If you were born before 1975, there is no excuse not to remember this.

Bill and Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Welfare Reform, Homelessness, Monica Lewinsky, The Tech Bubble, and why we may never have nice things again.

These memoirs are from April 1990 to New Year’s Eve 2000. In many ways, these were the hardest ten years of my life. The 90s started with hope and ended with hope. But the years in between were like a bad acid trip. The early 90s began with poor people still being citizens of the United States. And during that decade, our rights were stripped away one by one. It began with poor people losing equal protection in housing law. And continued into Bill Clinton and the bipartisan war against the poor. It ends just before the tech bubble burst. I worked for Aames Homeloan back then, and internet millionaires were calling me hoping to refinance the mansions they already had quasi-legal third mortgages on.

These were the years when tax laws changed to allow such abominations as Uber and Lyft. This was when banks began using mortgages as legal tender, and housing costs artificially skyrocketed. American Universities became privatized, and higher education became exclusive to an economic class that despised learning. I worked as a telemarketer, a butler, a mortgage salesperson, and a street vendor in Berkeley, California.

The 1990s were years of unending and overgrowing terror as rents rose and more people were made homeless. My family moved from rural New Jersey to Oakland, California, to avoid homelessness, and we found a worse housing situation than in New York City. We went from where I could reasonably expect the minimum of care if I was sick to my entire family being without medical care at all. Our solution was not to get sick.

Everything bad that exists today began in the 1990s. The roots were in the Seventies when the public was fooled into thinking a Christian Dominionist named Carter was a liberal, to the Reagan Misadministration of the 1980s that began to reverse the New Deal. But things didn’t get really bad until a horndog named Clinton made a “bipartisan” deal with the Republicans to shred the social safety net to pieces. In 1990, upward mobility still looked tantalizingly possible, and by 2001 the economy was shot in the head. These are the 1990s as seen by a poor person. Enjoy.

Sooner or later, these posts will be compiled into a book. I’ve been working on these posts for a number of years but not in any particular order. I realize I’m jumping around a lot, so I’m going to add the year everything happened.

Table of Contents.

1. Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself
2. The Tao of Larry Marra Sr. July-September 1990
3. Countdown to Blair House: Part One. The Nearly Fatal Gas Leak. Dec. 1991-Jan. 1992
4. Countdown to Blair House: Part Two. I Fought The Law, and The Law Cheated Jan. 1992-Oct 1992
5. Countdown to Blair House: Part Three. Bill in the Multiverse of Madness Jan 1992-Oct 1992
6. Countdown to Blair House: Conclusion. Landing With My Ass On Fire Jan-1992-Oct 1992
7. Dialing for Dollars. The Confessions of a Career Telemarketer 1990-1997
8. War Stories: Life in Electric Larry Land. July-Sept. 1990
9. The Night Carlos Died June 1994
10. Hillbilly Heaven 1992-1994
11. Further Blair House Drama 1992-1994
12. Remembering The Bill Clinton Years 1993-2000
13. Rush Limbaugh 1993-2000