Bloomberg In Resurfaced Video: ‘Black And Latino Males’ Don’t ‘Know How To Behave In The Workplace’

Billionaire Democrat presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg is facing renewed criticism over racially-charged remarks that he made in an old interview that has gone viral over the past couple of days on social media in which he said that blacks and Latinos do not know how to behave in the workplace.

Then-New York City Mayor Bloomberg made the remarks in a 2011 interview on PBS where he promoted a $127 million three-year initiative to help reduce disparities between young black and Latino men and the rest of the population.

“Bloomberg noted that he had donated $30 million from his foundation to Open Society Foundations, the network established by liberal billionaire financier Goerge Soros, toward the new plan to enhance employment among minorities,” Fox News’ Gregg Re reported. “Taxpayers and Soros himself contributed to the jobs initiative, which set up job recruitment centers in public housing projects, placed probation centers in ‘high-risk’ areas, and linked black and Latino success in schools to Department of Education ‘progress reports.'”

“Blacks and Latinos score terribly in school testing compared to whites and Asians. If you look at our jails, it’s predominantly minorities,” Bloomberg said, later adding that “virtually all” perpetrators and victims of crime were minorities.

Bloomberg later added, “But, nevertheless, there’s this enormous cohort of black and Latino males aged, let’s say, 16 to 25 that don’t have jobs, don’t have any prospects, don’t know how to find jobs, don’t know that the — what their skill sets are, don’t know how to behave in the workplace, where they have to work collaboratively and collectively.”

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Bloomberg on Black and Latino males between 16-25:

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To be fair, later in the interview Bloomberg did recognize the importance of uniting broken families and the importance of having a strong father figure in the home on how a child develops.

“But there will be jobs if we can get these kids, get their families together, even if their fathers don’t live with their mothers or have never been married, or even maybe they’re in jail, get the fathers engaged,” Bloomberg said. “A lot of statistics show that, if the father is engaged, it gives the kids some understanding that he’s heading down the wrong path. And then assign mentors to them on one-on-one basis, so that there is somebody who has been successful, has a job, has a family, fits into society, and that they can go to.”

“You know, a lot of these kids, it isn’t that they’re bad kids. It’s that once they made a mistake, it’s very difficult to recover from that. But we have an obligation to them, if not for compassionate reasons, just for selfish reasons,” Bloomberg continued. “Three-quarters of all kids in New York City that go to jail, serve a period and come out, go right back to the jail.”

Fox News noted that the comments from Bloomberg were just the latest that his campaign was having to deal with that could hurt him in his bid to win the Democratic nomination for president:

The head-turning comments in a resurfaced interview were just the latest headache for the multibillionaire’s campaign. In the past week, Bloomberg has been confronted with his previous claims that farming doesn’t take much intelligence and that “anybody” could do it, as well as his insistence that the way to get guns “out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them.” Additionally, Bloomberg has taken heat for suggesting that a functioning health care system must let the elderly die.

Bloomberg also took heat over the weekend after a Washington Post report highlighted a lawsuit that one of his pregnant employees filed against him years ago who claimed that he told her to “kill it” in response to learning that she was pregnant.