We can, therefore, interpret neoliberalization either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites…Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal. The evidence suggests, moreover, that when neoliberal principles clash with the need to restore or sustain elite power, then the principles are either abandoned or become so twisted as to be unrecognizable.

— David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism [via]

What happened in the US was that 8 men gave us a 3 page document which pointed a gun at everybody and said ‘give us $700 billion or else’. This to me was like a financial coup, against the government and the population of the US. Which means you’re not going to come out of this crisis with a crisis of the capitalist class; you’re going to come out of this with a far greater consolidation of the capitalist class than there has been in the past. We’re going to end up with four or five major banking institutions in the United States and nothing else. Many on Wall Street are thriving right now.

— David Harvey

I begin with this conclusion since I still find it vital to emphasize, if not dramatize, as I have sought to do over and over again in my writings over the years, that failure to understand the geographical dynamics of capitalism or to treat the geographical dimension as in some sense merely contingent or epiphenomenal, is to both lose the plot on how to understand capitalist uneven geographical development and to miss out on possibilities for constructing radical alternatives.

— Why the U.S. Stimulus Package is Bound To Fail

I love David Harvey.

Class power is, in itself, evasive because it is a social relation that eludes direct measurement. But one visible and necessary (though by no means sufficient) condition for its exercise is the accumulation of income and wealth in a few hands. The existence of such accumulations and concentrations was being widely noted in UN reports by the mid-1990s. The net worth of the 358 richest people in the world was then found to be ‘equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the world’s population—2.3 billion people.’ The world’s 200 richest people ‘more than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1998, to more than $1 trillion,’ so that ‘the assets of the world’s top three billionaires were more than the combined GNP of all least developed countries and their 600 million people.’ These trends have accelerated, albeit unevenly. The share of the national income taken by the top 1 per cent of income earners in the US more than doubled between 1980 and 2000 while that of the top 0.1 per cent more than tripled. ‘The income of the 99th percentile rose 87 percent’ between 1972 and 2001 while that of the ‘99.9th percentile rose 497 percent.’ In 1985 the combined wealth of the Forbes 400 richest people in the US ‘was $238 billion’ with ‘an average net worth of $600 million,’ adjusted for inflation. By 2005, their average net worth was $2.8 billion and their collective assets amounted to $1.13 trillion—‘more than the gross domestic product of Canada.’

— David Harvey, Limits to Capital, introduction to the 2006 Verso edition. [via]