What luck! I just read that one of the Home Depot founders says the corporation can turn a profit on areas with populations of as little as 50,000 by cannibalizing local businesses. There are maybe 50,000 people between Arch Cape and the Long Beach Peninsula on a sunny day, so our neighborhoods, which used to rely on local business people, are now being served up to the transnational corporations.

Welcome to the feeding frenzy in Clatsop County, formerly one of the last beautiful places on Earth.

Home Depot, in its 100,000 square foot-plus orange stores, can offer really cheap stuff for sale because it controls the manufacture of goods made by laborers working in factories around the world, brought to us by subsidized, still relatively cheap oil in big ships and carried on subsidized roads, and coming soon to the Clatsop Plains of Warrenton.

So there goes locally owned businesses and the local artisans who install tile and countertops. Astoria-area businesses will go down with the shiny Home Depot on Clatsop Plains, near the new National Park, and just down the road from the proposed liquefied natural gas refineries.

Other scrappy businesses in Gearhart, Seaside, and on the Long Beach Peninsula will be put out of their misery soon as well. Too bad all these pillars of our community will breathe no more so that the few of us who still have any work at all can buy more really cheap stuff to make us feel better about our increasingly empty, overfed, television-centered lives.

By 2002, there were nearly 1,500 Home Depots in the U.S., each opening causing a story of local businesses being destroyed, divorces being filed, lives being shattered. Home Depot will offer perhaps 150 jobs, and the LNG refinery suggests that 50 to 75 jobs might be available for us lucky ones with 12 years experience in an LNG factory, but that foundation of American democracy, independent local business, is methodically being snuffed out.

Too bad that we are finally selling our souls for a few jobs with the transnational corporations which have no interest in our communities or in our futures. Too bad we are dupes. Too bad.

Sue Skinner

Astoria