Eyes to the Wind by Ady Barkan

Author:Ady Barkan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

Four years earlier, when we moved from New Haven to Queens, Rachael had spent the summer in China on a language fellowship. I had done all the packing and driven our belongings into New York, enjoying the novel challenge of steering a midsize U-Haul over the Triborough Bridge, through the midday traffic, and around Astoria’s myriad potholes. This time it was her turn. When I got back from Jackson Hole, our entire apartment was in boxes. And in what we felt was the ultimate sign of our newfound class status, UCSB had agreed to pay for our moving costs. I was more than happy to let a trio of burly men carry everything down the two flights of stairs and into an enormous orange truck.

We sat on the carpet in the empty apartment, filled with anticipation for our new life out west. Rachael’s five years of hard work in graduate school had paid off handsomely with a dream job, and my two years of scheming and proselytizing about the Fed had been vindicated. We traveled to the Upper West Side to say goodbye and spend the night with my father and stepmom. For our final dinner, we decided to go back to the taqueria on Amsterdam Avenue where I had taken Rachael for our first date. It had been twelve years since we arrived in New York City for our first year at Columbia. All of a sudden we were entering our thirties and moving to California.

The next week, camped out at my mother’s house in Pasadena while we waited for our furniture and looked for an apartment in Santa Barbara, I had a follow-up phone call with Alexander, the funder who had given us the $100,000 seed grant. He was excited about the results of our trip to Jackson Hole, and particularly amused that so much of the press coverage had mentioned our bright green T-shirts. Of course, I told him, it’s all about the T-shirts. He asked me to send him a budget for 2015.

Twenty-five of us gathered in Washington, D.C., in mid-November for our meeting with Janet Yellen and the other governors. We identified three people to share personal stories about life in a weak economy, and another six people to present each of our demands to the Fed. Twenty-four hours before the meeting with us, we blasted out a press release announcing the formation of the Fed Up Coalition, which would be bringing the voices of everyday Americans into the Federal Reserve. We scheduled a press conference on the steps of the Fed for the next day, just before we would go inside the headquarters.

That night, while prepping in my hotel room, I got a phone call from Michelle Smith, Yellen’s consigliere. She was not happy. She had set up the meeting thinking it would be an anodyne listening session. We were using it to launch a public campaign aimed directly at her boss. Her colleagues inside the building were urging her to call off the meeting, she told me.

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