11.4.00 | LOS ANGELES -- Ralph Nader Friday shrugged off recent accusations that his million-dollar investment in the stock market reeks of hypocrisy.

"Do you have money in the bank? Do you have a checking account?" the Green Party presidential candidate asked a reporter at a Santa Monica press conference. "You're condemned because that bank owns stock. See?"

Salon.com, Pacifica Radio and many concerned lefties have criticized Nader's six-figure participation in the Fidelity Magellan Fund, which owns substantial chunks of such targets of Ralph's wrath as Occidental Petroleum, General Dynamics, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Wal-Mart.

"[Fidelity] holds shares in so many companies Nader has crusaded against, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Nader's participation in the fund is supremely hypocritical," Salon campaign correspondent Jake Tapper wroteOct. 28.

Not only has Nader eviscerated the companies in Fidelity's portfolio on a daily basis, he also wants to impose a $0.0025 tax on every stock transaction, because "we should tax things we don't like, such as speculation."

Asked Friday why he actively engages in something "we don't like," and whether his Fidelity investment is hypocritical, he said: "The issue is, first of all, what you do with your money? And I spend over 80 percent of our funds -- what I earned, for 30 years -- supporting creating citizen action groups," he said. "The Magellan fund is the biggest mutual fund in the country; 150 billion dollars. They invest in bonds, money-markets and 7,000 corporations. So, it's not true to say that I have a stock investment in Occidental.

"It is true to say that I have attacked all companies, whether or not I have the most remotest interest in them, and I relish in doing so because I want to establish a principle in American politics, which is: It's important for people to have a conflict against their financial interest."

Al Gore's family has a complicated, close and lucrative decades-long entwinement with Occidental, and its late boss Armand Hammer. When Nader argues that it is incorrect to compare his investment in Fidelity with Gore's involvement with Occidental, he is right.

Still, Nader is walking a quiet tightrope when it comes to his personal wealth and stock loot, weighed against the prejudices of his core supporters and his own well-documented desire for privacy. He has estimated his own lifetime earnings at over $13 million, drawn from the lecture circuit and various lawsuits (including, famously, a settlement with General Motors after the company harassed him in the wake of his GM-skewering "Unsafe at Any Speed"). From Day One he has used those monies to launch "public research groups" and a variety of consumer watchdog agencies ... and also to play the stock market, whether individually or under the names of his institutions.

He has also, since even before he became a public figure, jealously guarded his privacy, and revealed as little as necessary about his organizations' finances. He refused to reveal his tax returns when he ran for president in 1996, and has said he made sure to keep his spending on that election at below the tiny federal minimums that would require financial disclosure.

For progressives, seeing such a notoriously Spartan character associated with millions of dollars is a tad surreal, especially from a guy who campaigns daily against the income inequalities in America. For the majority in his audiences who love to yell whenever anyone on the podium condemns "capitalism," Nader's stock millions just doesn't square. (Outside the arenas, in the rare critical discussions about the Green Party candidate, his successful portfolio probably ranks #2 in its ability to irritate, behind his potential exaggerations in insisting that Democrats and Republicans are essentially the same.

After he disclosed his holdings this summer (per federal requirement), his explanations of the wealth were feisty.

"The question should almost be, 'Why is it so little?'” he told the Washington Post. "If it was in any way comparable to what these corporate executives are getting, we could've done a lot more."

It is not uncommon for progressive voters who might support Nader to view the stock market primarily as a playground for the greedy. Nader, who has a typically exhaustive command over the minutae of financing, seems to have the similar view that the capital markets are a place for investors to gamble (and in his case, win), as opposed to a place to generate business investment.

CNBC “Hardball” host Chris Matthews tried to gauge Nader's thoughts on the market's role in building the New Economy in a Nov. 1 interview:

MATTHEWS: Why do you think it started here, why did America beat the Japanese, the Russians, and the Europeans and the other Asian powers -- they were pretty good economically, they're dynamite in math and science, they can beat us one-to-one, why did this society produce the revolution we've seen in technology?

NADER: Simple, it's called government research and development. The Pentagon funded and created the Internet. The biotech industry, the aerospace industry, the pharmaceutical industry -- all were lunching off taxpayer research and development at NASA, National Institutes of Health, the Pentagon, that's what the other countries don't have.

MATTHEWS: Well they also don't have venture capital, they don't have the incentive system we have.

NADER: Well they also, a lot of the money goes into the universities, and a lot of inventions and innovations are coming out of universities. The problem is that these are taxpayer assets that then by our government are given away free to the corporations. ... Let us not forget, without the taxpayer, and government research and development, these booming industries wouldn't even be anywhere near where they are today."

On the campaign trail, Nader doesn't specifically bait Wall Street by name, unless it's to describe how the New York Stock Exchange extracted a massive subsidy from the city of New York to stay in Manhattan. His beef is more about how corporations as a whole have too much power, and that the natural tendency for corporate power is to derail all civil rights struggles.

His supporters, though, don't mind a good round of stock market-bashing.

“Yeah, Wall Street's whizzing," Jim Hightower said at Nader rallies in Austin and Seattle. "It's whizzing on you and me."

In the end, Nader seems to argue that owning a large investment fund, as opposed to specific stocks (though he owns some of those too, notably in Cisco Systems), is the moral equivalent of holding a "blind trust." You can feel good about getting rich, and you hope that your money doesn't directly support any bomb-making company, though it might.

And if you own shares in a company doing wrong, well, that's just a better way to draw some attention to the wrongdoing. In mid-September, Nader took particular glee in holding a press conference in San Jose slamming Cisco's proposed new 20,000-employee office development in Coyote Valley, "that last remaining oasis" of the Silicon Valley.

"The key thing is: Do you attack the companies, whether or not you have any funds in them, directly or indirectly?" he asked Friday. "Not only do I attack them, I invite even more ferocious and well-documented attacks for me to attach my name to. Isn't that wonderful?"