This article originally appeared in Bloomberg View on March 1st, 2012.

It isn’t every day that a reporter gets to sit in on a high-stakes policy meeting in New York’s financial district, but that’s exactly what I did on a balmy evening in late February at 60 Wall Street, the U.S. headquarters of Deutsche Bank AG.

No, the bank didn’t lose its institutional marbles and give me clearance to scribble notes while its cognoscenti mapped out corporate strategy. The confab I dropped in on was taking place under potted palm trees in the bank’s ground-floor public atrium, and the participants were 13 members of Occupy the SEC, a spinoff group of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I can’t help but conclude that their plans for petitions, marches, op-eds and sit-down meetings with banking regulators will be inflicting Wall Street with a long, nasty attack of agita.

Occupy Wall Street and its working groups, including Occupy the SEC, were supposed to be dead, in case you missed the obituaries. Now the protesters are messing with detractors’ heads with the emergence of a media-savvy collection of legal, banking and activist members who come off as sane and authoritative. This is not the way the Occupy bashers’ “welfare-bum hippies” propaganda script was supposed to play out.

On Feb. 13, seven writers who described themselves as “concerned citizens, activists and financial professionals” filed a 325-page comment letter to financial regulators, outlining their concerns about loopholes in the “Let’s Try to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis” proposal known as the Volcker rule.

Most Detailed

It was among the longest and most detailed of 16,000 letters sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency during the public-comment period.

We may call it a “public” comment period, but in the real world it is deep-pocketed business interests, not Mom and Pop, who usually have the juice to persuade officials to amend financial regulations. It’s no surprise that Wall Street has been working furiously to dilute the rule’s restrictions on how banks trade and what investments they can own, and the industry has a heap of comment letters on the Volcker rule to show for it.

This time, though, there is a noisy voice plugging for the little guy, and it carries weight that these rabble-rousers understand the banking industry from the inside.

Or, as Occupy the SEC member Alexis Goldstein — who has worked at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank — explained the group’s line-by-line analysis of the Volcker Rule to me: “We’d say ‘OK, I’m a bank, so how am I gonna get around this rule?’”

Even veteran activists who advocate regularly for the public were wowed. “They understood the nonsense in the proposed rule,” said Bartlett Naylor, financial policy counsel at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. Public Citizen, which also wrote a Volcker comment letter, was “humbled” by the Occupy effort, Naylor said.

Along with Goldstein, 31, who quit her job as a business analyst in Deutsche Bank’s technology department in 2010, the founding members of Occupy the SEC include Akshat Tewary, a former Kaye Scholer LLP lawyer who today specializes in immigration law; Caitlin Kline, a former credit derivatives trader; and a mysterious guy who calls himself “George Bailey” and claims to have spent 30 years working at compliance and accounting jobs at financial firms.

Bailey was a no-show at the Feb. 21 meeting I attended, but the other six authors of the letter were seated around three silver cafe tables strewn with half-eaten deli dinners and a jumbo bag of Reese’s Pieces. Seven other Occupy the SEC participants were there, too, including a New York University professor, Michael Ralph, who had come to the meeting because he had been impressed by Goldstein’s performance in a recent interview on MSNBC.

‘Finance Dorks’

The group, which Goldstein calls “the finance dorks of Occupy Wall Street,” divvied up the tasks related to a regulatory comment letter they will be sending to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, then made their way down a typed agenda list to this item: “March on Sifma.”

“What is Sifma?” a new member asked, referring to the abbreviation for the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a financial-industry trade group. Tewary, who was running the meeting, put it in language that a newcomer could understand: “If we are the rebels,” said Tewary, “they are Darth Vader.”

Sifma has predicted something close to financial Armageddon — I guess they mean the sequel — if the Volcker rule, as written, becomes law. And the trade group seems to be going out of its way to ignore the protesters, which says a lot about how official Wall Street feels about the Occupy movement: When the action in New York’s Zuccotti Park was headline news in November, Sifma held its annual conference in midtown Manhattan and devoted not a single item on its program to the public outcry against its members. Asked last week if Sifma would like to comment on Occupy the SEC or its letter about the Volcker rule, spokeswoman Katrina Cavalli declined.

That stance doesn’t surprise public-relations pros who say that engaging with anyone in the Occupy movement would recognize it as legitimate, which is the last thing Wall Street wants. “Financial institutions, as well as other big businesses, have been quite successful in recent years in solving their regulatory problems without engaging in an open dialogue with the public,” says Alexander V. Laskin, an assistant professor of public relations at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. “Instead of public relations, they rely on private relations,” such as lobbying, he says.

Protest March

Keeping the public out of the dialogue may get harder for Wall Street as Occupy the SEC steps up its game. At their recent meeting, members volunteered to set up in-person meetings with financial regulators (they have already had a one-hour conference call with 11 SEC officials); launch a Facebook page; post a petition on change.org to support their Volcker letter; and figure out the logistics of a protest march in Washington. The June 6 anniversary of the SEC’s founding is a possible date for the march.

They have left voicemail messages with luminaries including Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman after whom the rule is named, and Charles Ferguson, director of the documentary “Inside Job,” hoping to get them acquainted with Occupy the SEC’s work. The members exploit every opportunity to schmooze: One wound up chatting with Eliot Spitzer (yes, that Eliot Spitzer) recently after noticing the former New York governor biding his time waiting to be called in a Manhattan jury pool. On March 20, the group has appointments to meet with SEC and FDIC officials.

Once Occupy the SEC’s Volcker rule lobbying is done in May, members will pick a topic for what they call “the next big step.”

The group has brains, energy and flattering media coverage. But of all the things Occupy the SEC has going for it, its biggest edge may come from something that isn’t of its own doing: the financial industry’s cluelessness about the level of public disgust with its flouting of rules and kingly pay. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., told Fox News on Jan. 24 that the bashing of all bankers as bad guys is “a form of discrimination that should be stopped.” New York magazine interviewed a Wall Street executive in its Jan. 16 issue who bellyached that Main Street doesn’t understand Wall Street’s problems: “Even getting cut from $1 million to $500,000, they still think you’re earning too much,” the banker said.

Proprietary Trading

And then there is T. Timothy Ryan, Jr., CEO of Sifma, who in an interview with Bloomberg Radio on Feb. 15 was asked this question: Might the economy be better off if trading and commercial banking were separated, “given what banks did to the country during the bubble?” Ryan’s answer came dripping with condescension: “Your comments are, I would say, relatively over-the-top as to what happened here,” he told Bloomberg’s Michael McKee. Proprietary trading didn’t cause the 2008 crisis, Ryan said. “Actually, most of the problems were created by consumer loans, which were retail residential mortgages.”

If only we could do something about those out-of-control residential borrowers who are imperiling the world economy.

Wall Street could get lucky. A prolonged bull market is always a trigger for faded memories and public complacency. The best thing that could happen for the bankers who today are under attack would be a revival of ailing investment portfolios strong enough to inspire the public to start ringing their real-estate brokers again.

Short of that, people like Ryan and Dimon should pay attention to this: “We want to get the message out that anyone can do what we did,” says Goldstein, who wants ordinary Americans to be comfortable playing a part in rule-making. The more success Goldstein and her pals have in getting the word out on this democracy thing, the more Wall Street ought to worry about the finance dorks who munch on peanut-butter cups in the 60 Wall Street atrium.

This article originally appeared in Bloomberg View on January 4th, 2012.

On the surface, the year 2011 was one of ramped-up securities regulation and scary times for financial scammers, with enforcement cases soaring at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and coverage galore about the humbling of inside traders and municipal-bond riggers.

Along with the sexy headlines about felled lawbreakers, though, there were also troubling free passes and favors granted to the accused and the privileged.

Laws that were set up to punish bad guys got waived within days of the press releases announcing that the offenders had been brought down. Well-connected lawyers in the employ of investment firms got express-lane access to regulatory brass. Among the C-suite set, there was even one big name who left the securities industry for a few years and returned to face the humiliation of retaking the licensing tests. Of course, as it should be for the privileged, he got a waiver from the requirements that lesser mortals on Wall Street must meet.

In November, the said big-shot wound up resigning from his gig at MF Global Holdings Ltd. after the firm filed for bankruptcy, but we’ll get to that later.

The good news is that the most compromising free pass of all, the ability of alleged financial cheats to dispose of SEC lawsuits by saying they “neither admit nor deny” what they’ve been accused of, is under fire and inspiring calls for congressional hearings. Just how odious these deals have become was exemplified in a spat late last month between U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff and settlement partners Citigroup Inc. and the SEC.

Rakoff said in November that he wouldn’t sign off on the SEC’s $285 million settlement with Citigroup, which had been accused of misleading investors in a $1 billion financial product tied to risky mortgages. Dissatisfied with Rakoff’s decision, Citi and the SEC went to the appeals court on Dec. 27 seeking a stay, even talking on the phone with Rakoff later in the day about procedural matters without mentioning a word about their new motion. “Misleading,” Rakoff said in a Dec. 29 order.

Rakoff, who in 2009 nixed a similar deal between the SEC and Bank of America Corp., seems to have broken the spell of courts that rubber-stamp these ultimate regulatory cop-outs.

Paying fines and walking away from liability, though, isn’t the only break that the accused have been catching. It has become routine that, on the heels of a settlement with the SEC, big banks and other defendants request and receive waivers from punishments designed to kick in as a result of their settlement orders. My personal favorites are the series of agreements between the SEC and the investment firms it accused of rigging prices of municipal bonds. Five firms have agreed to pay $743 million in bid-rigging cases since December 2010 — all reaping the benefits of those “neither admit nor deny” clauses along the way, of course.

Start Believing

If we are to believe the SEC, some of those firms that didn’t have to say they did anything wrong really did break laws and hurt the public. Read this quote from a May 4 SEC press release: “Our complaint against UBS reads like a ‘how-to’ primer for bid-rigging and securities fraud,” said Elaine C. Greenberg, chief of the SEC’s Municipal Securities and Public Pensions Unit. “They used secret arrangements and multiple roles to win business and defraud municipalities through the repeated use of illegal courtesy bids, last looks for favored bidders, and money to bidding agents disguised as swap payments.”

I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty bad to me. Fraud. Secret arrangements. Disguises.

Bad, perhaps, but not bad enough to stop UBS AG’s lawyers at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP from writing to the SEC five days later on May 9 to ask a favor. Through its lawyers, UBS asked the SEC not to enforce a rule that would have disqualified it from participating in securities offerings that are exempt from registration requirements. To help make the case for UBS, the letter cited nine examples of times the SEC had granted waivers for “similar reasons” since 2002, including another action against UBS. On the very same day, the SEC wrote back to say the waiver was granted.

In case you are having trouble keeping track, what we’re talking about here is an exemption from a ban from an exemption. Regulators do have the ability to bring administrative proceedings if a firm abuses the privileges it gets from a waiver. But if we need to go to this much trouble to undo the rules when somebody gets caught — but doesn’t admit it anyway – – why have rules at all? UBS didn’t respond to a request for comment.

While all the settling and waiving and exempting is going on, the banks paying the most for legal juice benefit from remarkable access. Thanks to research by the Project on Government Oversight, the public got hard data back in May showing just how easy it was for SEC professionals to leave their posts for the private sector and, on behalf of their new financial-industry clients, to get rapid entree to sitting securities regulators.

Nice Work

The group got five years’ worth of information about SEC employees who left their jobs and, within two years of their going-away parties, wound up representing financial firms before the agency. In all, 219 former SEC employees filed 789 of the required statements (“Hey guys, we’re back, and wearing nicer suits”) from 2006 to 2010.

To give you a flavor of how these things really work, I’ll mention one of several gems among the 789.

Margaret E. “Mitzi” Moore, former senior counsel in the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, resigned Jan. 13, 2006, and within two months disclosed that she and other colleagues at her new job at the Financial Services Roundtable would be meeting March 17 with then-SEC Chairman Christopher Cox. The Project on Government Oversight got its hands on the meeting agenda that Moore submitted, and the first item on the list was a shout-out for the “good start” and “positive mood change at SEC.” The question “positive for whom?” comes to mind. Equally depressing was her memo notation that the SEC had made “good staff appointments.”

Much as we would all love to know exactly which regulators were warming the hearts of Wall Street lobbyists, the names were deleted from the agenda. In July last year, the Government Accountability Office released a study on similar revolving-door issues, but did give the SEC credit for a new policy of collecting post-employment information from departing workers.

Perhaps I am being too tough on the financial cops who pride themselves on being vigilant enforcers of rules that keep financial markets safe and fair. At the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Wall Street-financed self-regulator that is overseen by the SEC, decision makers have been known to be uncompromising in ensuring that members don’t skirt the rules.

With some exceptions, Finra expects members to re-take licensing exams if they have been out of the business for more than two years. It has fought and won battles against some former brokers, invariably small fries, who look for waivers.

Playing Rough

Some brokers who challenged Finra’s tough decisions have appealed to the SEC, only to have the agency back Finra with arguments that are hard to criticize. In one case, the SEC said the re-exams can be a safeguard to the public interest. In another, the agency argued that a broker who had been out of the business for more than two years should be denied an exam waiver because “in that time, there have been changes to the securities laws and regulations” with which she should be familiar. And who could argue that understanding the rules is important if you’re entrusted with other people’s money?

Which is why the exam waivers granted to Jon Corzine, the former MF Global chief executive officer who resigned from the bankrupt company last year, make you wonder. Corzine took his Series 7 broker exam in 1975, and took the test for brokerage principals in 1982, yet he landed a waiver of both of those exams when he took over at MF Global in 2010. By then, he had been out of the business since 1999, having served as the Democratic governor of New Jersey and senator of that state. Finra has said it showed no favoritism in granting the waivers.

But as history continues to get written in the MF Global story, regulators might take some lessons from their own tough talk about the importance of keeping up with regulations and safeguarding the public. Sometimes digging in your heels to enforce the rules isn’t such a bad idea.

This article originally appeared in Bloomberg View on November 4th, 2011.

I’m starting to get worried that Wall Street and its supporters are losing their touch.

The initial signs that the free marketeers were off their game didn’t have me all that alarmed. There was the collection of senior people in finance who, in a New York Times article, largely dismissed the Occupy Wall Street protesters as slackers with too much time on their hands, though there wasn’t much shock value there. It would take some deep thinking for a captain of finance to make the connection between a dearth of jobs and a surfeit of time for demonstrating.

Then there were the noisy cheerleaders of capitalism who busied themselves with trash-talking the protesters just as poll results started to show that much of the public was sympathetic to the views of the movement.

“Occupiers are arrogant, spoiled white kids who think they should be able to take public space from all of us for THEIR freedom of speech,” went one comment on a Twitter account that calls itself ‘DefendWallSt.”

“I wonder what smells worse, the hippies at OccupyWallStreet in LibertyPark OR the Staten Island Dump!” read another tweet from Provide Security, a New Jersey operation engaged in information-technology security, executive protection and — if they play their cards right — perhaps a whole new business in aromatherapy solutions for urban landfills. The site of the New York protests, Zuccotti Park (formerly Liberty Plaza Park), seemed to smell just fine the day I stopped by last month.

Tone Deaf

The existence of enthusiastic financiers who are sometimes tone-deaf about the little guy is hardly the stuff of Earth-shattering column fodder. What’s surprising to me is that Wall Street seems to have lost its mojo. It was a married couple on Long Island, not some cagey investment bank, who first filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to lay claim to the slogan “Occupy Wall Street” for use on things like T-shirts and bumper stickers. Nobody at an investment bank thought to lock up that slogan — and throw away the key — with a filing of their own?

And there’s mutiny out there with the public yanking money out of accounts to make a statement about the avarice of too-big-to-fail banks. Perhaps panicky that unhappy customers had figured out they might be better treated by consumer-friendly credit unions, even Bank of America Corp. abandoned plans to charge a monthly nuisance fee on debit-card transactions. This, of course, isn’t the way capitalism is supposed to work in an era of “socialism for the banks,” and “free markets for the little people.”

What’s happened to finance’s killer instinct? When the public takes money out of one product, Wall Street is supposed to be waiting with another. If this isn’t an opportunity to come up with the post-meltdown version of auction-rate securities, I don’t know what is. But I haven’t even spotted a slick new mutual fund that promises to make money by investing in populist rage.

The weakened state of Wall Street is even on display in its dealings with big customers. In cities from coast to coast, municipal leaders are starting to say that if a bank wants to get their business, it had better start hustling to modify mortgages and consider the lending needs of the community.

It’s possible that Wall Street’s leaders assume that the problem will go away as cold weather sets in, and neighbors and businesses complain about the disruption caused by protesters. Then again, it’s possible that financial companies are right on top of all this with sneaky new products and payoffs to politicians and I’m just too clueless to have figured it out.

Wall Street ‘Explode’

Beverly Gage, the author of “The Day Wall Street Exploded,” told me in a telephone interview that Occupy Wall Street shares traits with previous movements that wound up having legs. The Yale University history professor, whose book chronicled the Sept. 16, 1920, bombing near the New York Stock Exchange, says the nasty talk about smelly hippies and plotting socialists is standard fare. “If there is one thing that’s absolutely true about any movement targeting Wall Street it’s that there are accusations that there’s something un-American about it,” she said.

Gage says she doubts that protesters in cities such as New York will be deterred as winter approaches. The important marker in a movement is that demonstrators successfully “insist certain questions be part of the conversation.” Already, the Occupy Wall Street movement has heated up the national conversation about income inequality.

Meanwhile, capitalism’s boosters keep making things worse for themselves. After the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee e-mailed supporters to ask them to sign a petition supporting Occupy Wall Street, angry financial-services executives made it clear to Democrats that they “can’t have it both ways,” according to an article by Politico.com. Translation: Democrats had better not expect donations if they side with the 1 percent-bashers. Of course, it’s just that sort of checkbook politics that the protesters are railing about, so the bullying only served to make the movement look smart.

You’ve got to wonder why the big banks don’t see the light and do what they do best: co-opt the protesters, just like they did the Democrats.

It is, after all, getting chilly in the Northeast, opening vast opportunities for the financial world to score points. The New York Stock Exchange, just blocks from Zuccotti Park, could welcome the Occupiers for tours of the nice, warm trading floor as bitter weather sets in. Who knows what good might result if the banks got to know the protesters a little better, and vice versa? Banks are flush with cash after getting bailed out by the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. The protesters have an ever-greater need for donations of warm gear and covers to keep dry. There’s a “My TARP is your tarp” synergy to it. If the ball got rolling, it would only be a matter of time before some of those unemployed protesters were sporting Paul Stuart jackets and interviewing for internships with stock-exchange members.

Move On

Sadly, I don’t think the NYSE is considering my strategy. On Oct. 24, it refused to let activist film maker Michael Moore even stand on the sidewalk outside the exchange for an interview with a reporter from CNBC. In a separate move, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. yanked its sponsorship of a fund-raising dinner scheduled for last night for a New York City credit union after it learned that one of the evening’s honorees would be Occupy Wall Street.

The securities industry gets together for its annual conference in New York on Nov. 7, but the Wall Street protest heard around the world “is not on the agenda,” according to Liz Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

I suppose you could argue that the ire of the 99 percenters doesn’t matter all that much to Wall Street as long as firms can keep hold of their platinum-level customers. There are still rich people whose lives were untouched by the economic crisis, and how could they not be repulsed by the noisy, stinking hippies who are disturbing the peace? Or not.

When I visited New York’s Zuccotti Park, I noticed a nicely dressed couple in their 80s who had stopped to take a few photos of the demonstrators. Harvey and Roberta Teitelbaum, from Chicago, told me they were visiting for a long weekend of sightseeing and Broadway shows.

“What do you think of these people?” I asked, bracing to hear a rant about, well, noisy, stinking hippies disturbing the peace. “I believe in what they’re doing because banks and big companies have ripped off the country,” Harvey Teitelbaum told me. “Let’s change this country.”

I hate to tell you, Wall Street, but the Teitelbaums looked like they shopped at the same stores your best customers frequent. What will happen if your most-coveted clients start to think the kids huddled under blue tarps are on to something?

This article originally appeared in Bloomberg View on October 6th, 2011.

Anita Hill sits at a tiny conference table in her office at Brandeis University, just outside Boston, as I quiz her on the obvious themes. Her testimony during hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court? Admittedly a “terrible” experience, “but I want people to understand that I survived it.” Attacks on her character? A good thing for women in the workplace because now “they know what to expect” should they ever go public about harassment.

Her sex-harassment claim stirred up the dregs of America. Hill got threats of murder, rape and sodomy on her answering machine. David Brock, a best-selling author, declared her to be “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” only to recant that and other attacks years later. Yet Hill shows no bitterness, and exploits no opportunities to take a swipe at any of the people who turned her harassment complaint into a reason to assail her.

And today, she has a new cause. In a book released this week, “Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home,” Hill says women, particularly single heads of households, face a new setback: Just as they were gaining social and economic independence by purchasing homes in increasing numbers, they were upended by the crash in housing prices.

Young women entering the workforce for the first time may not even know her name, says Joan C. Williams, distinguished professor of law at the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. “But Anita Hill shaped their lives in ways they don’t understand.”

Coke Can Incident

It was just shy of 20 years ago, on Oct. 11, 1991, when Hill riveted American television viewers and set off battles of the sexes at many a company water cooler. Then a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, she had worked for Thomas at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She alleged before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Thomas had spoken to her about explicit sex videos he had watched, and once asked in her presence while at work, “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” At the hearings, and 16 years later in his autobiography, Thomas denied her accusations.

Let me say upfront that I have concluded over the years that Hill, not Thomas, was the credible one in this sorry tale. I base that opinion, above all, on the work of journalists Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, whose 1994 book, “Strange Justice,” offered extensive support for Hill’s accusations, including on-the-record comments from Thomas’s former classmates, who found Hill’s description of the sexual banter to be in sync with the man they knew. Mayer writes for the New Yorker. Abramson last month became executive editor of the New York Times.

Kathy Arberg, a spokeswoman for the Supreme Court, said Thomas declined to comment for this article.

Touched a Nerve

You may not agree with my take on what happened between the man who now sits on the Supreme Court — ruling this year against women in a historic sex-discrimination case, no less, involving Wal-Mart Stores Inc. — and the woman who today teaches courses including “Race and the Law” on a bucolic New England campus. But it’s hard to argue against this: Hill’s testimony touched a nerve with working women in America.

Even Hill was taken aback. “What then came for me was a surprise, and that is that my testimony started something else. It started individuals talking about sexual harassment; not only were they talking about it in ways they had never talked about it before, but they were talking about it. Just the fact that we were talking about it and we weren’t carrying around this shame about ‘Well, we were not tough enough if we admitted it bothered us.’ That was a change because we were always told ‘Just keep your mouth shut and just suck it up.’”

Changed Forever

Williams, the law professor, sensed the same historic shift in attitudes. “There was a common understanding that if you couldn’t handle harassment, you were kind of a wimp and probably didn’t deserve the job anyway,” she says. “Then came Anita Hill and all of a sudden there was a whiff of liability, and the cultural environment changed forever.” I read those words to Hill. “You know, I hope it changed forever,” she says.

It did. The Civil Rights Act of 1991, which for the first time gave employees filing a federal lawsuit the right to a jury trial and the chance to win damages for emotional distress, was signed into law five weeks after Thomas’s confirmation. Hill initially worried that the raking-over she got from critics would dissuade women from speaking up, but the opposite happened. Her testimony, combined with the new law, led to a surge of complaints, says Elizabeth Grossman, the regional attorney in the New York district office of the EEOC. (In August, a claim alleging a pattern of gender discrimination, part of a lawsuit brought by Grossman’s office against Bloomberg LP, was dismissed in a New York federal court.) “She brought a consciousness to many people and different employers in our society and got people talking about the issues,” Grossman says.

Constructive as that outcome was, it wasn’t what motivated Hill to recount so publicly the incidents of a boss who she says asked her out on dates and talked about “very vivid” pornography. It was about “whether Thomas, who was being considered for a lifetime appointment, was fit for the position,” she told me.

The Coke-can incident allegedly occurred in the offices of the EEOC, of all places. So the obvious question to Hill was whether a man who hits on a female employee and dishes talk about videos of oversize male sex organs had the appropriate “respect for the law” that a Supreme Court appointment calls for. Would she go through it all again knowing how hard it would be? “Oh yeah, yes,” she says. “The issues to me are so clear. This was about the integrity of the court.”

Magnet for Controversy

Despite Hill’s claims, Thomas squeaked by and was confirmed by a 52-48 Senate vote. He remains a magnet for controversy. Twenty Democratic House members on Sept. 29 asked the U.S. Judicial Conference, which oversees federal courts, to investigate the fact that he did not disclose almost $700,000 of his wife Virginia Thomas’s income from 2003 to 2007.

In a separate public-relations flare-up a year ago, Virginia Thomas delivered this contender for world’s weirdest voice message: On Hill’s phone at Brandeis, she suggested Hill apologize for “what you did with my husband.”

Much has gone right for women in the workplace since Hill spoke up. It would be tough to find a large U.S. company today that didn’t train employees on workplace-harassment issues, Grossman says. “It can be window dressing,” she says, but done right, harassment training can help companies decrease turnover rates, build morale and lower absenteeism. There’s also no question that women entering the workplace today have less to fear.

‘Ugly Out There’

Ironically, or some might say predictably, much has also gone dreadfully wrong, thanks to court rulings in which Thomas played a part. “Civil-rights laws are being undermined by the U.S. Supreme Court,” says Cliff Palefsky, a San Francisco-based employment lawyer. “It’s really, really ugly out there.”

Two decisions supported by Thomas this year could undo some of the post-Anita Hill progress by stifling the single-most-powerful weapon against workplace discrimination: the class-action lawsuit. The June 20 decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes torpedoed a class-action discrimination case that would have included 1.5 million women. Employees looking to bring large cases in the future will have a tougher time of it.

And an April 27 ruling in a case called AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion said consumers who signed the company’s customer agreement could neither sue individually nor pursue a class-action suit. The fear is that the Concepcion case opens a door for employers to require employees to sign agreements that similarly take away an individual’s right to sue while also shutting down employees’ ability to join co-workers in a class.

Vulnerable Time

The decisions come at a vulnerable time for women. “I look at the growing number of women who were in the housing market” in the previous decade, Hill says. Buying a home was “not only a statement about their economic independence, but also a statement about their social independence. Because remember, single women weren’t supposed to be homeowners; they were supposed to wait until they were maaaa-rried,” — she says the word in a sing-songy voice — “and then they were supposed to have the big house and the children, and women, we were rejecting that, only to get slapped by these, in many cases, toxic loan instruments.”

The Consumer Federation of America expressed concern in a 2006 study that a lopsided share of subprime mortgages was going to single women. One in five homebuyers in 2003 was a single female, the study noted, up from one in 10 in 1991. But as women were stepping up their home purchases, they were being steered to mortgages with onerous conditions. Black and Latino women were much more likely to wind up with a subprime mortgage than were white men with similar incomes.

Old Problems

While women confront these new obstacles, some of them still make the morning commute to jobs where old problems continue. Things are better, but “we’re still bringing the same old sex-harassment cases where the boss is grabbing people’s breasts and rear ends, and threatening to fire them if they don’t submit to advances,” Grossman says.

Discouraging? Hill offers some perspective. “I don’t think we’ve gotten it right. As much progress as we’ve made socially, I’m not satisfied that it’s over, that the battle is won and that we can just brush our hands and say ‘lets move on to other issues,’” Hill says. “It’s been 20 years, but what we are talking about is changing centuries of behavior.”