Monday, March 9, 2020

Bernie Sanders’s ‘Democratic Socialism’ Is The Same Kind That Destroyed Venezuela

Sanders’s policies aren’t a better version of socialism; they are the same as those of socialism past and present. Remember Venezuela when you head to the polls this November.
He told his supporters during one presidential campaign that this nation’s wealth “was stolen from its citizens by the evil capitalists and the evil corporations.” He assured them that once he was elected, he would end corruption in the current political system, eradicate poverty, strengthen democracy, and return the power back to the people.
His name was Hugo Chavez, and those were his campaign promises in 1998. He became president of Venezuela in 1999 and remained in power until 2013, when he lost his battle to cancer and died in office.
Why bring up Chavez now? The more I listen to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s talks and analyze his policies, the more he reminds me of Chavez. Chavez was charismatic, and “had an organic and intuitive connection with the poor and working-class citizens he came to champion.” Sanders’s impassioned way of explicating the struggle of the working class has enabled him to out-raise his Democratic rivals through small, grassroots donations. He even earned admirers who do not necessarily like the cost of his socialist policies but are trying hard to make a case for Sanders’s presidential run based on his “socialist ethics.”
Neither Chavez nor Sanders has ever worked a day in a private business. They have never created any products nor provided a service the public needs or desires. Yet both offered fierce condemnation of the rich, the capitalists, and private businesses. According to Chavez, “Capitalism is the road to hell.”
Now, however, Venezuelans do indeed feel like they are living in hell, after Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro’s socialist policies ruined what was once the richest country in Latin America. When Chavez said, “being rich is inhuman,” he apparently forgot or simply excluded his daughter Maria Gabriela Chavez, arguably the richest person in Venezuela with more than $4 billion in estimated assets, from his condemnation.
Similarly, when Sanders first ran for a U.S. Senate seat in 1971, he claimed it was “immoral” that half the members of the Senate were millionaires. Now, as a millionaire who owns three mansions and is running for president, Sanders could no longer point the pistol at himself, so now he “doesn’t think billionaires should exist.”
Read the rest of the story HERE.

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