[Michael Bloomberg is the 105th richest man in America, mostly on the basis of financial information terminals that he leases to banks, brokerages, etc. He launched this business in 1979 with capital from a severance package he got from Salomon Brothers after being on the losing end of power struggle. In 1974 I was a programmer at Salomon and Bloomberg was my user. I had developed a mini brokerage system for Salomon Brothers International Limit, which was part of his fiefdom at the firm. When an African-American woman who I worked with found out that I was assigned to Bloomberg, she spat out, "He's the biggest pig at the firm." When minority women secretaries would bring coffee to a broker on Salomon's immense trading floor, Bloomberg often yelled out things like "Look at the tits on that spic." He is now running for mayor of NYC on the Republican Party ticket, only because he found the Democratic Party primary crowded. This is from a profile on him at: http://www.newyorkmag.com/] He admits he's tried to clean up his act in recent years -- he limits himself in front of me to the abbreviated "NFW," as in "no fucking way" -- but friends and colleagues acknowledge that he can be a salty guy, a true product of Wall Street's raunchy trading-desk culture. "He's a really bawdy guy, very funny," says a woman friend, "but you don't take 75 percent of what he says seriously; he just loves to get a rise out of women." Female staff report that he has a good record for promoting women and minorities and has never been accused of hitting on his employees, but he has made flip sexual comments that women have found offensive. Last month, the Daily News rehashed the details of a 1997 sexual-harassment complaint against Bloomberg by former sales executive Sekiko Garrison, who charged that when she told him she was pregnant, he responded, "Kill it." He has denied, under oath, that he made this and other crude statements, but nonetheless he settled the case last spring, for a sum said to be less than six figures. The lawsuit wasn't news per se -- it had been mentioned before in the press -- but the specific charges taken from the original legal papers made headlines. "Mike expected people would dredge it up," says Bill Cunningham, a recently hired senior political adviser to Bloomberg, "which is why he took and passed a lie-detector test." Bloomberg chooses his words carefully when he's asked about the sexual-harassment lawsuit and the press feeding frenzy after the Daily News story. "It was very hurtful," he says. "I am 100 percent convinced that this company and myself acted honorably." Why settle, then? "I settled it because it would have dragged on and on and been disruptive for me and a lot of people who would have been brought in [for depositions]." His expanding team of political advisers fervently hope the story will be old news by the time Bloomberg is expected to announce in June. "If it had to come out," one of them says, "it's much better to do it now rather than a week before the election." Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
