GREG LEROY: Sure. Taxpayers subsidize Wal-Mart at least two different ways, both through the front door and through the backdoor. The front door, I mean bricks-and-mortar subsidies. We at Good Jobs First last year identified more than $1 billion of bricks-and-mortar subsidies given to Wal-Mart stores and warehouses: loans, grants, cheap land, infrastructure, so-called tax increment financing, other training grants, things like that. And then in the backdoor, other sources, including Congressional U.S. staff in the U.S. House of Representatives have identified massive subsidies given to Wal-Mart employees through safety net programs. That is, Medicaid, children's health insurance, free school lunches, Section-Eight housing assistance, earned income tax credits given to workers at Wal-Mart and their family because the company pays poverty wages. So we as taxpayers are subsidizing the company heavily coming and going.

JUAN GONZALEZ: What kind of examples have you uncovered of communities who successfully resisted these kinds of efforts or that actually held companies accountable for their promises?

GREG LEROY: Well, that's the exciting part of the movement today. At the grassroots level, both at the state and local level, a growing number of groups are fighting back, demanding accountability. Twelve states now have some form of annual company specific disclosure. States like Minnesota and Maine and Illinois and Washington state coming online soon, so the taxpayers can see the cost and benefits of every deal. And when that happens, a lot of bad deals tend to go away. That's what history teaches us.

A number of states and cities are enacting what are called claw-backs, literally money back guarantee language to hold companies accountable and saying if you fall short on job creation, we get some of our money back. More than 40 states and more than 40 cities around country are attaching wage standards to their subsidies saying to Wal-Mart or anybody else, if you get a subsidy from us, you've got to pay a better wage, a living wage, the jobs have to be full-time, you have to have health care. That's becoming a very common standard attached to subsidies.

And then, at the local level you've got very exciting projects-specific campaigns like those especially led by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy around projects like the Staples Center expansion or the modernization of the LAX airport, where they attach many strings to the deals to make sure that local residents in the neighborhood get first crack at the jobs, get living wages, get environmental and housing benefits, so that local people are not just road kill for the project.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Did your book get at all into the whole issue of sports stadiums and sports arenas as job -- supposed job development projects? Because it seems that every city in America is building a new arena, sometimes more than one, for either basketball or hockey or football or baseball.

GREG LEROY: Yes. We went after stadiums. The chapter is called, “Loot, loot, loot for the home team.” And you know, there is just an enormous body of evidence, quite unanimous from many different perspectives, that professional sports stadiums are not good economic development. The most they do is move dollars around. You and I do not have more leisure time, and you and I do not have more money to play with just because we have a new place to go, a new stadium to go to. So really what stadiums do is just move leisure time dollars and leisure time around. But they don't create economic development. Arenas and convention centers, especially convention centers, are grossly overbuilt now. The convention center business has actually been faltering for ten years. It began to falter long before 9/11. And despite that, cities continue to massively subsidize new convention center space, which you basically got way too much capacity chasing fewer and fewer dollars.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you build a new consensus for reform?

GREG LEROY: Well, I think disclosure is the bedrock of that. Once people see who's getting the money, where it's coming from, and what we're getting in return, things change. Claw-backs, as I mentioned before, or money back guarantee language, job quality standards to get the poverty wage subsidy deals out of the pipeline. There's a whole system of land reforms, land use reforms, smart growth reforms we also suggest. You know, the average corporate relocation in this country is not across state lines. It's actually from a core urban area, an older area, to the fringe, often chewing up land and causing more sprawl. For instance, we document the fact that not one single state requires that job subsidies, even preferentially, go to much less -- are mandated to go to places that are accessible by public transportation. So low-wage families that don't own a car don't get access to many of the new jobs being subsidized by taxpayers. We think that's nuts. At least in urban areas that have good transportation systems we should be steering those jobs to places that are accessible by public transportation to create more opportunity for low-wage families, to give more people a choice about how to get to work, to clean up the air and reduce traffic congestion.