28th November 2011
All The Angry People
“Kachel had four hundred and fifty dollars from the sale of his copy of Final Cut Pro. For two hundred and fifty, you could travel to New York City on a Greyhound bus. He had never been farther east than Dallas, but New York City was so dense and diverse, and so full of ideas and ways to make money, that if he could learn to exist there he could surely find a place to exist. On the last night of September, he went to bed telling himself, “Oh, this is just absolutely nuts, you can’t do that.” He woke up in the morning with a clear thought: This is exactly what I’m going to do.
Kachel didn’t tell his few friends about his plan. But on the night of October 3rd, on a Wordpress blog that he had set up, he wrote, “About to board a bus to NYC. Not sure if I’ll ever come back to Seattle… . I have had some moments of panic, asking myself if I’ve completely lost my mind. That’s entirely possible. But those moments pass quickly and my sense of adventure takes over and I’m ready to hit the road all the more.” He had abandoned most of his remaining possessions; he was travelling with only a small duffel and a daypack, and they contained not much more than a few changes of clothes, a portable hard drive with some of his movies, and a “relatively stupid” cell phone with enough memory to send and download tweets. The bus left at midnight. At five in the morning on October 6th, Kachel arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal, in Manhattan. By 10 A.M., he had made his way downtown to the occupation.
20th June 2011
Preet Bharara Takes on Wall Street
“He started in the position in August, 2009, and his short tenure has been crowded with aggressive prosecutions of terrorism, Medicare fraud, illegal tax shelters, and public corruption. But the arrest of Rajaratnam, on October 16, 2009, gave Bharara his highest-profile case. From the start, Bharara made it clear that he would go after Wall Street crime. “Greed, sometimes, is not good,” he said in announcing the arrests.
