Lifestyles of the rich and socialist: Bernie Sanders has 3 houses, makes millions
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., entered the 2020 presidential race this week promising to transform America with a left-wing vision of economic and environmental justice. But the self-described democratic socialist’s high-end income, multiple houses and fondness for air travel have already opened him up to criticism that his lifestyle doesn't always match the rhetoric.
Sanders has pitched himself as a grassroots economic populist, focusing on income inequality and higher taxes for the rich.
"Our campaign is about transforming our country and creating a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice," he said.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-socialist-bernie-sanders-has-3-houses-makes-millionsSocialism doesn’t equal social justice, or vice versa
Home/Ideas, Politics/Socialism doesn’t equal social justice, or vice versa
Socialism doesn’t equal social justice, or vice versa
(By Sosamma Samuel-Burnett, Centennial Fellow) In November 1989, I was a junior at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. I had come of age during the Cold War and the world was evenly divided between Democracy (led by the USA) and Socialism (led by the USSR). I had spent the previous 2 1/2 years immersed in international politics, especially studying Soviet politics and Marxist theory to prepare for the diplomatic needs of this divided world. But that fall semester, the Berlin Wall fell and, within two years thereafter, so did the USSR. The world and life, as I had known and studied, had forever changed.
Years later as a professor in California, I would share that experience with my students – to prepare them for a much more fractured and volatile world that was not anchored by just two camps. I taught them that the lessons learned from the Soviet experiment was simply that Socialism does not work. Communism as a theory is quite Utopian, but Socialism as its political construct is not about Utopia but is about control. And the controls that Socialism creates ultimately removes rights and freedoms from individuals, and also heavily burdens the economic system. Certainly Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were chief among architects of the Soviet Union’s fall, but even without these two leaders, it was an eventuality that the Soviet system would fail, because socialism eventually implodes.
Fast forward to Fall 2015. The word and concept of socialism has crept back into the U.S. lexicon, but curiously it has taken on a different context. Where socialism and communism were taboo terms that referenced “the enemy†in earlier decades. Socialism has now taken on a certain cache among predominately liberal circles. Given my experiences as a child, as a student, and as a professor, I am struck that this term has become more appealing, in light of our history and that of socialist countries, particularly the USSR.
Consider the fact that one of the Democratic presidential front runners, Bernie Sanders, not only identifies himself as a Democratic Socialist but is highly regarded by many. I would argue that he is highly regarded less because of his political views and more because of his personal authenticity. However, his identification as a “Democratic Socialist†is problematic. Not only is this reference an oxymoron, if we consider the meaning of either term, but also seems to be an attempt to intertwine with the concept of the more democratic “social justice.â€
I am equally struck by the fact that social justice, in turn, has increasingly fallen out of favor among Conservative and even Christian circles. They also seem to interrelate the idea of social justice with something akin to socialism. If history and society can demonstrate one thing to us in this context, it would be this – socialism does not create social justice. And in the converse, social justice does not create socialism.
http://www.ccu.edu/centennial/2015/10/socialism-doesnt-equal-social-justice-or-vice-versa/
