I’ve known about the connections between Walmart and the Clintons since the beginning and if there is one reality in the 2016 Democratic Party race, Hillary Clinton has never met a wealthy donor she wouldn’t suck up to. Walmart heiress Alice Walton fits Hillary’s bill perfectly.

Marlena Fitzpatrick Garcia, reporting in Hillary Clinton Received a Massive Donation From Walmart Heiress for Alternet writes:Hillary Clinton’s campaign finance records show the wealthy Walmart heiress, Alice Walton, donated $353,400 to Clinton’s “Victory Fund.” The six-figure donation contrasts Clinton’s campaign messaging as a workers’ ally. Walmart stands out for its oppressive labor practices and corporate greed behavior. Before that Alice Walton contributed $25,000 to the Ready for Hillary political action committee.

Unlike many other elected officials, Clinton has refused to publicly denounce Walmart over the company’s pay scale and anti-union policies. She gave her critics ammunition when campaign treasurer Jose Villarreal attended a fundraiser discussion and dinner hosted by Ivan Zapien, Walmart’s vice president of corporate affairs in Mexico. Zapien, who previously served as the company’s top lobbyist in Washington, maxed out in personal contributions to Clinton’s campaign last year.

Bernie, however, is a different story.

Bernie Sanders has called out the Walton heirs and Walmart’s labor practices as a prime example of how greedy corporate behavior harms workers and costs billions in tax dollars. Forbes estimates that despite Walmart being one of the wealthiest corporations in history, the company costs taxpayers roughly $6.2 billion per year due to substandard wages. As a result, many workers depend on public assistance to meet basic needs.

“Today Walmart is the largest private sector employer in America. Yet many, many of their employees are forced to go on food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing that you pay for through your taxes because the Walton family refuses to pay their workers a living wage,” Sanders said.

Clearly, the union leadership is selling out their constituents. Seems like a good time to hold union elections as well.

Jon Swaine, reporting in The Counted so far: you ask, we answer for The Guardian, writes:

Guardian US is continuing in 2016 to record every death caused by law enforcement officers—something that no government agency has done, even as unrest has rocked several American cities following controversial fatal encounters with police.

This award-winning investigation, titled The Counted, last year prompted the FBI to promise to overhaul its discredited voluntary reporting system. Separately, it led the Department of Justice to launch a new program for counting police-involved deaths, mirroring the Guardian US project and drawing directly on its findings.

Among The Counted’s many striking findings were that young black men are being killed by police at nine times the rate of other Americans, and that African Americans killed by police were twice as likely as white people to have been unarmed.

Because there is no national database of police killings, the tally is largely fueled by citizens alerting The Guardian to local events. Swaine continues:

What questions do you have for our reporters about the project? At 1pm ET on Tuesday 12 April, Guardian US reporters Jon Swaine and Jamiles Lartey will be talking about the project live—you can tune in at facebook.com/TheCounted.

Before then, you can submit your questions about the use of force by US police and related issues, either via Twitter using the hashtag #AskTheCounted, by emailing us directly at thecounted@theguardian.com or commenting below. Then, visit The Counted’s Facebook page on Tuesday at 1pm ET, where we’ll be answering those questions, live.

We are all citizens, we are all journalists, we are all responsible for what happens in our names.

I’m a firm believer in ensuring that schools are safe spaces, for minors.

Once you’re 18, when you’re an adult, then the time has come to grow up and deal with the scary place known as reality. Matt Taibbi, opining in College Kids Aren’t the Only Ones Demanding ‘Safe Spaces’ for Rolling Stone crosses over the college campus boundary to realm of media and writes:

The commercial formula at the all-liberals-suck channel is the same as the one at the all-Republicans-are-boneheads channel. People in this country tend to follow politics in the same way they follow sports teams. They don’t think, they root.

Ouch!

He’s right of course. We like living in echo chambers because we like having our particular realities reinforced. Which bring Taibbi to Donald Trump.

Ironically, Trump is one of the few public figures from the conservative camp who’s thrived after thumbing his nose at red-team taboos. As amazing as it is that he survives after making comments about Megyn Kelly’s wherever or sneering at John McCain for being captured in war, the fact that some of his seemingly more harmless asides haven’t sunk him is just as notable.

You won’t find many right-wing pundits or pols with jobs to protect who’d be willing to make even the mildly approving (and obviously accurate) comments about the “good work” that Planned Parenthood has done for “millions of women” that Trump has made this campaign season. Of course Trump is rich in addition to being insane, so he’s exempt from the usual professional pressures.

Taibbi, rightly again, of course, thinks we progressives are no better:

Democratic politics is the same minefield of litmus tests and taboos that Republican politics is, with the caveat that we’re supposed to pretend it isn’t. Even people who’ve dedicated their lives to liberal causes quickly learn that any blemish in their belief systems can be costly.

So those that have non-conforming beliefs, like free-speech icon Nat Hentoff (who somewhat reluctantly came out as pro-life in the Nineties), tend not to be very loud about their idiosyncrasies, hoping it doesn’t hurt them professionally too much.

The few exceptions are people like Bill Maher, who have big enough and secure enough audiences that they can afford to openly challenge a few blue-team bugaboos and keep working.

Still, when Maher came out with off-color jokes and comments about Islam, blue-team America went nuts, organizing campaigns to keep him off campuses and devolving at times into humorously genuine despair over his continued existence. It was very nearly an existential crisis. He’s liberal, but I don’t agree with absolutely everything that he says! How will I cope? A plaintive Huffington Post piece asking how to “solve a problem like Bill Maher” is typical of the phenomenon.

I’ve experienced this first hand. Wile I’m generally liberal/progressive, I’ve caught flack for being pro-death penalty in ways that I’m not supposed to be. I’m also generally pro-military and pro 2nd Amendment, to mention just three atypical views I hold.

Previously…

I’ve never checked my credit score, I have no idea what the credit reports (or background checks) have to say about me, but I do know—thanks to the Internet—that I share my name with a lot of people and that I’ve lived—thanks to the Navy—in a lot of different places.

I don’t think that I’d like the odds that somewhere there is at least one bad boy (that was way too easy) with whom I share a name.

So, be sure to visit: Equifacks, Experianne and TramsOnion and get those Google hits up!

Nobody fucks with the proverbial 800-pound gorilla because, well, King Kong. The only way to deal with a monster is to either a.) become a monster yourself—Predator vs. Alien—or b.) shrink the monster down to a manageable size.

Bernie Sanders thinks that path taken by Trust Teddy Roosevelt is the better way, but Hillary Clinton supporter Paul Krugman has other ideas.

Matt Taibbi in Why the Banks Should Be Broken Up: Bernie or no Bernie, ‘Times’ columnist Paul Krugman is wrong about the banks for Rolling Stone does his usual excellent dissection of the issue, but nails the nut of the story—fear of the monster—with this paragraph.

Moreover the failure to punish the banks for the great mortgage frauds of the crisis years left all of these companies with the knowledge that the authorities were afraid to aggressively enforce the law, for fear of disrupting a fragile economy.

That a 74-year-old guy from Brooklyn could be cast as the monster slayer might seem silly, but Bernie is the only candidate even talking about leading the pitchfork-and-torches brigade to save the village.

Taibbi concludes:

When UBS and HSBC escaped with slap-on-the-wrist settlements for the LIBOR and money-laundering offenses, respectively, Sherrod Brown redoubled his efforts to break up the banks, insisting that these episodes proved these companies were now too big to be regulated. By 2013, Brown said, it was clear that “these megabanks are out of control.”

The call to break up the banks is not some socialist clarion call to end capitalism. (Well, it might be from Bernie, but not from everyone.)

In fact, it’s just the opposite. The lessons of the crash era are that these megabanks have grown beyond the organic controls of capitalism. They were so big and so systemically important in ’08 that the government could not let them go out of business.

This alone was an argument for breaking them up. The banks emerged from ’08 with the implicit backing of the federal government. They became quasi-state entities, almost immune to failure. Not just Bernie Sanders worried about this. Voices as diverse as Louisiana Republican David Vitter and Krugman’s own New York Times editorial board have argued for hard caps on bank size.

What’s happened in more recent years, with LIBOR and the money-laundering scandals and Forex and the London Whale episode and so on, is that these firms also proved too “systemically important” to regulate and prosecute. They grew too big not only for capitalism, but for criminal law.

When a company is not only too big to fail, but too big to prosecute, it’s too big to exist. Krugman may believe otherwise, but he shouldn’t pretend that others—including his own paper—don’t have legitimate concerns.

As do we all.

Bernie writes:

We just got word that we won Wyoming’s caucus. This is huge.

This momentum is just what we need in order to win New York’s crucial primary in 10 days. But we also must know that the billionaire class is more scared than ever, and they don’t want to see us win again. They want to stop us here and now.

Contribute to our campaign and we can keep our momentum going with another huge victory in New York. Your investment today in our movement will go a long way to taking back our country from the billionaire class.

Momentum is winning eight out of the last nine contests while bringing more and more voters and young people to our side as we talk about income inequality, climate change, universal health care, and our corrupt campaign finance system.

Momentum is proving again and again to the political and economic establishment that you don’t need to have a super PAC in order to win the presidency.

This momentum is incredible—but you’ll never imagine what our momentum can be if we win New York’s primary.

Contribute to our campaign and we can win New York’s primary, win the Democratic nomination, win the White House, and take back our country from the billionaire class.

Thanks for being with us.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

I’m catching up on a trio of stories that directly affect my family in what is known locally as The Mid-Ohio Valley. I grew up in and around Marietta, Ohio and left the region after graduating from Warren High School in 1973. During high school, a combination of factors—my involvement with Scouting, Mr. Smith’s and Mr. Gwyn’s science classes, the first Earth Day in 1970 the very real presence of noxious gasses and toxic effluent spewing from nearby chemical plants (particularly the Union Carbide facility just over the hill from Tunnel, along Route 7 and the Ohio River) came together to awaken me to what would become the Environmental Ecology movement.

My dad worked as designing engineer at the Marbon plant just south of Pakersburg, West Virginia, plant at what was known as Washington Bottom. Next door to that plant was the DuPont facility which would become ground zero for Teflon Travesty. I’ve been sitting on three articles from The Intercept’s Sharon Lerner, waiting for a time when I could dive deep into what they have to say. Today is that day.

The first piece, published last August is a three-part series—The Teflon Toxin— which begins with DuPont and the Chemistry of Deception; followed by The Case Against DuPont and How DuPont Slipped Past the EPA.

The second article, A Chemical Shell Game: How DuPont Concealed the Dangers of the New Teflon Toxin was published last month.

The third article, also published in March, is New Teflon Toxin Causes Cancer in Lab Animals.

Not light reading for a snowy Saturday afternoon.

Matt Leonard emails:

Friends,

In 2016, the fossil fuel industry faces an existential crisis.

Every country in the world has now agreed to tackle the issue of climate change, historically low prices have sent the industry into a financial tailspin, and two consecutive years of record global temperatures have galvanized support for climate action. There has never been a better moment to confront the fossil fuel industry and break its hold on our economy.

This May, organizers on every continent are planning a global wave of mass actions to leverage this moment—to break free from fossil fuels and spark a just transition to 100 percent renewable energy.

Along with partners around the world, we announced the Break Free 2016 mobilization as the Paris Climate Summit was wrapping up in December.

In the United States, the Break Free mobilization will be a series of actions from coast to coast to take on the industry and keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Break Free isn’t like anything we’ve ever done before. It’s a network of independently-organized actions to keep fossil fuels in the ground. It’s escalated, but more than just a handful of protest veterans. It’s a mass mobilization, but not just happening in one place at one time. It’s global, but grassroots-driven.

In Albany, New York, a coalition of groups from across the region will take on an oil-by-rail terminal that pumps pollution into the homes of the city’s poorest residents; in Colorado, activists will take a stand to say that it’s time to keep all publicly-owned oil and gas underground; in Los Angeles, community members will call for a fracking ban—and so much more.

Each of these actions will help escalate a critical fossil fuel fight that’s already underway. Around the country, communities impacted by fossil fuels have been fighting and winning local battles for months, years, and sometimes decades—from Native peoples’ resistance to pipeline infrastructure in the Midwest, to the frontline-led battle to stop fracking in California’s Central Valley, to the kayak blockades that stopped Shell’s Arctic drilling rig in Seattle last year.

Now, we all have an opportunity to step up and join in.

By confronting the power of the fossil fuel industry, we can create space for something better to grow in its place—clean energy, local solutions, and a just transition to a new kind of economy.

By coordinating our escalation across the planet this May, we can show the fossil fuel industry that they have no place left to run: the world is through with their pollution, their corruption, and their greed.

Together, we can make this a turning point.

Here we go,

Matt
for the 350.org team and all of our allies and partners across the country

Wisconsin’s anti-worker/union right-to-work law has been declared unconstitutional. That’s good news for workers seeking the ability to collectively bargain in the state.

The Associated Press, in Wisconsin right-to-work law struck down by court as unconstitutional, reports:

Wisconsin’s so-called “right-to-work” law, championed by Republican governor Scott Walker as he was mounting his run for president, was struck down on Friday as violating the state constitution.

Wisconsin’s attorney general, Brad Schimel, also a Republican, promised to appeal against the decision and said he was confident it would not stand. Schimel has not made a decision on whether to seek an immediate suspension of the ruling while the appeal is pending, spokesman Johnny Koremenos said.

Three unions filed the lawsuit last year shortly after Walker signed the bill into law. So-called right-to-work laws prohibit businesses and unions from reaching agreements that require all workers, not just union members, to pay union dues. Twenty-four other states [including Ohio, JH] have such laws.

The unions argued that Wisconsin’s law was an unconstitutional seizure of union property since unions now must extend benefits to workers who don’t pay dues. Dane County circuit judge William Foust agreed.

He said the law amounts to an unconstitutional governmental taking of union funds without compensation, since under the law unions must represent people who don’t pay dues. That presents an existential threat to unions, Foust wrote.

“While [union] losses today could be characterized by some as minor, they are not isolated and the impact of [the law] over time is threatening to the unions’ very economic viability,” he wrote.

Schimel may have a harder time with his appeal in light of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.

Hillary Clinton, possibly reflecting on Mitt Romney’s 47 percent gaff in 2012, deployed a white-noise generator at a private fund raising event in Denver to prevent eavesdroppers (i.e. journalists) from hearing what she had to say to all the big money donors at a garden event at the Colorado Governor’s mansion in Denver. What was she hiding?

Journalist Stan Bush first sounded the alert on Twitter and posted a video of the sound as heard on the street.

Elizabeth Harrington, writing in Clinton Camp Used Static Noise to Drown Out Speech at Colorado Fundraiser for The Washington Free Beacon reports:

The Hillary Clinton campaign used a static noise machine to drown out the Democratic presidential frontrunner’s speech during a fundraiser in Colorado Thursday.

Stan Bush, a reporter for KCNC-TV CBS4 in Denver, was among several reporters staking out the fundraiser at the home of [Democrat] Gov. John Hickenlooper.

Music could be heard at the event, which was held outside in a public neighborhood before Clinton was set to speak. The campaign then used a “large speaker pointed out into the street” to distort the sound so lingering reporters could not hear, according to Bush.

This is how Hillary lets us know that she’s all for transparency?

Zaid Jilani, reporting for The Intercept in Hillary Clinton Fundraiser Hosted by All-Star Cast of Financial Regulators Who Joined Wall Street casts the net wider:

As Hillary Clinton questions rival Bernie Sanders over the depth of his financial reform ideas this week, a group of former government officials — once tasked with regulating Wall Street and now working in the financial industry or as Wall Street lobbyists — are participating in a fundraiser for her in the nation’s capital.

The invitation for the April 6 fundraiser, obtained by Sunlight Foundation’s Political Party Time, describes a “conversation” with the Clinton campaign’s chief financial officer, Gary Gensler, and Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Carl Levin, D-Mich.

The host: Julie Chon, a former Senate Banking Committee staffer who today is a managing director at the New York hedge fund Perry Capital.

Finance chair Gensler is a former Goldman Sachs staffer who later joined the Obama administration as a financial regulator.

Several members of the organizing committee are now either advocating for corporate clients or advising them how to best work with and around the regulations they once enforced.

One member of the committee is Raj Date. Date was the deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, tasked with reining in Wall Street abuses. In January 2013, he left the bureau and by April started a new lending firm, Fenway Summer. He then became an adviser to Promontory Financial Group, which pitches Date as advising its “clients on complying with consumer protection regulation and managing complex risks.”

The list of people who expect to have Hillary in their pocket if she wins the nomination and goes on to defeat Donald Trump in November just gets longer and longer and longer.

I don’t remember where I first encountered the idea that the three most dangerous substances for human, that we regularly ingest, are all white: sugar, fat and salt. There’s a reason that heroin addicts going cold turkey are given sugar to take the edge off and there’s a reason that we ingest far more sugar than all the heroin addicts in the world could ever snort, smoke or shoot.

Ian Leslie, writing in The sugar conspiracy for The Guardian, explains:

Robert Lustig is a paediatric endocrinologist at the University of California who specialises in the treatment of childhood obesity. A 90-minute talk he gave in 2009, titled Sugar: The Bitter Truth, has now been viewed more than six million times on YouTube. In it, Lustig argues forcefully that fructose, a form of sugar ubiquitous in modern diets, is a “poison” culpable for America’s obesity epidemic.

A year or so before the video was posted, Lustig gave a similar talk to a conference of biochemists in Adelaide, Australia. Afterwards, a scientist in the audience approached him. Surely, the man said, you’ve read Yudkin. Lustig shook his head. John Yudkin, said the scientist, was a British professor of nutrition who had sounded the alarm on sugar back in 1972, in a book called Pure, White, and Deadly.

“If only a small fraction of what we know about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive,” wrote Yudkin, “that material would promptly be banned.” The book did well, but Yudkin paid a high price for it. Prominent nutritionists combined with the food industry to destroy his reputation, and his career never recovered. He died, in 1995, a disappointed, largely forgotten man.

That is how this Long Read begins. Read the rest.

…she gets fleas, and try as she might, Hillary Clinton can’t pick off all the huge, blood-sucking fleas from the fossil fuels industry that’s she acquired during her political life.

Naomi Klein, writing in We’re out of time on climate change. And Hillary Clinton helped get us here elaborates:

There aren’t a lot of certainties left in the US presidential race, but here’s one thing about which we can be absolutely sure: the Clinton camp really doesn’t like talking about fossil-fuel money. Last week, when a young Greenpeace campaigner challenged Hillary Clinton about taking money from fossil-fuel companies, the candidate accused the Bernie Sanders campaign of “lying” and declared herself “so sick” of it. As the exchange went viral, a succession of high-powered Clinton supporters pronounced that there was nothing to see here and that everyone should move along.

You don’t hunt field mice with artillery, so when Hillary brings out the big guns think elephants.

The very suggestion that taking this money could impact Clinton’s actions is “baseless and should stop,” according to California senator Barbara Boxer. It’s “flat-out false,” “inappropriate,” and doesn’t “hold water,” declared New York mayor Bill de Blasio. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman went so far as to issue “guidelines for good and bad behaviour” for the Sanders camp. The first guideline? Cut out the “innuendo suggesting, without evidence, that Clinton is corrupt.”

That’s a whole lot of firepower to slap down a non-issue. So is it an issue or not? First, some facts. Clinton’s campaign, including her Super Pac, has received a lot of money from the employees and registered lobbyists of fossil-fuel companies. There’s the much-cited $4.5m that Greenpeace calculated, which includes bundling by lobbyists.

But that’s not all. There is also a lot more money from sources not included in those calculations. For instance, one of Clinton’s most prominent and active financial backers is Warren Buffett. While he owns a large mix of assets, Buffett is up to his eyeballs in coal, including coal transportation and some of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the country.

As Ron Popeil would say, and that’s not all!

Then there’s all the cash that fossil-fuel companies have directly pumped into the Clinton Foundation. In recent years,Exxon, Shell, ConocoPhillips and Chevron have all contributed to the foundation. An investigation in the International Business Times just revealed that at least two of these oil companies were part of an effort to lobby Clinton’s State Department about the Alberta tar sands, a massive deposit of extra-dirty oil. Leading climate scientists like James Hansen have explained that if we don’t keep the vast majority of that carbon in the ground, we will unleash catastrophic levels of warming.

Bernie is already surging upward in Pennsylvania. When that energy crosses the border into New York, Hillary could be done.

One of the questions regarding Bernie’s qualifications to be president arises from his responses in an interview with the editorial board of the New York Daily News regarding how he would break up the too-big-to-fail banks. Peter Eavis, writing in Yes, Bernie Sanders Knows Something About Breaking Up Banks for The New York Times calls bullshit:

Bernie Sanders probably knows more about breaking up banks than his critics give him credit for.

The Daily News on Monday published an interview with him that led some commentators to say he didn’t know how to break up the country’s biggest banks. Downsizing the largest financial institutions is one of Mr. Sanders’s signature policies, so it would indeed raise questions about his candidacy if he had little idea of how to do it.

In the interview, with The Daily News’s editorial board, Mr. Sanders does appear to get tangled up in some details and lacks clarity. Breaking up the banks would involve arcane and complex regulatory moves that can trip up any banking policy wonk, let alone a presidential candidate. But, taken as a whole, Mr. Sanders’s answers seem to make sense. Crucially, his answers mostly track with a reasonably straightforward breakup plan that he introduced to Congress last year.

Eavis continues, but I found a comment from David Gregory most on point:

Let’s get real.

FDR did not write the bills that created the FDIC, the SEC, Social Security, The CCC or the NRA- he delegated and had advisors. Just like Obama did not write the Affordable Care Act.

Presidents should be evaluated by their judgement and character- not their ability to describe arcane minutiae. I do not care if Hillary can name every leader in the Middle East- I care that she gave Dubya a blank check in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9-11 and apparently has yet to meet a war she didn’t like. Bernie listened to the Bush Administration’s arguments and found them wanting. That is what is important.

Hillary’s attack is a sign that she, and her staff, are starting to panic.

So, Hillary, who’s only been elected to a single office and served a single term in the appointed office of Secretary State wants to make the case that her rival who served four terms as mayor of Vermont’s largest city; served eight terms in the United States House of Representatives; and has been elected twice to the U.S. Senate, isn’t qualified to be President?

Bernie and Hillary are approaching the the primary in the critical state of New York. The state where Bernie is from (he was born in Brooklyn) and Hillary won her single election as a carpet bagger. If Hillary loses there then she will have been defeated in the closest she can come to a home state and that could spell the end of her campaign. She understands the gravity of such a loss and is rapidly approaching any means necessary territory.

Errin Whack, writing in Bernie Sanders is questioning whether Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is “qualified” to be president, the jab coming after Clinton criticized his record and his preparedness for the job, for the Associated Press reports:

Bernie Sanders on Wednesday questioned whether Democratic rival Hillary Clinton is “qualified” to be president after she spent much of the day criticizing his record and his preparedness for the job.

“She has been saying lately that she thinks that I am quote unquote not qualified to be president,” Sanders told a crowd of more than 10,000 people at Temple University’s Liacouras Center in Philadelphia. “I don’t believe that she is qualified if she is, through her super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special-interest funds.”

Sanders also said Clinton is not qualified because of her vote on the war in Iraq and her support for trade agreements that he says are harmful to American workers.

It’s the latest salvo in a war of words that has gotten increasingly heated as underdog Sanders has gained ground on front-runner Clinton, capped by the Vermont senator’s victory in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary.

Clinton quickly began to distance herself from her clear response to a question on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

In a discussion of an interview with Sanders that appeared in the New York Daily News, Clinton was asked if “Bernie Sanders is qualified and ready to be president of the United States.”

She responded, “Well, I think he hadn’t done his homework and he’d been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn’t really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions.”

So, she didn’t use the word qualified or not qualified, but then she has learned from the master the importance of knowing what the meaning is is.