Read Online Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings by The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America - Free Book Online Page A

would never end. It was obscene. Platters and platters of food and bottles and bottles of wine. We never thought once about what anything cost. Not at all. Just like at the exchange, it was all funny money. Never your money. So you didn’t think about it.
    In 1982 I switched over to the government bond market. By the mid-1980s the government bond market was booming and I was making good money with a nice bonus every year. I bought a new house, new cars, new clothes, and I became so entrenched in the lifestyle that I was spending tons of money. When your whole life revolves around money, pretty soon your value judgments come into question. My buddies and I would literally be stepping over homeless people on our way to work, and we’d snicker about it. We certainly didn’t want to get our shoes scuffed up by their burlap pants. “Get a job” was our attitude.
    Wall Street in the 1980s was like nowhere else on this planet. It was a culture of greed and backstabbing and partying. Your best buddy is the one who’s gonna stab you in the back tomorrow if it means some more greenbacks in his pocket. It wasn’t a good way to live, but it was the only way I knew.

    Not since the Roaring Twenties had there been such a culture of money and glitz in America. Yet the new rich were making money differently than their predecessors. A thriving 1920s capitalist might have amassed a fortune building automobiles, while a successful 1950s businessman might have thought up new ways to sell products. In the 1980s millionaires were often lawyers and investment bankers who got rich not by
building
or
selling
anything, but by shifting ownership of companies, by refinancing companies, by making deals. It was all done on paper, and to many it all felt a little unreal.
    Looking back, experts would agree that this was a streamlining that American business desperately needed. Still, all this wheeling and dealing, which seemed so abstract, affected the jobs—and the lives—of real people. Sometimes it meant closing factories in the United States and reopening them in places such as Thailand or Mexico. Why should management pay union workers in Ohio or Michigan high wages when they could pay a tenth of that to someone in the Third World? Sometimes it meant buying out local family-owned businesses to break them apart and sell each part.
    Whole towns suffered dramatically from this rampage of mergers, acquisitions, and relocations. Communities that had relied on local factories for jobs now found themselves without any source ofemployment. Increasingly, people could not find new jobs. A new underclass emerged. Most visible were the homeless, people living on the street, whose desperate lives seemed to put the lie to claims that the country was back on its feet. The homeless problem was a complicated one, caused in part by Reagan’s welfare cuts, by an inner-city drug epidemic, by a shortage of affordable housing, and by the decline of marriage, which left more people struggling to get by on their own.
    A powerful new form of cocaine, called “crack,” swept through American cities in the late 1980s. Darryl McDaniels, born in 1964, is the “DMC” of the rap group Run-DMC. He saw the damage crack did to his community.
    I grew up on the tree-lined streets of Hollis, Queens, in New York. Most of the parents in my neighborhood were hardworking people with nine-to-five jobs. You knew everybody’s parents, every kid, every uncle, the name of every dog and cat on the block, and the TV repairman, the oil man, and the mailman. Hollis was really a close-knit middle-class community. Almost every Saturday in the summer, the whole neighborhood would come into the park, and a DJ would be there, and the rappers and the emcees from the neighborhood would come on the set andwe’d rap and we’d party and we’d DJ and we’d play music and have fun until the police came and said, “Somebody called the