I think it's just male attitudes, not men in America, men anywhere. I've read
that there were cultures in which males didn't dominate, but they certainly
have in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas according to everything I've
read.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2020 12:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: 64 Different Women Have Filed 40 Lawsuits
Against Michael Bloomberg for Sexual Harassment and Discrimination
I've never traveled in the same circles as Michael Bloomberg, but over the
years I have worked alongside many men who shared Bloomberg's attitudes toward
women.
I remember when my mother took a stenographer job with the American Hawaiian
company, back in 1946. Mother presented herself as an attractive, well
dressed, but overweight woman. She brought home multiple stories about the men
in the office discussing the women in the office, in front of the women.
Mother's boss told her often that he'd like to "bed her" if she'd lose some
weight.
A coworker of mine at the Agency owned his own plane. He bragged that he had
lettered on the side of his plane, Ass or Grass, no one rides for free.
My wife was constantly hit on by the men she worked around.
One man would cuddle up to her and coo, "If I told you you have a beautiful
body, would you hold it against me?" Of course it was "all in fun". Just like
her one boss who grabbed her and tried to kiss her. When she pushed him away
he said, "I thought all you Italian women were hot blooded."
The stories go on and on. Men took it for granted that hitting on the women in
the work place was all in a days work.
To this day, and attitudes are vastly improved, men continue to deny that they
are sexists. "Hey, the girls actually like it!"
Like our belief that we are more inclusive of all minorities, our male
dominated nation still secretly harbors an attitude that this land was made for
White Men.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/14/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
64 Different Women Have Filed 40 Lawsuits Against Michael Bloomberg
for Sexual Harassment and Discrimination By Laura Bassett, GQ
14 February 20
The surging Democratic presidential candidate and Bloomberg LP have
fielded nearly 40 sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits over decades.
In December 2015, employees at Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun
control organization funded by Mike Bloomberg, arrived at work to find
a holiday gift on their desks from their employer: the former mayor's
1997 autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg. Flipping through the book,
staffers found themselves uncomfortably reading their billionaire
founder's boasts about keeping "a girlfriend in every city" and other
womanizing exploits as a Wall Street up-and-comer.
"A few people started immediately going through it and sending the
cringe-iest parts around on email chains," one former Everytown
employee told me. "Hardly the most controversial things he's said, but
it's still a bad look."
Indeed, Bloomberg's casual boasts about his sex life in his own
autobiography are now some of the least problematic parts of the his
candidacy for president. In recent days, the former New York City
mayor's track record on race is undergoing renewed scrutiny: Bloomberg
oversaw and expanded the racist and unconstitutional "stop and frisk"
program, and a newly unearthed video shows him blaming the end of a
racially discriminatory housing practice known as "redlining" for the
2008 economic recession. But it takes a telling amount of gall and
cluelessness to gift a book with anecdotes about your own womanizing
to employees at your gun safety non-profit in the year 2015,
especially for a politician with presidential ambitions who has been
vigorously denying allegations of misogyny throughout his entire
career-including nearly 40 sex discrimination and sexual harassment
lawsuits brought against him and his organizations by 64 women over
the past several decades.
Bloomberg's sexism, like that of fellow New York City billionaire
Donald Trump, has been prolific and well-documented, but for some
reason, the stories about him don't seem to have taken hold. He is
still being embraced by the Democratic establishment as a viable
option for its presidential nominee. He surged to third place in
several 2020 polls this week; the Democratic National Committee
changed its rules to allow him to participate in the next primary
debate; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said his presence in the primary is a
"positive one."
All this, despite what's already been reported and alleged for decades
about Bloomberg's behavior. As a recap, here are some examples: Sekiko
Sakai Garrison, a former sales representative at Bloomberg LP, alleged
in a 1997 lawsuit (one of four separate lawsuits in a two-year period)
that when then-CEO Mike Bloomberg found out she was pregnant, he told
her, "Kill it!"
and "Great! Number 16!"-an apparent reference to the number of
pregnant women or women on maternity leave at his company. She also
alleged that when Bloomberg saw her engagement ring, he commented,
"What is the guy dumb and blind? What the hell is he marrying you
for?" and that he once pointed to another female employee and told
Garrison, "If you looked like that, I'd do you in a second." Bloomberg
denied having said most of those things, but reportedly left Garrison
a voicemail saying that if he did say them, he "didn't mean it."
Bloomberg once described his life as a single billionaire bachelor in
New York City to a reporter as being a "wet dream." "I like theater,
dining and chasing women," he said. On a radio show in 2003, he said
that he would "really want to have" Jennifer Lopez, which he later
explained away as wanting to "have dinner" with her. A top aide said
Bloomberg frequently remarked "nice tits" upon seeing attractive
women. Employees of his in 1990 put together an entire booklet of his
some of his more egregious comments, including, "If women wanted to be
appreciated for their brains, they'd go to the library instead of to
Bloomingdale's," and, of the computer terminal that made him a
billionaire, "It will do everything, including give you [oral sex]. I
guess that puts a lot of you girls out of business."
More recently, Bloomberg defended his longtime close pal Charlie Rose,
who was fired from CBS and PBS in 2017 after multiple women alleged
that he made unwanted sexual advances on his female colleagues and
subordinates. "The stuff I read about is disgraceful-I don't know how
true all of it is,"
Bloomberg told the New York Times. "I never saw anything and we have
no record, we've checked very carefully."
Bloomberg then took that opportunity to cast doubt on the #MeToo
movement as a whole, saying the public should "let the court system
decide" whether a man is guilty. "You know, is it true?" he said. "You
look at people that say it is, but we have a system where you
have-presumption of innocence is the basis of it." (He didn't give men
of color the same benefit of the doubt in
2015 when he was recorded as saying that minorities were arrested at a
disproportional rate "because we put all the cops in the minority
neighborhoods," and because "ninety-five percent of your murders and
murderers and murder victims fit one M.O.") Rose, coincidentally, had
once described his constant banter with Bloomberg about women in the
office (which they shared in the 90s) as "a locker room thing"-the
same defense Trump used to excuse his having boasted about "grabbing"
women "by the pussy."
Bloomberg's campaign, in reckoning with his long history of toxic
frat-boy behavior, is essentially asking voters to try and focus on
his political values instead. "Mike Bloomberg has supported and
empowered women throughout his career-from appointing women to the
very top positions in his mayoral administration to supporting women
candidates for higher office to an industry-leading 26-weeks of paid
family leave at his company," Julie Wood, a Bloomberg campaign
spokesperson, told ABC News in October. "At the same time, Mike has
come to see that some of what he has said is disrespectful and wrong.
He believes his words have not always aligned with his values and the
way he has led his life." Of course, at least through 2015, he was
leading his life in such a way that he proudly passed out a narrative
of his sexual exploits to the young people he hired to combat gun
violence.
If the Democratic Party wants to claim the moral high-ground on issues
of misogyny and sexual harassment in the wake of the #MeToo movement,
it has a moral obligation to reject as its highest leader a man who
talks about women much in the same way Trump does. A half-hearted
apology for behavior so egregious that it sparked nearly 40 lawsuits
by women is a bandaid on a bullet wound.
