ Afterwards its hard to do anything against it and actually there were and are lots of protests at least against the current head of all this bullshittery... Hope you don't think at what happened last week in Germany here because that surely doesn't help anyone let alone change anything positively.
Uhm, what exactly do you propose? Problem is, those politicians still got and get elected :/ Afterwa
