Osborne’s Spending Review  An £11.5bn Slap in the Face for Public Sector Workers, Pensioners and the Poor   Scriptonite Daily 26jun13 http://scriptonitedaily.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/osbornes-spending-review-an-11-5bn-slap-in-the-face-for-public-sector-workers-pensions-and-the-poor/ "Where Will the Axe Fall?  I will not rehash Osborne’s entire Spending Review, you can find that here.  Instead I want to focus on some key cuts.  It is also useful not to think of them as cuts, but transfers.  Each cut from the infrastructure, the services and the social security systems of our state have simply been transferred to fund the privatisation and commercialisation of our state.  Total Spending Osborne announced pubic spending of £745bn in 2015/6.  This is actually £1bn more than he has previously announced.  It means the overall spending as a % of GDP is actually be several higher than Labour’s last year prior to the Bank Bailout.  "The government is not cutting spending, it is radically changing what we spend our taxes on.  This is the key to understanding the ideological nature of bogus austerity.  It is not tightening the belt, it is taking food from the mouths of the poorest, to stockpile it for the richest."

Talk of the devil: Osborne speech: Spending Round 2013  speech - Oral statements to Parliament - Inside Government - GOV.UK https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/spending-round-2013-speech   "Instead of the £157 billion the last government was borrowing, this year, we are set to borrow £108 billion pounds.  That’s £49 billion less in borrowing.  That’s virtually the entire education budget.  ... I can report that the biggest single saving we’ve made in government is the £6 billion pounds a year less we are paying to service our debts.  ... Mr Speaker, the deficit has come down by a third.  Yet at over seven per cent, it remains far too high, so we must continue to take action.  So the figures today show that until 2017-18, Total Managed Expenditure – in other words, the total amount of government spending - will continue to fall in real terms at the same average rate as it is falling today.  The task before us today is to spell out what that means for 2015-16.  Total Managed Expenditure will be £745 billion.  To put that huge sum into context, consider this: if government spending had been allowed to rise through this Parliament at the average rate of the last three decades, that total would have been £120 billion pounds higher.  This Government has taken unprecedented steps to achieve this expenditure control.  But now we need to find £11.5 billion of further savings."

2013 new film: The Spirit Level - documentary http://thespiritleveldocumentary.com/ 

Royal Mail staff vote against privatisation "More than 96% of 112,000 postal workers vote against sell-off despite each being promised £1,500 of shares"  UK news 19jun13 Rupert Neat The Guardian

Anti-poverty strategies - reviews (phase one)   Joseph Rowntree Foundation http://www.jrf.org.uk/funding/calls-for-proposal/anti-poverty-strategies-phase-one via Gwen

INEQUALITY & GROWTH & opposing views on how they are (or might be) connected: 'Looking for Capitalism's Tipping Point' - NYTimes.com ?16may13 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/us/17iht-letter17.html?_r=1&

The World's Richest 8% Earn Half of All Planetary Income - The top 1 per cent has seen its real income rise by more than 60 per cent over those two decades. by Eric Zuesse 28may13

Merryn Somerset Webb re min wage & living wage & tax etc 1may13 http://www.moneyweek.com/blog/tax-breaks-miliband-bad-idea-63701 

ROBIN HOOD TAX

NEW or PROGRESSIVE ECONOMICS that work even if ZERO GROWTH

 “Why, in the era of Wall Street hegemony, do close to half of global financial transactions still flow through territories linked to Britain? New Left Project's Jamie Stern-Weiner spoke to Ronen Palan, Professor of International Political Economy at City University London and co-author ofTax Havens: How Globalisation Really Works, to find out.”  [My summary: The 1944 Bretton Woods agreement (ratified in 1945) was supposed to stabilize currency systems with regulations, but it got dodged by the creation of the parallel unregulated offshore market.] Extract: Q to Ronen Palan: "Presumably the existence of this market facilitates tax evasion, and enabled sidestepping of national regulations which contributed to the 2007-8 financial crisis?"  A: by Palan: "Absolutely. People talk about financial deregulation as one of the causes of the crisis, but in fact financial deregulation followed rather than constituted deregulated financial markets. Governments essentially found themselves in a position whereby so much of international finance was already operating through this non-regulated parallel market [the unregulated offshore market including 'shadow banking', tax dodging etc - which increased from early '60s onwards in exploitation of its in creation as a byproduct of UK gov reaction to the 1956-7 Sterling Crisis Run on the Pound, itself in reaction to...], that they had no choice but to try and deregulate their own domestic markets in order to compete. They rationalised this ideologically—we call it neoliberalism—but the main cause was that there was already a non-regulated global financial market sucking in most of the funds in any case."