Jill Stein: the Green party candidate with her money in Big Carbon

Hypocrisy on the campaign trail, misrepresentation to voters, one view in private and another in public – for once, the latest revelation in the 2016 presidential race isn’t about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. It’s about purer-than-pure Green party candidate Jill Stein.

To recap, Stein is a sanctimonious medical doctor with a worrying penchant for pseudoscience (think GM food conspiracy theories and anti-vaccination myths) who is running for president for the second time. Last month, she vandalised a bulldozer in protest against an oil pipeline and is subject to an arrest warrant in North Dakota. Her entire campaign is based on slamming other politicians for being in the pocket of Wall Street and Big Business, and her position is utterly uncompromising. Though the prospect of a Trump presidency should horrify anyone who claims to be so committed to taking down corruption in business, Stein has been far more hostile to the Democrats and Hillary Clinton than to the walking embodiment of capitalism gone wrong running on the Republican ticket. In fact she’s echoed Trump’s rhetoric, calling Clinton a “criminal”, and pandering to the notion that the election might be “rigged”. She’s even said Clinton’s foreign policy is scarier than Trump’s.

But if you’re going to eschew nuance and maintain yours is the only path to righteousness, you better be sure your hands are as clean as you say they are. Which Jill Stein’s are not.

An investigation this week from Yashar Ali at the Daily Beast finds that Stein’s wealth is tied up in mutual funds that invest in all of the industries she so despises: Big Pharma, Big Carbon, Big Tobacco, drones, and even the financial sector.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong in investing in mutual funds or in these industries – millions of Americans with retirement accounts and investment portfolios do the same. But Stein isn’t like millions of Americans. She’s the saviour of the American Left. She has routinely condemned the banks that offer funding for US enterprises, the energy companies looking for ways to provide cheaper power to low-income Americans, building projects of all kinds, and any politician whose stance is more accommodating than hers.

Stein’s campaign has responded by pointing out that Chelsea Clinton is on the board of the Daily Beast, which is true, but doesn’t explain away Stein’s controversial investment choices. The campaign also argued that Stein has “no control in management or decision-making” when it comes to her funds. Ali refuses to buy her excuse:

“While it’s true that Stein would not have control over the investments of the funds she invested in, she did have a choice of whether to invest in these funds to begin with. In the past, political candidates, in an effort to avoid a conflict of interest or have their judgment called into question, have invested their entire portfolios in U.S. Treasuries, cash/cash equivalents, in socially responsible index funds, or clean-energy funds. In her statement, Stein said that she has ‘explored’ more socially responsible funds but ‘found their investments in fracking and large-scale biofuels not much better than the non-green funds. I have not yet found the mutual funds that represent my goals of advancing the cause of people, planet, and peace.’

While Stein claims that she had difficulty finding funds that aligned with her values, she didn’t explain why she chose to remain in funds that are completely disjointed from her values.”

(Ali’s article also notes that numerous other politicians, from Barack Obama to Ted Cruz, have been questioned about their mutual fund portfolios, so this is hardly an unfair point of interest for the Green party candidate, as Stein’s response claims.)

Such hypocrisy may seem small-fry when compared with the behaviour of the other candidates – just this week a memo emerged showing how Bill Clinton’s wealth was tied to the charitable work of the Clinton Foundation, while an undercover investigation by The Telegraph revealed evidence of Trump’s super-PAC offering to illegally accept money from a foreign donor. But such comparisons miss the point: Jill Stein isn’t running as a better alternative to Trump or Clinton, she’s running as the only ethical and moral choice for Americans with a conscience.

Politics is about compromise – that’s one of the few things Clinton and Trump both agree on. Stein paints herself as a die-hard idealist, prepared to derail Clinton’s victory and hand the keys to the White House to Trump rather than admit the Democrats are the lesser of two evils for voters who feel as she does about big banks and climate change. And that’s her prerogative – there’s a role for committed idealists in every election. But Jill Stein isn’t an idealist – she’s a hypocrite who is accepting double-digit returns for investing in the industries she demonises, while castigating others for doing the same.

The voters who buy into Jill Stein’s fantasy-land delusions about energy and business deserve to know that, in private, she understands exactly how the real world works, and is perfectly happy to profit from it.