San Antonio College Library

The covert campaign to rig our tax system to benfit the super rich--and cheat everybody else.

"In communities across America, a scandal is lurking that is far bigger than the recent headline-grabbing debacles of Enron and WorldCom. Here, Greg LeRoy exposes the Great American Jobs Scam, showing how major corporations have learned to use an all-too-often empty promise of "jobs, jobs, jobs" to win economic development subsidies and fatten their own coffers." "The average state has more than thirty subsidy programs, which range from property tax...

"Late one evening, investigative journalist Bastian Obermayer receives an anonymous message offering him access to secret data. Through encrypted channels, he then receives documents revealing how the president of Argentina has sequestered millions of dollars of state money for private use. This is just the beginning. Obermayer and fellow Süddeutsche journalist Frederik Obermaier find themselves immersed in the secret world where complex networks...

These essays examine the problems of defining, measuring and understanding the implications of "underground economies" that are surmised to have emerged in many of the world's developed nations. The conceptual problem of how to measure unreported income is examined and alternatives suggested.