To begin, you can go and read the full interview, and an update from Playboy here.

I also posted, back then, the whole PDF of the interview if you'd like it here.

From the update, these views are worth posting, and the commentary in bold is from the magazine:

SANDERS WAS TALKING ABOUT CLINTON FOUNDATION CASH IN 2013

Well, (Bill) Clinton was and is a very smart guy, but he is the guy who signed NAFTA. I like Bill Clinton, I like Hillary Clinton, but they live in a world surrounded by a lot of money. It’s not an accident that Clinton is doing a fantastic job with his foundation. Where do you think that money is coming from? The point being that Clinton was a moderate Democrat who was heavily influenced by Wall Street and big-money interests, and Obama is governing in that same way. CLASS WARFARE WILL BE A MAJOR THEME

We are in the midst of intense class warfare, where the wealthiest people and the largest corporations are at war with the middle class and working families of this country, and it is obvious the big-money interests are winning that war. THE 1 PERCENT WILL NOT BE BANKROLLING HIS ELECTION

When we were growing up and read about oligarchic countries in Latin America and elsewhere, did you ever think that in the United States one percent would own 38 percent of the wealth and the bottom 60 percent only 2.3 percent? HAWKS WON’T LIKE HIS FOREIGN POLICY

We should do everything we can to avoid a hugely expensive cold war with China similar to what we had with the Soviet Union. We should also do our best, in a respectful way, to support those elements in China fighting for a democratic society. SERIOUSLY, THEY’LL HATE IT

If you want to talk about nation building, I know a great nation that needs to be rebuilt. It’s called the United States of America. I would rather invest in this country than in Iraq or Afghanistan. Our roads and bridges and railroads and water systems and schools need rebuilding. We have been at war now for more than a decade. Our troops have done a tremendous job, but it is time for the people of Afghanistan to take full responsibility for their country and for waging the war against the Taliban. And in Iraq, I think it’s clear that nation building didn’t work very well. HE’LL BE THE RARE CANDIDATE DISCUSSING CIVIL LIBERTIES

The way the drone program has been handled is a major reason I voted against the nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA. Of course we must defend ourselves against terrorism, but I am not convinced Brennan is adequately sensitive to the important balancing act required to make protecting our civil liberties an integral part of ensuring our national security. Drone attacks that kill innocent people are immoral and create an enormous amount of anti-Americanism. AND THE PATRIOT ACT

I think we can fight terrorism without undermining the Constitution. That is why I voted against the so-called Patriot Act. In my view, that surveillance law gives the government far too much power to spy on innocent U.S. citizens and provides for very little oversight or disclosure. THE SENATOR IS NOT A FAN OF CAPITALISM

People have lost sight of America as a society where everyone has at least a minimal standard of living and is entitled to certain basic rights, a nation in which every child has a good-quality education, has access to health care and lives in an environmentally clean community, not as an opportunity for billionaires to make even more money and avoid taxes by stashing their money in the Cayman Islands. Can you argue that the era of unfettered capitalism should be over? Absolutely. Does this system of hypercapitalism, this incredibly unequal distribution of wealth and income, need fundamental reform? Absolutely it does. You have the entire scientific community saying we have to be very aggressive in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Yet you’re seeing the heads of coal companies and oil companies willing to sacrifice the well-being of the entire planet for their short-term profits. And these folks are funding phony organizations to try to create doubt about the reality of global warming.

To the unpublished material: There are 200 plus pages of transcript because I spent hours talking to him so I'll comb through to find additional material. Just because it's in the air, I'll start with thoughts about the challenges of running for president when he was musing about it (uh, where it says "PLAYBOY", those are my questions cuz yeah I'm just that kinda guy). What I think is quite instructive below is his view that 2/3 of the people agree with him on the issues--I agree with that--which he pointed out to downplay the idea that he's iconoclastic:

PLAYBOY: That’s ironic. You may have been asked this question. This seems like the perfect time for you to run for President, why won’t you do that? I know you’ve been asked this a million times, you’ve mentioned but the country is at a point where it’s ready to blow up. SANDERS: Well, the answer is that to run a serious campaign, you need to raise hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, that’s number one and I don’t think… PLAYBOY: Which you could do, you could raise, assuming--let me just back it up and say what you’ve been saying, it’s almost as if you’ve been the Paul Revere or whatever analogy you want to use, everything you’ve said and everything you talk about is coming to pass and there are people out there that are hungry for that. I can understand if you don’t want to go through the arduous process of that, that’s a different issue but you could raise…I mean, Barack Obama proved it, you can raise money. SANDERS: Barack Obama went to his friends the first time around on Wall Street. PLAYBOY: That’s true, but he still raised a fair amount of money in small donations. SANDERS: Yeah, but I’m not Barack Obama, okay? That’s the point. I do not take corporate money. PLAYBOY: Small donations from regular people. SANDERS: Yeah, but you need just a phenomenal number of small donations and a kind of an organization, so I appreciate the compliment. PLAYBOY: You just said nobody is speaking about it, so— SANDERS: Again, it’s hard to say what kind of media coverage one would get, right wing…Rand Paul, you know, trust me, these things are harder than they look on the surface and I’m not even talking about just money, money is huge, organization. PLAYBOY: You would have thousands of people willing to work for you, all over the country, campuses, cities. SANDERS: Tempting, I think people are hungering for a voice out there, that’s what I do think and what would be tempting would be to try to raise issues and demand discussion on issues that are not being talked about. Issues that you and I have talked about, inequality in wealth and trade policy, protecting the social safety net, moving aggressively on global warming, those are issues that are not being talked about and it would be tempting, but… PLAYBOY: So why do you resist it so much? Let’s say you could raise the money, the people would be there— SANDERS: Whoa, whoa, whoa, it’s too easy. PLAYBOY: There would be— SANDERS: Jonathan! We’re talking about the United States of America, you’re talking about having to put together an organization of tens and tens of thousands of people. Ross Perot can run as an independent because he’s a billionaire. PLAYBOY: You could raise the money, given the way people can raise money now, particularly small donations over the internet and social media, there would be other people—I’m telling you, you could raise the money. I’m not saying that you could raise Barack Obama type, but enough to run a national campaign. You said there needs to be a voice out there, particularly—Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee probably for the Democrats, let’s face it. That’s not going to offer an alternative to the country. SANDERS: No, it’s not. PLAYBOY: She won’t even explain…nobody has even held her accountable for her vote for the Iraq War and that’s the kind of voice we’re going to have out there. SANDERS: Well, I thank you very much, if I run I’ll make you my campaign manager. PLAYBOY: Well, I won’t put it—look, I don’t know if you want me for the campaign manager but there are a lot of people out there who would put time into it and I think you should—I’m just asking, do you ever consider that given that there isn’t the voice that you just described, let’s put it that way. SANDERS: I wish that there was that voice, whether I’m the right person or not, I have my doubts, but thank you very much. And by the way, I should tell you, people like me do not often make it into the United States Senate. Do you see that plaque in front of you? PLAYBOY: This one here? SANDERS: Yeah, you know who that is? PLAYBOY: No, who is that? SANDERS: That’s Eugene V. Debs. PLAYBOY: Oh yeah, yeah, okay, so Debs ran for President. SANDERS: Debs ran for President on more than one occasion and he got six percent of the vote, point being that people with my politics don’t often make it to the United States Senate and I’m proud of the work that I’m doing here, I’m proud of representing the State of Vermont, I’m comfortable doing that. PLAYBOY: In 2016, though, you would get a pass in terms, you wouldn’t be giving up your seat to do it. SANDERS: All right, we’ll talk about that next time. PLAYBOY: He obviously doesn’t want to go there. But I’m going to come back to that someday. I understand that you’re hesitant. SANDERS: I do, I honestly appreciate your support on that, but… PLAYBOY: I won’t push you again on that right now. Do you think of yourself as an iconoclast in that way, in what you talk about? SANDERS: Well, I mean, I’m very proud to be the longest-serving independent in American Congressional history, that’s no small thing. PLAYBOY: Is your iconoclasm, have you always been that way? SANDERS: I don’t see myself…you know, it’s not like I wake up in the morning and say, I’ve got to be different than everybody else. Everything that I have told you, Jonathan, I believe has the support of most of the people in the country. I am amazed that I have colleagues here who have the great courage to tell their constituents that we should give tax breaks to billionaires and cut social security. That’s very courageous and brave, I am not that courageous. I tell people that we’ve got to stand together to fight for the middle class. PLAYBOY: I hate to tell you, you just made the argument again, I’m not going to go back to it, he just made the argument again to run for President, right, didn’t he? SANDERS: It is true, everything that I’ve talked with you, there’s very little—very little—that I have said to you that doesn’t have the vast support of the—the real question is, why aren’t there more people raising these issues? The poll came out, we just saw it yesterday, two-thirds of the American people think that we should lift the cap on taxable income for social security. You understand what I’m saying? Two-thirds of the people! I introduce legislation to do that, is it very brave? I’ve got two-thirds, what’s brave is to cut social security, that takes a lot of courage to do what the people don’t want to do. It astounds me that in fact you have two political parties who day after day after day do exactly what the American people do not want them to do and do not do what the American people want them to do.

[emphasis added]

PLAYBOY: And why is that? One of the things that struck me is that after Occupy Wall Street erupted, there was very little reflection on the part of the infrastructure of the progressive movement, why none of the Occupy Wall Street actually turned—it really did not come from the progressive infrastructure, not the Campaign for America’s Future, with all due respect, The Nation, all those infrastructure had almost nothing to do and there’s been no reflection why that happened. SANDERS: Look, it’s a complicated issue and I don’t know all the answers, to be honest with you, Jonathan. I think what we do know is certainly the Democratic Party has very few grassroots…is very weak, they can mobilize people to get out and vote, but in terms of being a political movement as opposed to get out the vote effort, that’s not their intention and that’s not what they intend to do. Unions are now weaker than they used to be, you’ve got a certain number of union people who are going to vote Republican, get caught up in other issues. Clearly the major political goal that we have is to reverse that phenomenon and to build a strong grassroots movement around progressive ideals. Are we there now? We are absolutely not. PLAYBOY: But stand outside the Democratic Party, put them aside, I’m actually thinking about the institutions outside the party, it feels like there was never really a recognition that Occupy Wall Street happened without any real connection to unions, to… SANDERS: There was some, there was some unions. PLAYBOY: Later, but there wasn’t. SANDERS: I don’t know the answer to that. PLAYBOY: Do you think that’s because we failed to organize sort of beyond a small circle? SANDERS: Let me just tell you this, I’m telling you a story outside of school here, but I’ll tell you at the end. I go to the Democratic caucuses every week, we caucus and every week there is a report about fundraising. Republicans have raised thus and thus, this is what we have done. In the six years that I’ve been going to those meetings, I have never heard five minutes of discussion about organizing, it’s about raising money. Not five minutes to say, look, West Virginia we have rallies, we’re doing this, we’re doing that, we’re knocking on doors, there is zero, to the best of my knowledge. In six years, I have heard no discussion about that at all. PLAYBOY: And it goes back to the point we talked about in one of the last get- together about you believe we could win the states like Mississippi— SANDERS: I absolutely do. PLAYBOY: But we spend no time there. SANDERS: Absolutely. I mean, the other thing, where the Democratic Party is now, I think if Barack Obama was sitting here he would not deny it, nobody believes that the Democratic Party is now the party of the American working class. That wasn’t always the case, in the ‘30’s, I think people did believe that, ‘40’s maybe they believed it, nobody believes that right now. The Democratic Party—and I support all of these things—is the party of gay rights, I support that, it’s the party of much stronger women’s rights, much better on global warming, much better on immigration, all of those things are good things. But in terms of class politics, the understanding of that, what is enormously important is that you have a middle class today which is literally disappearing. Our country is moving towards an oligarchy, with a handful of wealthy individuals and corporations having enormous political and economic impact. Is that part of the Democratic world view? It is not. PLAYBOY: So to close the loop, before we leave this point about why there isn’t a movement, is that because you think, is it possible that even though people are doing poorly, it’s not like people are living on a trash heap in Mumbai, that people can still shop at Wal-Mart, to put it into gross terms. SANDERS: People are hurting, yeah they can shop at Wal-Mart, but people are really hurting and hurting very badly. I think to some degree also, if you go out and talk to people and you say, hey, the Celtics beat the Knicks last night, let’s talk about that or let’s talk about the football game, that’s part of the vernacular, I think people are so alienated from the political process that that type of discussion—if you say to somebody, what are you doing to try to improve life for the middle class, they’ll look at you like you’re crazy. What are you talking about, what am I supposed to do? I’ve got a job, I’m working 50 hours a week or I don’t have a job, I’m unemployed, I’m knocking my brains out trying to find work, taking care of my kids. The idea that collective action can improve our quality of life and make gains for working families, I don’t think that’s part of the world view of people. PLAYBOY: So in some way, the decline of unions to 7.6%, very few people have connection to unions, they don’t know what collective action is. SANDERS: Absolutely, exactly. When we talk about the decline of the—hold on one second…

[INTERRUPTION AS SUBJECT GOES OFF INTERVIEW] SANDERS: When we talk about the impact of the decline of humans, it is certainly true that as fewer workers are organized, they have less say in the work place, less capability of negotiating wages with their employers, but equally important if not more important is the fact that there is no political…that millions of workers who previously had gotten their political education, today are not getting that education. There are stories here that I’ve heard from my colleagues in industrialized states who would go to two factories, one unionized, one not and the consciousness of the workers in the different factories was night and day. So historically and today, unions are the major proponents of educating working people about the economic reality that they face and how they can organize in order to improve their lives and to the degree that unions become more and more downsized and less significant, that means millions of workers do not receive that education. PLAYBOY: So what you were saying before ties into something that other people have told me. Forget about the polls that say Democrats are favored more than Republicans or vice versa, there seems to be the lowest support in my lifetime for the system. Do you see that? SANDERS: Yes. In real terms, what the Democratic campaign program is about is we’re pretty bad but they’re worse, vote for us. That’s true, we’re pretty bad but the Republicans are worse and that’s the reason you should vote for the Democrats. Is Obama better than Romney? On his worst day he’ll be better, absolutely. Is Obama prepared to address the very serious problems facing our country today? No. PLAYBOY: But going to the point of what people are feeling, people just seem to think the system doesn’t work for me, whether you’re in the Tea Party or you’re on the left. SANDERS: And the answer is, the system does not work for them and the facts are very clear. If you’re a working person, what’s happened to your life? What’s happened to your life? 30 or 40 years ago, your kid could go to a wonderful university, tuition-free in New York City, in Vermont, in California. The State University of California, one of the best university systems in the world, virtually free. PLAYBOY: I went to the University of California, actually. Almost free, we had fees which cost a total of $1000 for the whole year. SANDERS: All right and now it is extraordinarily quite expensive. If you’re a working person, if you had a high school degree when I was growing up and you had a job in a factory and you had a union, you know what, you could live a middle class wife. Now you have husbands and wives both forced to live it and in some ways they have less expendable income than they used to have, because their wages have not kept up with other costs. So what’s happening is, people are working longer hours for low wages, their standard of living is in decline, healthcare costs are off the wall, millions of people have outrageous deductibles and copayments or maybe no health insurance at all. The average person is saying, you know what, I am getting decimated, I am getting beaten up pretty badly and who is out there talking to me? Who’s out there? I’m turning on the television, people are talking about gay marriage, my state has led the effort so I don’t mean to demean that, I support that, but talking about this, talking about that, who is talking about my right not to have to work 50 or 60 hours a week? Who’s talking about my right that maybe I can have a month of paid vacation? Who’s talking about my right to have my kid be able to go to college without being deeply in debt? Who’s talking about my right to have good quality healthcare at an affordable cost? PLAYBOY: And the opposite, the people who are yelling the loudest are saying firefighters should not have pensions and you shouldn’t aspire to that. SANDERS: So what the right wing has done—and they’re very good at this stuff—is they said to the working stiff, they say your wages have gone down, your benefits have gone down, you’re doing worse than you used to, your kid is going to do worse than you and look at the fireman! You’re paying taxes and they have a pension! You’re paying taxes and they have healthcare, you don’t have any healthcare! So we’ve got to go to the race to the bottom, take away their healthcare and that’s what they do. They play off one group against the other. I often point out in the 1950’s, when states like Mississippi were highly segregated, do you know who the lowest paid white workers in America were? People in Mississippi. What did they have, what were they given? They could drink at a water fountain that a black worker couldn’t, meanwhile they were the lowest paid white workers in America and that’s the way the system works. So we are aggressively moving toward a race to the bottom and meanwhile, the people on top are laughing all the way to the Cayman Islands. PLAYBOY: So the story, and we talked about the story that they use race to divide people, defeated unions, there’s Citizens United which you point out, the awful trade deals. Is it also about 30 or 40 years of being hammered that the free market is this God thing that— SANDERS: Reagan, we have Reagan International Airport because he is one of the great American heroes and meanwhile, there’s virtually no mention by the way of Lyndon Johnson who gave us Medicare, Medicaid and a whole host of programs which have improved lives for a lot of people. The corporate media and the big money and trusts have A) talked about—despite all the obvious evidence of the failures of cowboy capitalism and unfettered free trade, have kept touting it and meanwhile, equally destructive is we hear very, very little about those social democratic societies who have made real achievements. Between you and me, in a nation where 22 percent of our kids live in poverty, it is not insignificant that in Scandinavia you’re talking about three, four, five percent or fewer kids living in poverty. That’s a pretty good achievement. It is not insignificant as you’ve indicated that in Australia, what you’re telling me all Australian citizens have high-quality healthcare, that’s pretty good! We should be proud of that, we should be celebrating that! How many people in America even know that they are the only nation, we are the only nation in the industrialized world that doesn’t have healthcare for all of its people through a national healthcare system. What percentage of people even know that? So you’re looking at a right-wing ideology which tells us what freedom is about is your right to work for $9 an hour without any health insurance, without the ability to get a higher education and the poor enslaved people in other countries who have healthcare, who have good retirement benefits, that’s something that we should not try to emulate. [emphasis added]

SANDERS: The way I phrase it is that we are in the midst of an intense class warfare, where the wealthiest people and the largest corporations are at war with the middle class and working families of this country, and it is obvious that the big money interests are winning that war. They are winning the war in terms of their lobbyists providing tax breaks for people who don’t need it and then fighting for cuts for working families. Here’s a story that didn’t get a lot of attention. You know what the Business Roundtable is? PLAYBOY: Mm-hmm. Yep. SANDERS: They are the board of the largest companies, CEOs of the largest companies in the world. They came to Washington last month. Here’s what they said, and all of these guys are making millions of dollars a year. All of them have wonderful retirement programs. Some of them are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They came to Washington and said, “The Business Roundtable proposes that we raise Medicare eligibility age to 70 and Social Security eligibility to 70 years of age.” Could you imagine the chutzpah of guys who are worth, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars with retirement packages the likes of which Americans couldn’t even dream, average Americans, and then proposing them. This is class warfare, and they’re getting cockier and cockier and cockier. They think nobody can stop them. And unless we bring forth the political revolution in this country, a real grass roots movement, they’re probably right. That’s where we are. PLAYBOY: That is pretty astonishing that they have that gall, the chutzpah. SANDERS: To come to Washington. Can you imagine somebody who’s going to get a golden parachute of tens of millions of dollars, perhaps, who is going to have, you know, not a worry in his or her life them coming to Washington and saying “I want you to raise Medicare eligibility to 70?” PLAYBOY: And the chutzpah also is about the kind of experience they’ve had to go through at work in a comfortable office in a big CEO office compared to the factory worker or the person who is in the coal mine and wants to retire in a decent fashion. I mean, that, too, their whole experience is different. SANDERS: Absolutely. I mean, there’s a separate world out there. These are people whose kids live in gated communities who, when they travel, they get into their chauffeured cars, they get into their own jet planes and they go all over the world. You know, they eat at the finest restaurants, they work out in the greatest gyms. They haven’t a clue or a concern about what’s going on with ordinary Americans. PLAYBOY: Do you think that this – when you said we’re in intense class warfare, does that – the terminology “class warfare,” is that a hard thing to explain or use to most America or do you think that things have changed in that way? SANDERS: People do understand it. [EMPHASIS ADDED]

PLAYBOY: It took, I mean, Citizens United is in some way the death blow, but this is a process of at least 30, 40 years, right? So, how would you describe, if we’re talking to the state college readership, tell us the story a little bit. SANDERS: It happens in a few ways. Number one, the decline of trade unions in America, is a very very important issue. At the end of the day unions are what workers have to negotiate decent contracts and, second of all, unions, the AFL-CIO and the other unions are what gives working people political clout, so those two factors. So when you see a devastating reduction of the trade unions, like you see in Michigan. Michigan going to a right to work state, workers will have less power to negotiate contracts and less political clout. That has been going on, as you know, for many, many decades right now. PLAYBOY: When you were a younger man and unions represented probably 35 percent of the workforce in the private sector. SANDERS: Yes. PLAYBOY: Now it’s below 7 percent. SANDERS: Exactly. PLAYBOY: So that’s what you’re talking about? SANDERS: Sure. Sure. So in those two senses – most workers now have nobody to look after them, so the employer says, “Oh, by the way, Jonathan, good news! We’re giving you a job but you don’t have any vacation time.” Where you going to go? You going to go to your union rep to talk about it? You don’t have a union rep. And you say, “Well, thank you very much because everybody else is unemployed, I’ll take the job.” What do you have to say when the boss says, “Oh, by the way, you’re going to have to work overtime.” What are you going to say to him? You have no power. And, second of all, in Washington, where you have lobbyists from the super large corporations dominating political activity, very, very powerful, who do you think is a voice for workers? That’s what the unions have historically been. To the degree that they shrink, there’s less voice. Those are the two very important – so that’s one issue. Second issue: I think these trade policies have been an absolute disaster. I think corporate America knew exactly what they wanted. I was there when NAFTA was brought about, just when I got to Congress in the early ‘90s. And the theory behind NAFTA is we’re going to create all these jobs in the United States and we are going to just be able to send our products to Mexico and China and everybody else. I mean, anyone who heard that knew it was nonsense from day one except the leadership of the Republican and Democratic parties and the Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers. They loved that. So, that has resulted in a very significant reduction in the manufacturing sector of America, which is not only blue collar jobs but a lot of ancillary jobs that go into manufacturing. You know, you’ve got engineering jobs, you’ve got research and development jobs, you’ve got white collar jobs. You see 50 or 60,000 factories lost in the last ten years. That’s trade and other issues, pushes wages down as well. Those are two factors, I would argue, that have played a role. PLAYBOY: Now, on the trade issue, there also is the fact that it intimidates workers because then the employer can say, “Look, you know what, if you don’t agree to what I want, I’m going across to Thailand” or some other place … SANDERS: They can and they do. PLAYBOY: Yep. SANDERS: There are many employers who have said just that. “Here’s my contract. You’re taking away production, you’re going to pay more for health care. You don’t really like it, okay, go back out. We’re going to China.” That is exactly what has happened time after time after time. So, you’ve got those two things and then you have as a result of the money in politics, a movement that working people are getting less representation in Washington. And I think those are some of the reasons why. But, and here’s the important point to make and sometimes we forget about this. If I give you a new tool; i.e., I’m going to give you a computer, as opposed to a yellow pad, well, I have a right, you have a right, we all have a right to expect that you’re going to be more productive, right? You have a new tool. If I give a guy in the woods a chain saw, as opposed to an old fashioned saw, that guy’s going to cut down more trees. More productive. Here is the irony at this time. Our society has become far more productive, productivity has soared and yet all of the gains from that productivity have gone to the people on the top. While you have become more productive as a worker, your wages and income and benefits have gone down. PLAYBOY: Now, again, during that time when you spoke, there was the whole deal about the tax cuts that the president – this is back – not the recent deal but back in 2010 and you said, “This is a bad deal for the American people,” and that deal, back in 2010, extended tax breaks for the top two percent, continued the Bush-era 15 percent tax rates on capital gains and dividends, and a Democratic president agreed to that. SANDERS: Democratic president, now remember – now this is, in fairness, after the November elections where the Democrats took, as the president said, “a shellacking.” At that moment, Democrats control the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives and I had forgot – we had 59 votes in the Senate. You don’t need to know more about the weakness of the Democratic Party, when they control the House, the Senate and the White House, to give the Republicans – I think the Republican leadership said, “Well, we didn’t get everything we wanted. We got about 85 percent of what we wanted.” It was a reduction in the estate tax, there were more estate tax breaks for the top of the top. PLAYBOY: Yeah, and here’s what killed me and what I thought was, I mean, it’s hard to overuse the word “outrage” in these kind of … SANDERS: Right. PLAYBOY: But here, and particularly you noted that at that time you tried to get a bill passed to get a $250 check to a disabled veteran, trying to get by on $15,000 or $16,000 a year, but you couldn’t get the votes for that, but under that deal the CEO of Morgan Stanley would get a tax cut of $926,000, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan would get a $1 million tax deduction. I mean, could you not have a better example of the … SANDERS: I think it was a pretty clear example, but it is – what can I tell you? I mean, and, again, what I want to reemphasize, who were the Democrats negotiating with? They controlled the House, big time, they controlled the Senate, they controlled the White House. Now, it is true that two months later that wasn’t going to be or a month later, that wasn’t going to be the case because they lost the election. That’s where they stood at that moment and what is very, very sad is, in terms of the Democrats, they are strong on some issues. You know, they’re pretty good on women’s issues. The president has been strong on gay issues, social issues. They have been good. But in terms of being an effective voice and a fighter for working class people in this country, I think most people do not perceive that there’s a heck of a lot of difference between either party, which then gives Republicans the opening to move to the social issues because if the average guy says, “Well, you know, I’m anti-abortion and the Democrats are not there for me on economic issues, why wouldn’t I vote with the Republicans?” Do you follow what I’m saying? PLAYBOY: Mm-hmm. Has the financial crisis, though, changed that dynamic a little bit, that there’s a fear among the people and so they see both parties not standing up for them, so they’re less … SANDERS: Yeah. Well, here’s what it is. Every speech that I give, I will get a question. “Bernie, I don’t understand how these CEOs and these large financial institutions that were clearly engaged in fraudulent behavior, none of these guys are in jail. Why?” I don’t know if you caught recently Eric Holder, Attorney General, talking about the concerns that the Justice Department has about prosecuting large financial institutions because if they become, quote, unquote – not quote, unquote – if they become destabilized, the impact that will have on our economy and the world’s economy … In other words, these guys are not only too big to fail; they’re too big to jail. This is an admission, the Attorney General of the United States: I worry about prosecuting the heads of the largest financial institutions. PLAYBOY: So that’s an admission of who runs the country in a certain way. SANDERS: Absolutely. It is, and I think you asked me about the impact of Wall Street. If you were the president, I think most people – here you have a situation where, literally, the Wall Street folks spend billions and billions of dollars to end Glass-Steagall, to deregulate Wall Street. If you read some of the comments that I made during that period in debates with Alan Greenspan, who came before the House Financial Committee – I would suggest you read that. You know, but I said is exactly what happened. I said, “You really aren’t worried when we have these giant institutions merging with other giant institutions that you’re going to be in a very precarious financial situation?” “Oh, no, no. It’ll be more efficient,” blah, blah, blah, blah. So, Wall Street spent billions of dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions to get what they wanted. Then they proceeded to create the world’s largest gambling casino, which then ended up collapsing, bailed out, against my vote, by the American people. Massive unemployment, massive loss of life savings, people lost their housing, a horrendous, horrendous situation. The American people are looking to the president of the United States and Congress to say, “How did it happen? Hold these bastards accountable, throw the crooks in jail, do something.” And I remember, and I was new into the Senate at the time, meeting with people like Byron Dorgan, Maria Cantwell, some others, who I shared those concerns with. We went to the White House and we met with the president, we met with the Secretary of Treasury. Larry Summers was there, the whole financial team, and our message is: The American people are outraged. Wall Street has just caused immense suffering in this country. People want action. What are you going to do about it?

Ok, I have to cook dinner...so feeling slighted if I don't respond :):)...