The latest IMF loan does not 'rescue' Jamaica, whose debt must be written off if its people are to take control of their economy. Many people in Jamaica would have trembled as they read the financial press last week, telling them that their country is, again, due to be "rescued" by a loan package put together by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Last week I was at the World Bank’s Land and Poverty Conference in Washington DC, sitting in one of the most luxuriously appointed office buildings I have ever seen, (and I used to work for Lehman Brothers), as we discussed the land issues that so critically affect many of the poorest people on our planet.

This week, this fine setting will play host to the annual Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group, where land issues will also be a big focus for many of the assembled policymakers, academics, NGOs and private sector investors.

A quick note on Portugal. Let’s start from three facts: Austerity did not work. Portugal is in a recessionary cycle. The economy will shrink by 2.3 per cent this year, more than twice as much as the previous government forecast (and the slowdown of exports to the rest of the eurozone, is not helping).

A multi-billion dollar aid program administered by the World Bank is underwriting systematic human rights abuses in Ethiopia. Last September, Ethiopian victims submitted a complaint about the program to the World Bank Inspection Panel, which is tasked with investigating whether or not the Bank complies with its own policies to prevent social and environmental harm. A meeting of the Bank’s board of directors to discuss the Panel’s preliminary findings was postponed on March 19th due to objections from the Ethiopian government.

Financial business is creating credit without limit until a crisis occurs. That’s the fundamental flaw which caused the current crisis, says Andrew Sheng in this INET interview. He also worries that the destruction of the tropical forest and other threats to the biosphere have the same character of ungovernable excesses until a crisis occurs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=K6teTv7XQCM#!

http://ineteconomics.org/video/andrew-sheng-sustainability-requires-cagi...

Slate’s Matthew Yglesias writes columns about economics and finance. Yglesias has been writing about Cyprus, and my critiques of the policies he has been proposing are the subject of this column. The short version of the background one needs to understand the issues is that Cyprus is in a crisis and the EU is willing to bail out its collapsing banks only if Cyprus raises revenues. The EU is unwilling to make the banks’ sophisticated creditors – the bondholders – take any losses.

(Remarks by Prof. Michael Hudson at The Atlantic’s Economy Summit, Washington DC, Wednesday, March 13, 2013)

Ok, this is pretty grim, and I believe that it is accurate. It is one reason that I have been developing the CRX as a concept and practice. We have to have some sort of viable alternative process. I also am sooooo tired of people criticizing the CRX as if not creating alternatives is even close to a viable path. Bullshit alternatives are even worse because they in effect use the desire and hope for change to be the basis for another fraudulent process which in some sense will also destroy even the possibility of hope.

This is a re-working of my second talk at the Rimini MMT conference, as heard on Guns and Butter.

These are remarks Chris Hedges made in Union Square in New York City last Friday during a protest outside a branch office of the Bank of America.

We stand today before the gates of one of our temples of finance. It is a temple where greed and profit are the highest good, where self-worth is determined by the ability to amass wealth and power at the expense of others, where laws are manipulated, rewritten and broken, where the endless treadmill of consumption defines human progress, where fraud and crimes are the tools of business.