CABLECAST AND WEB STREAMING OF PROGRAM IN SERIES  

          "CONVERSATIONS WITH HAROLD HUDSON CHANNER"

                      FRIDAY AUGUST 20, 2004

                                                        Originally Aired 10-27-97)

                                                WILLIAM WOLMAN 

                                                                        &

`                                            ANNE COLAMOSCA

                                                   Co-Authors:

                                     "The Judas Economy - 

                The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of Work"

                       

 

MORE ABOUT WILLIAM WOLMAN & ANNE COLAMOSCA AND THE JUDAS ECONOMY

As Business Week's chief economist for 10 years, Mr. Wolman is known for his ability to enliven economics stories.

He and The New York Times' legendary Leonard Silk helped pioneer the coverage of economics as news.

Mr. Wolman, a Montreal native, supervises the magazine's coverage of economics and finance, and his guidance has led to some major awards.

One example is the magazine's 1980 "Reindustrialization of America" special issue, which garnered Mr. Wolman a National Magazine Award for best single-topic issue as well as a Deadline Club Award, a John Hancock Award and a University of Missouri Journalism Award.

Mr. Wolman also won a Champion Tuck Award for the magazine's 1984 exploration of the U.S. deficit.

"We want to be constructive ... " Mr. Wolman said of the deficit story. "There is not much of a general sense of how serious the problem really is or what 'sacrifices' or actions are necessary to deal with it and to remove 'deficit fear' from the financial markets."

Mr. Wolman, who earned a doctorate in economics from Stanford University in 1957, also appears regularly on CNBC, where he has provided commentary since 1989.

In fact, Mr. Wolman was an early pioneer in business news programming, serving as executive editor of "Business Times," a daily television program that aired on ESPN, from 1983 to 1984.

Mr. Wolman originally joined Business Week in 1960, and left and rejoined the magazine twice.

He is co-author of three books: "The Beat Inflation Strategy," published in 1975; "The Decline of U.S. Power, 1980"; and 1998's "The Judas Economy: The Triumph of Capital and the Betrayal of Work."

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Editoral comment of The Judas Econ0my by Kirkus Reviews

A bleak antimarket assessment of the postCold War outlook for American workers. Wolman, chief economist at Business Week, and Colamosca, a former staff writer at the same magazine, assert that, since the 1989 triumph of laissez-faire economics over socialism, increasingly mobile capital has called the tune to which the domestic labor force is dancing. They go on to argue that US industry (in the name of global competitiveness and allied imperatives) has downsized, outsourced, and otherwise double- crossed loyal blue-collar employees, whose wages in any event had made precious little headway since the 1970s. Nor, the authors caution, are the livelihoods of presumptive elites like so-called knowledge workers sheltered from gathering storms; corporate America is transferring thousands of data-processing and other high-tech jobs to remote offshore venues (e.g., Bangalore, India) where well-educated locals will do them more than competently for appreciably lower pay. Big business apart, the villains here are currency/securities traders and central banks that reward slow, price-stable growth and punish expansionist policies which revive inflationary fears. In their view, consistently tight money not only curbs economic and income gains but also imposes a burden on consumers in the form of needlessly high interest rates. The authors offer conventionally liberal recommendations for reversing the trends that they claim have put US workers in a race without a finish line. Inter alia, they maintain, the federal government should increase its R&D spending; encourage greater cooperation among advanced industrial powers (``to end the tyranny of the central banks and markets''); create a new safety net to socialize the risks of global capitalism; subsidize national listings of employment opportunities; and make it easier to change jobs (e.g., by mandating portable pensions). A deliberately provocative text whose subtext seems to be that the world and transnational enterprises owe US workers a better living.