This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.
Tag: Bill Clinton
-
The Butt family, Texas grocery kings
Texas has Jerry Jones, Mark Cuban, Ross Perot, the Basses and the Hunts. And then there are the Butts.
Charles C. Butt, 70, chairman and CEO of H. E. Butt Grocery Company, runs one of the largest privately held companies in the U.S. It has been family owned and operated since 1905, when grandmother Florence opened the C.C. Butt Grocery Store in Kerrville, Texas, with a $60 investment.
More than 100 years later, that mom-and-pop store is now known as H-E-B, employs over 56,000 and has annual revenue of more than $12 billion. It has more than 300 stores in Texas and Mexico and is headquartered in San Antonio. (Story continues below interactive map.)
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.The family is on the Forbes 400 list, which estimates its wealth at $2.3 billion.
But the Butts are not merely small-town, big-time grocers.
H-E-B founder Howard Edward Butt who died in 1991 at age 91, was named by John F. Kennedy to the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and helped to establish the University of Corpus Christi. He took his mother’s modest investment and expanded it around south Texas and Mexico.
His namesake and oldest son, Howard Jr., 80, heeded longtime friend Billy Graham’s advice to become a full-time preacher but still retains the title of vice chairman of the company.
Howard Jr. once spoke at a prayer breakfast hosted by Dwight Eisenhower. He also organized the North American Congress of the Laity, whose honorary chairman was Gerald Ford. He has published numerous books, including one by Random House, Who Can You Trust?
He preaches, writes and serves as president of the H. E. Butt Foundation, established in 1933. It started out with the goal of eradicating tuberculosis in the Rio Grande Valley, but today mainly supports Laity Lodge Ministries, which offers non-denominational seminars, retreats and camping facilities in the Texas Hill Country.
The founder’s daughter, Eleanor Butt Crook, 74, is a former schoolteacher like grandmother Florence and mother Mary. She is a public education advocate, a world hunger activist and a director of the LBJ Museum in San Marcos.
She married William H. Crook, a friend of brother Howard from Baylor University. The late Mr. Crook was an ordained Baptist minister, an adviser to Lyndon B. Johnson and national director of Volunteers in Service to America. In 1968 he was named ambassador to Australia.
Eleanor’s daughter, Elizabeth Crook, is a novelist, whose first two books were published by Jackie Onassis for Doubleday. Longtime family friend Bill Moyers hosted a New York book party for Elizabeth and LBJ Press Secretary Liz Carpenter gave The Raven’s Bride its title and helped in its publicity.
Charles, Howard Sr.’s youngest son, is a modern art collector who in 2006 gave $1 million to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio. Under his leadership, H-E-B contributes five percent of its pre-tax earnings to charity, a practice the family started in the 1930s.
As part of its community investment program, H-E-B spends almost $500,000 a year for Excellence in Education Awards to recognize Texas public school professionals. H-E-B supports 21 food banks that serve 8,000 organizations in Texas and Mexico.
Charles, like his sister Eleanor, is an advocate of Texas public education and medical research for which both have been recognized. The Mexican government awarded Charles in 2001 the prestigious Aguila Azteca award, the highest honor given to a foreigner.
The family’s next generation of grocers include Stephen W. Butt, 53, senior vice president for the upscale Central Market and Howard E. Butt III, 56, senior vice president and general manager of the Mexico division.
In addition to the usual grocery items, most H-E-B stores carry flowers (with the ability to ship worldwide), have in-house pharmacies (some with clinics), photo processing, mobile phone services and business centers. Help is only a click away for online meal planning and shopping tips, health advice, and life, home, auto and pet insurance. H-E-B also offers online defensive driving courses.
“Here Everything’s Better” is the company motto.
The Wharton — and Harvard — trained Charles Butt, head since 1971, carries on his family’s tradition of innovation. H-E-B introduced air conditioned stores in balmy south Texas in the 1940s, a frozen food section and its own brands. Later it opened “supermarkets” that brought together a fish market, butcher shop, pharmacy and bakery.
In the 1920s Howard Sr. persuaded his mother to sell tobacco and in the 1970s Charles persuaded his father, a Baptist deacon, to sell beer and wine and to remain open on Sundays.
H-E-B has stood firm on its south Texas ground against national chains like Albertson’s and Kroger and is in step with the Wal-Marts, Targets and Costcos in the “hypermarket” concept — where everything under the sun is sold under one roof. H-E-B Plus is a one-stop shopping destination for groceries, health and beauty products, grills, charcoal, diapers, greeting cards, lawn and garden equipment, music and electronics.
Read related stories: Business · Religion
-
Clinton’s Mark Penn still favors micro over macro
It may be too early for the post-mortems on the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY.
But given her troubles of late, the pre-mortems are rolling in.
There’s enough blame to go around, but Mark Penn, Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, is taking a lot of the hits. (Story continues below interactive map.)
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.
“No matter how much bad stuff happened, (Clinton) kept to her Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn,” wrote Frank Rich in Sunday’s The New York Times.In a sense, though, who could blame her?
Penn, the CEO of a large and powerful public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, knows campaigns, people and voting trends.
Drawn to Bill Clinton’s team by Dick Morris, he helped fashion President Clinton’s 1996 re-election. Penn was also a leader in Hillary Clinton’s successful senatorial campaign in 2000.
And he guided Britain’s Tony Blair to his third re-election as prime minister, just as he put Israel’s Menachem Begin in the win column.
But the question remains, how did Penn lose his touch this time around, if, in fact, he did?
For one thing, analysts suggest, he read his own book, Microtrends: The Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes.
In Microtrends, Penn and co-author E. Kinney Zalesne divide the American public into emerging demographic categories. (Stay-at-home workers, etc.)
“There is no One America any more, or Two or Three or Eight,” Penn writes. “In fact, there are hundreds of Americas, hundreds of new niches made up of people drawn together by common interests.”
Politicians and corporations like this kind of analysis, as it gives them groups to target.
However, Obama and his advisers have placed far more emphasis on the macro over the micro. Their message of unity and change essentially argues that there could be one America.
Penn may say that the numbers don’t back this up. At least for now, many voters are saying something different.
Confident in his numbers, and willing to go on the attack, Penn has not been shy about appearing before the cameras. But his take-no-prisoners style may not have played well this time around.
He drew flak in December for what seemed to be a clumsy attempt to tag Obama with youthful cocaine use.
And Penn didn’t win any points recently for saying that Obama’s primary wins, with the exception of his victory in Illinois, weren’t in “significant” states. (Take that, Wisconsin and South Carolina.)
In addition, given the attention last week paid to Sen. John McCain’s connections to lobbyists, it’s not surprising that Penn has become example A of Clinton’s connections to lobbyists.
Penn is such a Washington insider, in fact, that he’s the nominal boss of Charles R. Black Jr., a key McCain adviser and spokesman.
Black is the chairman of BKSH & Associates, a lobbying firm that is a subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller, the company Penn heads.
Another of Penn’s companies, the polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, has been paid at least $4 million by the Clinton campaign and is owed millions more. Some have suggested that this means Penn wins even if his candidate loses.
Despite Clinton’s recent run of defeats, Penn continues to argue that she can emerge as the ultimate winner.
In a Feb. 13 memo, he predicted that the demographics in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, states that hold primaries on March 4, favor Clinton.
If Penn is right, and Clinton does well in those three, the media could then turn to blaming David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist. He’s a man who has been praised so far for being alert to macro-trends, the other side of the demographic coin.
Read related stories: Politics
0 Comments
-
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment
-
-
Federal Reserve’s Fisher still fears inflation
Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the Fed’s top anti-inflation hawk, cautioned again that the central bank must be wary of “stirring the embers of inflation.”
Speaking at the Petroleum Club in Fort Worth Friday, Fisher called the nation’s economic growth “anemic,” but said the economy is not in recession and he doubted there would be sustained negative growth.
“There is a lowering of expectations for growth,” he said, “but it is positive economic growth.” (Story continues below interactive map.)
MAP HINTS: Click expands a name. Control+Click centers map on a name. Solid lines are current relations. Dotted lines are former relations. For advanced tools choose Tools > Options from the menu at top. More help. Not seeing the maps? Please go here to check for the latest version of Java.Fisher, who spent many of his early years in Mexico and speaks fluent Spanish as well as English, has championed economic research since taking over the Dallas Fed in 2005.
His academic background is impressive: Two years at the U.S. Naval Academy, then Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, where he earned an MBA. He is also a former vice chairman of Kissinger McLarty Associates, a firm chaired by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Fisher was the only member of the Federal Open Market Committee to vote against the half-point interest rate reduction in late January. Lower rates can foster inflation.
Interesting note: The Star-Telegram in Fort Worth reported that Fisher said 31 percent of all the non-governmental jobs created in the United States in 2007 were created in Texas.
Read related stories: Business · Economy
0 Comments
-
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment
-
0 Comments
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment