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2024-08-07 03:21:28

Nathan on Nostr: I think Bitcoin, in the long term, will positively impact politics & shrink DC. But ...

I think Bitcoin, in the long term, will positively impact politics & shrink DC.

But until then politics matters.

It impacts your life & it impacts the lives of others often in ways that have lifelong consequences. Dismissing it completely is foolish.

Don’t believe me? I'll leave it to @RobertACaro who writes the following in chapter one of his new book "Working" (midway through I'll substitute "political power" w/ "politics” in brackets):

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People are always asking me why I chose Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson to write about. Well, I must say I never thought of my books as stories of Moses or Johnson. I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man. From the very start I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times-particularly the force that is political power.

Why political power? Because [politics] shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in little ways that you might not even think about. For example, when you're driving up the Triborough (now Robert F. Kennedy) Bridge in Manhattan in New York, you may notice that the bridge comes down across the East River in Queens opposite 100th Street. So why do you have to drive all the way up to 125th Street to cross it, and then basically drive back, which adds almost three totally unnecessary miles to every Journey across the bridge?

Well, the reason is political power. In 1934, Robert Moses was trying to get the Triborough Bridge built, and he couldn't because there wasn't enough public or political support for the project. William Randolph Hurst, the publisher of three influential newspapers in New York, owned a block of tenements on 125th Street. Before the Depression, the tenements had been profitable, but now poor people didn't have jobs, and couldn't pay their rent. Hearst was losing money on the buildings and he wanted the city to take them off his hands by condemning them for some project. Robert Moses saw that the project could be the Triborough Bridge, and that's why the bridge entrance is at 125th Street. That's a small way in which [politics] affects your life. But there are large ways, too.

Every time a young man or woman goes to college on a federal education bill passed by Lyndon Johnson, that's [politics]. Every time an elderly man or woman, or an impoverished man or woman of any age, gets a doctor's bill or a hospital bill and sees that it's been paid by Medicare or Medicaid, that's [politics]. Every time a black man or woman is able to walk into a voting booth in the South because of Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Act, that's [politics]. And so, unfortunately, is a young man-58,000 young American men-dying a needless death in Vietnam. That's [politics]. It affects your life in all sorts of ways. My books are an attempt to analyze and explain that power.

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