MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Don’t be a sucker for socialism: From the USSR to Venezuela, experience reveals Sanders’s socialism wouldn’t enrich anyone but a ruling elite. “George Orwell explained the phenomenon in his Animal Farm, many decades ago. But people keep falling for it: Like Ponzi schemes, socialism is an evergreen form of fraud, egged on by suckers eager to believe the lies hucksters tell them. Which brings me to Bernie Sanders.”