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LA Times Interviews Bernie Sanders
By Bernie Sanders
Source: LA Times
March 25, 2016
The following is a transcript of Bernie Sanders’ meeting with the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board on March 23, 2016.
Nicholas Goldberg (editor of the editorial pages): Thanks for doing this on such short notice. We’re excited because it means that the California primary, even though it comes so late in the cycle, is not meaningless.
Bernie Sanders: To me it is not meaningless.
[ROOM LAUGHS]
Goldberg: Good. We have a lot of questions. We’re on the record. We are almost exclusively people from the opinion side of the paper. But we do have a person from the news pages as well. You are being recorded, so stuff could end up in the paper. If you want to go off the record, just tell us and that’s fine. We have a lot of people with a lot of questions, I think, so don’t let your answers go on too long just so we can get more of them in.
Sanders: OK.
Nick Goldberg: I’ll start with a touchy-feely question. I’m sure people will have more specific programmatic questions. But I wanted to ask if you could talk about how your ideas on poverty and wealth and income inequality and economic fairness were formed. It seems to be such a deep and integral part of your being. I wonder whether if it came from books, something you lived, something you witnessed?
Sanders: I think, Nick, that’s a good question. I’ve thought about that a lot. I can’t give you a definitive answer. But I think, to a significant degree, it resulted from the family life I grew up in. My father came to this country at the age of 17. He had no money, couldn’t speak English. Never made a whole lot of money. He was a paint salesman. We lived, for the first part of my life, in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y.
There was always a lot of tension in our house with regard to money. My mother, her dream was that she would own her own home. Not an apartment. She died young. She never achieved that dream. So there was always stress in the household over money. I learned that economics lesson at a very young age. I’ve studied economics since. But I would answer your question knowing what lack of money does to a family.
I’m not suggesting we were poor or hungry. That was not the case. But it had a major impact on my political thinking.
Nicholas Goldberg (editor of the editorial pages): Thanks for doing this on such short notice. We’re excited because it means that the California primary, even though it comes so late in the cycle, is not meaningless.
Bernie Sanders: To me it is not meaningless.
[ROOM LAUGHS]
Goldberg: Good. We have a lot of questions. We’re on the record. We are almost exclusively people from the opinion side of the paper. But we do have a person from the news pages as well. You are being recorded, so stuff could end up in the paper. If you want to go off the record, just tell us and that’s fine. We have a lot of people with a lot of questions, I think, so don’t let your answers go on too long just so we can get more of them in.
Sanders: OK.
Nick Goldberg: I’ll start with a touchy-feely question. I’m sure people will have more specific programmatic questions. But I wanted to ask if you could talk about how your ideas on poverty and wealth and income inequality and economic fairness were formed. It seems to be such a deep and integral part of your being. I wonder whether if it came from books, something you lived, something you witnessed?
Sanders: I think, Nick, that’s a good question. I’ve thought about that a lot. I can’t give you a definitive answer. But I think, to a significant degree, it resulted from the family life I grew up in. My father came to this country at the age of 17. He had no money, couldn’t speak English. Never made a whole lot of money. He was a paint salesman. We lived, for the first part of my life, in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y.
There was always a lot of tension in our house with regard to money. My mother, her dream was that she would own her own home. Not an apartment. She died young. She never achieved that dream. So there was always stress in the household over money. I learned that economics lesson at a very young age. I’ve studied economics since. But I would answer your question knowing what lack of money does to a family.
I’m not suggesting we were poor or hungry. That was not the case. But it had a major impact on my political thinking.
Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/la-times-interviews-bernie-sanders/
12 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
Thanks for the thread, polly. 
