How Col Richard Liebert routed Wal-Mart

Col. Richard Liebert, who is presently running for the state legislature - replacing another (Air Force) retired Colonel who successfully repealed Montana's Medical Cannabis Initiative, which was approved by the voters by a 60-40 margin, started the local group to oppose the construction of a second Wal-Mart Superstore (plus a Sam's Club) in Great Falls.  That's where I met him, and he went on to chair the Citizens for Clean Energy group which successfully defeated a coal-fired power plant partially owned by the City of Great Falls.  
Here is what I wrote about Wal-Mart and that campaign at the time:- March 6, 2006.  I hope that everyone who lives in this retired (Army) Colonel's district will vote for him.  He is also a cattle rancher and active in AERO and other environmental sustainability groups. 

Wal-Mart slaughtered in public hearing
3-06-06, Montana Green Bulletin

"You don't want to reject a Wal-Mart or other large corporations. The word might get out that Great Falls is anti-business, and they'll punish us by not opening any more stores or creating jobs, here."
That was the message in some of the testimony at a public hearing before the City Planning Advisory Board last Tuesday on the matter of opening another Wal-Mart Superstore on the opposite end of town.
Besides the 3 or 4 actual Wal-Mart employees who were allowed to wear us down with a two-hour inane and irrelevant "Power Point" presentation on the proposed new store, Dan Huestis (who sold them the land) and three other people testified in favor of it. Everyone else who testified (15-20 people) were strongly against it. We also turned in 400-plus signatures on petitions against the proposed new Wal-Mart.
As a consequence, the Board voted not to grant Wal-Mart a conditional use permit to begin construction. We anticipate several more rounds of legal and PR sparring before they finally decide that Great Falls isn't worth the trouble of putting another store here. 
Malmstrom AFB may prove to be the deciding factor, since development around the new store would impinge on the flight path of the main runway -- in case we ever get another flying mission, here. (The last one, a KC-135 refueling mission, was moved to Homestead AFB, Florida, after which Hurricane Andrew hit, and that base was closed. In effect, they "took a bullet" for Malmstrom).
In the meantime, we might be able to convince a majority of the business community, civic leaders, labor people, and others that not having Wal-Marts here will improve the business climate, increase the number of jobs, as well as the overall prosperity of our local community. Hopefully, we can get some people to invest in a locally owned co-op department store or mall, since rents in those which are owned out of state have become prohibitive. If local business people could reclaim even 50% of the local retail sector, it would do more for our local economy than any number of military bases and coal-fired generating plants.
Most people implicitly know that stores like Wal-Mart aren't good for us. Wal-Mart is headquartered in Arkansas. It sells mostly cheap Chinese imports. It may be marginally cheaper than other large stores, but we know it doesn't allow its workers to organize unions, and that it pays lower wages and benefits than its competitors. And it sucks something like 85% of every dollar spent, there, out of the local economy, never to be seen, again.
The negative economic impacts of Wal-Mart are so bad that the first thing its representatives do when attempting to open a new store is to convince local planning boards that they shouldn't consider the results of any sort of economic cost-benefit analysis. That's what Wal-Mart did here, and that's the main reason that the advisory board was persuaded to refuse them a permit. If they're trying to hide or suppress that information, it must be very negative, indeed.
The City of Bozeman actually commissioned a study which found that it would cost that community $36 million per year in lost jobs and sales for other businesses to put in a Wal-Mart superstore. Wal-Mart fought it, and eventually prevailed and built its Superstore. (We can well imagine some intellectual skullduggery on the part of Bozeman's "free market community" which has no interest in the viability of the local retail sector, and little sympathy for the rights of labor, either).
But Bozeman is growing rapidly and already much more affluent than Great Falls, so Wal-Mart's negative impact would be somewhat less noticeable to the professional class which dominates, there. These elites, who may or may not shop at Wal-Mart (but can often be found sneaking furtively about Sam's Club) often seem to be in favor of a low-wage economy for others, since they benefit from having to pay lower wages to their own employees. That is certainly the case in Great Falls, plus we have a considerable population brainwashed to think that if we had higher wages, we'd have to have higher prices for everything else, and that people would be less eligible for benefits like Medicaid and Food Stamps! I've actually heard this argument several times from people who were paid far less in their responsible jobs than they should have been, but instead of protesting, they had been persuaded to defend the system as it is in order to keep their jobs!
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In any case, we got a very interesting live demonstration of how Wal-Mart operates, and what sort of corporate (non-)citizen it is. It panders to the lowest common denominator of intelligence and taste, relies heavily on fraud and advertised "image" of a wholesome, all-American place, while acting to diminish and destroy virtually every American value and principle we can think of -- especially freedom of speech and association, local community self-determination, and the intrinsic dignity of productive work.

The simplest way to explain Wal-mart is to identify it with Chinese communism and American plantation slavery. If those are your kinds of economic and social institutions, then you should be very much in favor of Wal-Mart, and shop there often. Hopefully, we've already experienced "peak Wal-Mart", and we shall be witnessing its decline and dissolution, henceforth. At least we've established the principle that municipalities can take or leave any offers or applications from corporate takeovers of our local economy, and apply whatever taxes or restrictions we decide are in our own best interest. Our municipality is a corporation, too, and just as free as Wal-Mart to take its business elsewhere. If we don't want them, all we have to do is say, "No!" We don't even have to give a reason.
I polled the four city staff planners and eight Citizen's Advisory Board members at the hearing, to determine how many of them had seen the film, "Wal-Mart, the high cost of low prices." Not one of them had. Yet, the Advisory Board voted it down, mostly (if not entirely) on the basis of our testimony and the petitions we collected. News coverage, particularly TV, was ample but dismal in its content. Apparently, the reporters hadn't seen the film, or done any research on the issue, either.
It is vitally important in these grass-roots efforts to arrange for media coverage early. Jo Black, the Tribune business reporter, gave the movie some very good coverage early on, and no doubt contributed greatly to the large audiences for the film. However, the corporate vise seems to have been applied to her reporting of the hearing, since the strength and variety of the testimony against Wal-Mart was not accurately reflected in the stories. KRTV news actually said that the audience was more or less balanced between opponents and proponents, when in fact it was about 9-1 against Wal-Mart.
We've already got some very good alternative strategies working in Montana. Jeff Milchen of Bozeman-based ReclaimDemocracy.org http://reclaimdemocracy.org/ , and the American Independent Business Alliance <http://amiba.net> wrote the following:
"Those who have broader concerns about the concentration of power in the hands of giant corporations should consider where else our dollars could be going. As I argued in an article <http://tompaine.com/Archive/others/beyond_buying_blue.php> for TomPaine.com one year ago, "dispersing economic power among millions of small, independent businesses is one key to restraining corporate power and sustaining democracy."
Working toward that end, some 200 communities, organizations and businesses are participating this Saturday in "America Unchained," a campaign created by the American Independent Business Alliance (disclosure: I'm a co-founder). Unchained and the growing network of Independent Business Alliances seek to go beyond damage control to persuade people to keep their dollars recirculating in their local economy rather than sending them to distant corporate headquarters.
In my home of Montana, citizens of Plentywood, Malta and Glendive all recently decided they had no need to lure a big-box store or drive out of town to shop. Instead, they re-tooled the corporate model of pooling investments in order to build community-owned and operated department stores. These are true anti-Wal-Marts in many ways, promoting democracy, community stability and cohesiveness. All of the profit goes to the locals who invested in themselves and their neighbors."
Read more>> <http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051115/beyond_walmart.php>
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What can be done beyond a defensive battle to stop a big box store from opening in our community? here are a few examples.
* Ban or limit <http://www.newrules.org/retail/formula.html> the number of chains in your community.
* Ban subsidies <http://www.newrules.org/retail/news_slug.php?slugid=324> to big box stores.
* Limit the size <http://www.newrules.org/retail/size.html>and/or location <http://www.newrules.org/retail/neighbor.html> of retail development to ensure new stores benefit your community.
* Create an Independent Business Alliance <http://amiba.net> to help community-based business thrive.
* Explore worker-owned <http://clcr.org/index.php> businesses, co-ops <http://www.wisc.edu/coops/>, and community-owned department stores (contact us for more on this topic) as an alternative to absentee-owned chains.
* Deny claims to "corporate personhood " that allow corporations to challenge citizens' authority.
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/