Published Dec. 2, 2004, in the Kirksville Daily Express

Story by Matthew Webber

KIRKSVILLE - On a day when melting slush postponed the groundbreaking of rural northeast Missouri's first Home Depot store, Ralph Nader said these kinds of corporations are "cancerous" to small-town America.

In Kirksville Wednesday night, Nader chastised chain stores like Home Depot and Wal-Mart for working with, and running their businesses like, a Chinese dictatorship. The consumer advocate and Green Party presidential nominee told a capacity crowd in Truman State University's Baldwin Hall that people accept the chain stores in their communities because "we've grown up corporate," with corporations and their messages all around us.

Citing the control the automobile, tobacco, pharmaceutical, fast food and other industries exert on U.S. governmental policy, Nader said it is dangerous, but no surprise, that children recognize Ronald McDonald as easily as Santa Claus.

In a town that the Atlanta-based The Home Depot company has tapped for just its second rural hardware store in the United States, Nader saved some of his harshest criticisms for these national chain stores.

"These chain stores, like Wal-Mart," the largest retailer in Kirksville, "they are a massive economic cancer in this country," Nader said.

Nader said these chain stores contribute to the outsourcing of jobs and the closing of small businesses in communities like Kirksville. Not only that, but these corporations get tax subsidies to continue reducing employees' wages and benefits, he said.

"The taxpayers, local and federal, are subsidizing Wal-Mart," he said. "When you walk into a Wal-Mart, you're not just paying the price for a product. You're paying for a hollowed-out main street, a hollowed-out small-business community."

This message resonated with many of the 1,300 people who heard him speak, people who may have felt the sting of the recent recession. In 2003, one of Kirksville's largest employers, Standard Register, a business-printing company, closed, while another, Hollister, which produces medical supplies, laid off about 50 employees.

Further, while local hardware-store owners would not comment to the Daily Express for a previous story about Home Depot's arrival, others in the community have expressed fear that the opening of Home Depot will mean the closing of these long-standing businesses.

Martha Bartter, 72, an English professor at Truman, said she agreed with Nader that big corporations sometimes eliminate choice - or even small businesses altogether.

"When we moved here [13 years ago], Wal-Mart was a small store on the far end of town, and there were two other discount stores here. You don't have a choice anymore," said Bartter, who "object[s] to Wal-Mart on all sorts of grounds."

Kevin Chase, a junior at Truman, said he, too, had grown up in the corporate world of which Nader spoke.

"The theme we saw tonight was that the corporate control of every aspect of individuals' lives is expanding, and it's a theme I've seen before just in my own experience," Chase, 21, of St. Louis, said.

After hearing Nader, Chase said he felt inspired to take "local action."

"We as individuals can find out as much as possible, not just about global issues that seem too far out of reach, but about local issues," he said. "We can use that information to affect local change."

Truman's Student Activities Board paid Nader $15,000 and travel expenses to speak about his life of consumer advocacy, said Meghan Doherty, 20, of St. Louis, SAB event chair and a junior at the university.

Earlier Wednesday night, Nader told reporters the Federal Aviation Administration should issue stronger standards for charter planes and other small planes like the Corporate Airlines commuter plane that crashed in a field about two miles south of Kirksville Regional Airport Oct. 19, killing 13 of 15 people on board.

And Tuesday night near St. Louis, about 165 miles from Kirksville, a small, corporate jet crashed on a Missouri River island, killing two people.

"We're trying to get the FAA to issue stronger standards here, but the charter plane industry's got a lot of powerful lobbyists," Nader said. "They don't like it. But maybe after these crashes, they'll begin to see it's in their own economic interests to adhere to tougher standards."

Some smaller airports and planes lack the newest safety equipment, Nader said, and some smaller airlines don't always enforce pilots' flight-time limits.

Although federal investigators have not yet determined the cause of the Oct. 19 crash, some factors are that Kirksville Regional Airport does not have an instrument landing system to guide pilots to a more precise approach and the Corporate Airlines plane did not have a terrain avoidance system to warn the pilot he was flying too low. Also, at the time of the crash, the pilot and co-pilot had been on duty for almost 15 hours, which is within FAA guidelines.