Lots of questions are being asked about the Clinton Foundation–except some obvious ones that are being almost entirely ignored, questions which should invite debate on troubling connections sitting right out in broad daylight.

Donald Trump and his Republicans allies, as well as others, have failed yet to make the case that Hillary Clinton tied her decisions as Secretary of State to donations made to the Clinton Foundation. I’m not saying the quid pro quo or even simply an appearance of improper behavior don’t exist: there are serious past and current allegations about possible ethical violations. But, most of these “donations for action” examples could also have been just part-and-parcel of the interaction between elites engaged in foreign affairs. Such engagement might, indeed, have led to bad and questionable decisions that we can respectfully debate and disagree on.

To make the case for those violation, one has to sometimes trace a picture that the average observer can’t follow: X person made a call to Y person who handed it off to a whole series of other people, who, then, arranged a call/meeting with the Secretary of State, which, then resulted in a decision and, then, presto, money arrived to the Clinton Foundation. It looks bad, and may, in fact, be bad (illegal?), but the chain is mostly hard to prove beyond say a standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt”.

What isn’t at all hard to show is something I’ve raised for a very long time, pre-dating the election season: The big donations  streaming into the foundation (and those donations are the backbone of the Foundation’s income) comes mostly from interests directly opposed to what the Democratic Party purports to stand for. Certainly that is a reasonable case if one simply takes as a yardstick the most recent platform adopted at the convention in Philadelphia.

For example, the Walton Family Foundation is listed as giving $1-$5 million to the Foundation just in the second quarter of 2016 (to the Foundation’s credit, it openly discloses donations accessible in an easy-to-use website search). That money is derived from Wal-Mart profits that flow to the six heirs of the Walton family, who were collectively worth $149 billion in 2014.

To be more accurate, Wal-Mart’s business model relies on poverty: it pays workers low wages, gives them, at best, bare-bones, unaffordable health care, and no real pension, forcing tens of thousands of workers and their children to rely on government support to survive. The company is virulently anti-union. And it counts on nationwide poverty to drive customers seeking low prices through its doors. Its international supply chain is based on a simple idea: find the cheapest, lowest-cost slave-like labor to make goods that can be shipped back to the U.S. Bluntly, the Waltons rob people of the sweat-of-the-brow and feed on the rest of us to amass a stupefying fortune.

The 2016 Democratic Party platform says this:

“We believe that Americans should earn at least $15 an hour and have the right to form or join a union and will work in every way we can—in Congress and the federal government, in states and with the private sector—to reach this goal”. Wal-Mart, along with most of the business world, opposes hiking the minimum wage above its current poverty-level of $7.25-per hour, and the company, based on its history, will do everything possible to destroy the labor movement.

Don’t indict the Clintons for sucking up alone to Wal-Mart. Many people in the party have done so for many years (as I’ve written about for almost a decade, including here). Which is unfathomable, again, if the party claims to be for unions and for a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. There should be a complete ban from taking money from Wal-Mart until the company ceases to be at the leading edge of stealing the future from workers.

Let’s move on to the financial sector. Bank of America bestowed $500,000-$1,000,000 on the Foundation. That’s chump change compared to the $59 billion the bank has paid out through 2015 in fines, settlements and restitution as part of its illegal role in the mortgage crisis—a crisis that robbed millions of Americans of their jobs, life-savings and secure future.

The party’s 2016 platform has extensive language on “Reining in Wall Street and Fixing our Financial System”, including:

“Democrats believe that no bank can be too big to fail and no executive too powerful to jail. Democrats will support stronger criminal laws and civilpenalties for Wall Street criminals who prey on the public trust… Banks should not be able to gamble with taxpayers’ deposits or pose an undue risk to Main Street.”

For basically a pittance, Wal-Mart, Bank of America and other powerful corporate interests whitewash their day-to-day behavior by tossing a few crumbs to the Clinton Foundation. I have heard many Foundation supporters defend its works by ticking off its various good deeds (lowering drug prices, for example, in poor countries). Ok, but, one has to ask how those good deeds measure up to what is essentially handing a “seal of approval” to companies who, then, ravage the lives of millions of people.

Would it be more powerful and effect the lives of millions of people, here and abroad, if the Foundation refused to take a single dollar from Wal-Mart until the company declared its neutrality in union elections and supported the $15-an-hour hike in the minimum wage–which would be in sync with what, again, the party platform promotes–which presumably the Clintons are bound to support? Or to say to Bank of America–and the other donors from Wall Street–that its money won’t be taken until it changes its business model, stops trying to undo financial regulation and, along with the rest of corporate America, revamps its compensation structure so that its CEO stop engaging in legalized robbery that allows them to loot corporate treasuries, enriching themselves and leaving nothing for the workers who actually create most value?

Ahem.

I think this critique can be made, while at the same time, being clear that the same powerful interests funding the Foundation are close allies and donors of Republicans, and, not surprisingly, have escaped scrutiny. The Koch Brothers-funded arms of the Republican Party and the right-wing noise machine won’t utter a disparaging work against Wal-Mart and Bank of America. Donald Trump, the target of thousands of lawsuits many of which allege that he has cheated thousands of people and small businesses out of pay they are owed, has been an integral part of the system conning working people.

Beyond the white-washing, more fundamentally, the acceptance of money from a significant number of the Foundation’s donors promotes a basic misconception that rich people and big corporations can fix the world’s problems through philanthropy or good deeds. That is bullshit.

Our problems are deeply systemic. We can only address climate change, poverty and global inequality by axing the very system benefiting many of the donors to the Clinton Foundation. We should not reward such donors–we have to say “get the hell out of the way and go away.”

It’s a sober, open and transparent debate Democrats should welcome.