Carl, all I can say is, like so many women you described, me too!
Penny
On 2/15/20, Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.
