Hands off BAZ, Charamba tells Parliament

Thursday, 22 December 2011 00:00
Lloyd Gumbo Herald Reporter

PARLIAMENT has no mandate to discuss or question the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe as this is tantamount to interfering with the Executive, a senior Government official has said.
Secretary for Media, Information and Publicity Mr George Charamba yesterday said the only arms of Government with the mandate to discuss BAZ's actions were the Executive and the Judiciary.
He said Parliament's role ended with the nomination of board members.

We Can Make Highlanders Great Again

IF THE Highlanders Football Club stakeholders do not sit down to seriously discuss the club’s plight and come up with a viable business plan, then we are most likely going to see the inevitable deterioration of the team to an ordinary outfit. The worst case scenarios would be synonymous to the demise of Zimbabwe Saints or that of Kennedy Sibanda’s Eagles FC. I know it sounds farfetched but if Highlanders is left on its current path, then it is surely a plausible prediction.

Nation Must Act Decisively

By Peace Thabani,

WE HAVE just witnessed a national football disgrace. Influential and top officials at the Zimbabwe Football Association (ZIFA), including the past chairman and the chief executive, have been working with an Asian betting syndicate to facilitate the Zimbabwe national team to lose games for payment.
Close to 100 players, coaches and journalists are reported to be involved and are reported to have all benefitted from the scandal. Not only did the arrangement make the purported national team lose several games, but it disintegrated the soccer administration and development structures. Read More...

First Published on NewZimbabwe.com

Soul Singer Teddy Pendergrass Dead at 59

Photo: Michael Ochs Archive/Getty

King of Pop Michael Jackson Dies at 50

Summer Olympics 2016

Brazil Can Do It Too!!!!!!

"All those people who thought we had no ability to govern this country will now learn that we can host the Olympics."

"The Brazilian people are good, generous and the country deserves it."

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

Irving Kristol, Godfather of Modern Conservatism, Dies at 89

Barry Gewen

New York Times

September 18, 2009

Irving Kristol, the political commentator who, as much as anyone, defined modern conservatism and helped revitalize the Republican Party in the late 1960s and early ’70s, setting the stage for the Reagan presidency and years of conservative dominance, died Friday in Arlington, Va. He was 89 and lived in Washington.

He was commonly known as the godfather of neoconservatism, even by those who were not entirely sure what the term meant. In probably his most widely quoted comment — his equivalent of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame — Mr. Kristol defined a neoconservative as a liberal who had been “mugged by reality.”
It was a description that summarized his experience in the 1960s, along with that of friends and associates like Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. New Deal Democrats all, they were social scientists who found themselves questioning many of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society ideas. Mr. Kristol translated his concerns into a magazine. In 1965, with a $10,000 contribution from a wealthy acquaintance, he and Daniel Bell started The Public Interest. Its founding is generally considered the beginning of neoconservatism. “Something like a ‘movement’ took shape,” Mr. Kristol wrote, “with The Public Interest at (or near) the center.”
The Public Interest writers did not take issue with the ends of the Great Society so much as with the means, the “unintended consequences” of the Democrats’ good intentions. Welfare programs, they argued, were breeding a culture of dependency; affirmative action created social divisions and did damage to its supposed beneficiaries. They placed practicality ahead of ideals. “The legitimate question to ask about any program,” Mr. Kristol said, “is, ‘Will it work?’,” and the reforms of the 1960s and ’70s, he believed, were not working. Read More...

What went wrong with economics

Illustration by Jon Berkerly

Jul 16th 2009 From The Economist print edition

And how the discipline should change to avoid the mistakes of the past

OF ALL the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself. A few years ago, the dismal science was being acclaimed as a way of explaining ever more forms of human behaviour, from drug-dealing to sumo-wrestling. Wall Street ransacked the best universities for game theorists and options modellers. And on the public stage, economists were seen as far more trustworthy than politicians. John McCain joked that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, was so indispensable that if he died, the president should “prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.” Read More...

Uncertainty bedevils the best system

By Edmund Phelps
Published: April 14 2009 19:50 Financial Times

In countries operating a largely capitalist system, there does not appear to be a wide understanding among its actors and overseers of either its advantages or its hazards. Ignorance of what it can contribute has in the past led some countries to throw out the system or clip its wings. Ignor­ance of the hazards has made imprudence in markets and policy neglect all the more likely. Regaining a well-functioning capitalism will require re-education and deep reform.
Capitalism is not the “free market” or laisser faire – a system of zero government “plus the constable”. Capitalist systems function less well without state protection of investors, lenders and companies against monopoly, deception and fraud. These systems may lack the requisite political support and cause social stresses without subsidies to stimulate inclusion of the less advantaged in society’s formal business economy. Last, a huge social insurance system, with resulting high taxes, low take-home pay and low wealth, may not hurt capitalism. More...

From Bubble to Depression?

By STEVEN GJERSTAD and VERNON L. SMITH, Wall Street Journal

Bubbles have been frequent in economic history, and they occur in the laboratories of experimental economics under conditions which -- when first studied in the 1980s -- were considered so transparent that bubbles would not be observed.
We economists were wrong: Even when traders in an asset market know the value of the asset, bubbles form dependably. Bubbles can arise when some agents buy not on fundamental value, but on price trend or momentum. If momentum traders have more liquidity, they can sustain a bubble longer.
But what sparks bubbles? Why does one large asset bubble -- like our dot-com bubble -- do no damage to the financial system while another one leads to its collapse? Key characteristics of housing markets -- momentum trading, liquidity, price-tier movements, and high-margin purchases -- combine to provide a fairly complete, simple description of the housing bubble collapse, and how it engulfed the financial system and then the wider economy. Read More...

Why this will not be a normal cyclical recovery

By Roger Altman
Published: April 5 2009 19:23 Financial Times

The rare nature of this recession precludes a cyclically normal US recovery. Instead, we are consigned to a slow, painful climb-out, as are nations such as Japan and Mexico that depend on US demand. The implications for US policy include a likely second round of stimulus, much more federal capital for the banking system and stunning budget deficits that will slow key initiatives for President Barack Obama, such as healthcare and energy reform.
What is unusual is that this is a balance-sheet driven recession, centred on the damaged financial condition of both households and banks. These weaknesses mandate sub-normal levels of consumer spending and overall lending for about three years. More...

Related Article: The London summit has not fixed the crisis

G20 Communique - Apr 2 London Meeting

We have today therefore pledged to do whatever is necessary to:

• restore confidence, growth, and jobs;
• repair the financial system to restore lending;
• strengthen financial regulation to rebuild trust;
• fund and reform our international financial institutions to overcome this crisis and prevent future ones;
• promote global trade and investment and reject protectionism, to underpin prosperity;
• build an inclusive, green, and sustainable recovery. Read More

Annex to Communique:

DECLARATION ON STRENGTHENING THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM

DECLARATION ON DELIVERING RESOURCES THROUGH THE INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Progress Report on the Actions of the Washington Action Plan