Jill Stein hypocrite

[Valley Oak]

Merriam-Webster: hypocrite:

"a person who claims or pretends to have certain beliefs about what is right but who behaves in a way that disagrees with those beliefs"

Jill Stein Has Investments In Fossil Fuel Companies and Tobacco!

The Young Turks, Oct 27, 2016
The Daily Beast recently published a hit piece against Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Some of her investment portfolio is in fossil fuels. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below. https://tytnetwork.com/join

"Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein has largely based her campaignon her uncompromising positions on the environment, opposition to big banks and Wall Street, defense contractors, and the pharmaceutical industry. But an analysis of her financial disclosures, which she was required to file as a presidential candidate, show she is heavily invested in the very industries that she maligns the most and as a result of her investments, she has built significant wealth.

According to the financial-disclosure form she filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics on March 30, 2016, Stein and her husband, Richard Rohrer, have investments (with the exception of real estate) valued at anywhere from $3,832,050 to $8,505,000. (Stein told The Daily Beast she inherited “over a half-million dollars” from her parents.) We don’t know their exact net worth because filers are only required to provide a range of the value of their investments as opposed to exact values.

Stein voluntarily released the first two pages of her 2015 federal tax return. That return, filed jointly with her husband, shows a total income of $349,088 in 2015 and an effective tax rate of 21 percent.

The Daily Beast:
Jill Stein’s Ideology Says One Thing—Her Investment Portfolio Says Another...

[phredo]

The whole review by Cenk Uygur is worth watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jWK4EhVCLE Eleven minutes well spent!

The posting begins with a quote from Cenk, I believe, but the rest of the posting must be from the Daily Beast article that The Young Turks reviewed. Until I listened to the youtube above, I got the idea that the whole article, including the punch line in red at the end, was from the review. Silly me!

[BobHeisler]

Sounds hypocritical to me.

Merriam-Webster: hypocrite:

"a person who claims or pretends to have certain beliefs about what is right but who behaves in a way that disagrees with those beliefs"

Jill Stein Has Investments In Fossil Fuel Companies and Tobacco!
...

[phredo]

Umm... I finally got around to reading the Daily Beast article itself in order to see if there was more to it than the parts quoted by The Young Turks, the latter being much more extensive than the parts quoted by the original poster here. It turns out The Young Turks did a pretty good job of summarizing, as well as critiquing, the Daily Beast article.

The main information in both is that Stein has most of her money in mutual funds, like the Vanguard Fund and other "index" funds, that is, funds that invest in a wide range of stocks that, collectively, copy the performance of the stock market as a whole. The only investment not in these kinds of funds mentioned in the article was a direct investment on Merck, a pharmaceutical company. Here is what Stein said, as quoted in the Daily Beast article, in response to questions from the Daily Beast:

“Like many Americans who hold retirement accounts, pension funds, or who invest in the American economy, my finances are largely held in index funds or mutual funds over which I have no control in management or decision-making. Sadly, most of these broad investments are as compromised as the American economy—degraded as it is by the fossil-fuel, defense and finance industries.”

The article goes on to say that, while the above statement may be true, she does, in fact, have a choice of investing in "socially responsible" mutual funds try to not invest in, for example, polluting industries, and then provides Stein's answer to that, saying, "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.'”

So, echoing Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, I would say that she didn't do much different than most people do who have money to invest and don't want to spend a lot of time going over mutual fund prospectuses to figure out all their holdings. On the other hand, given her position in politics and her world view, she probably should have done more work on it and invested in some of the best of the "socially responsible" funds, even though the returns would be lower.

[phredo]

And what's more...

There is a big difference between having $5 million dollars (admittedly, I was a bit surprised that Stein is as well off as she is) spread around in income producing mutual funds that mirror the overall economy with all it's good and bad actors and, let's say, someone, a hundred times richer, who accepts direct payments measuring in the millions from bad-actor corporations. In the one case, we might expect the person to be influenced in very small ways (as in unconsciously, perhaps) by her indirect holdings in a particular business. Not a wonderful thing, and I would agree it would be better is she tried her best to figure out how to divest from any companies that could suggest any conflict of interest. But imagine how the other person is expected to and surely will respond to what amounts to direct bribes that would would not be given unless the bribed person responded properly!

The article in the Daily Beast did not choose to compare Stein with other candidates but instead contrasted her choice of mutual fund holdings with her own aims and ideals, which is their right to do, of course, and has some merit. But one could find fault with the tone, using expressions like "moral and ethical supremacy" and "purity a central pillar of her presidential candidacy" to characterize Stein and the Green Party's stance. I don't think the Green Party calls themselves "pure" or "morally and ethically supreme", words which are being used to try to create a false sense that the Greens' politics, in most ways indistinguishable from Bernie Sanders', are impractical, pie-in-the-sky notions held only by elite cranks. As Uygur points out, the attitudes and goals of the the Daily Beast do not affect the facts of where Stein's money is, but are interesting in their own light.