Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I moved to Palo Alto in 1973 to go to Stanford and lived next to Palo Alto for 45 years.

I never knew much of the stuff in this book was going on. Never knew that Palo Alto was in the top leadership of the Capitalists transferring of wealth from the bottom 80% of society to the top 1% (the Reagan and Bush W administrations were largely staffed — leadership and ideas/policies — from Stanford’s Hoover Institution).

Our record wealth inequality represents their amazing success in transforming our country and the world. The Chinese Foxconn employees in iPhone City are mistreated/exploited as much or more than the Amazon fulfillment workers who have to urinate in bottles to meet their required productivity goal.

“At every step, capital used up working people, churning through earth’s only truly inexhaustible resource. That Amazon is a market leader in workplace mechanization, labor exploitation, and low-end wages all at the same time is deeply concerning.” p618

Yes, I skimmed some of the details in the sections that least interested me, but he covers a huge number of things and makes almost all of them interesting.

Harris writes with humor — made me laugh out loud on occassion.

“the Airbnbozos whose defining feature is an eagerness to unleash forces they don’t understand onto as many people as they can, as fast as possible.” p619

“No matter what the Feds say, there is only so long you can decline to recognize someone who is hitting you with a shovel.” p621
[The Feds said that the Ohlone tribe (native to Palo Alto in the centuries before Leland Stanford arrived) no longer exists.]

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