"Bo" Pilgrim visits Brownwood. Follow the Money !

Thursday September 14, 2006
News

Audience leaves a little richer, in several ways

By Candace Cooksey Fulton — Brownwood Bulletin

Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim, left, chairman of the board and co-founder of Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., accepts the Gen. Douglas MacArthur Freedom Medal, presented by Howard Payne University President, Dr. Lanny Hall. Photo by Candace Cooksey Fulton

Take the advice straight from the Bible and take the money. Either way, those who accepted Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim’s gift of “Good News for Modern Man” left lunch Wednesday a little richer.

Pilgrim, the co-founder and majority owner of Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., had a folded $20 bill inserted between the last page and the cover of each booklet.

Pilgrim told those attending the Othal Brand Chair of Free Enterprise and Public Policy luncheon at Howard Payne University he has a formula for life — a pecking order he never varies from or changes.

“I saw on TV the other night where you could work with people and in 60 days, you could plan your life,” Pilgrim said.

“I can give you a plan in 60 seconds. It’s the plan we use at our company — God, first; family, second; company, third; and sales, fourth. That’s it. It’s that easy and it’s what works.”

Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. is a Fortune 500 company with 40,000 employees and annual sales of more than $5 billion. The company, which Pilgrim and his older brother Aubrey began as a sideline to their feed store in Pittsburg, Texas, 60 years ago, hatches 6 million chicks a night and ships out 30 million processed and packaged chickens each week.

In 1946 the brothers gave 100 chicks away with each bag of feed they sold. The farmers who took the chicks would raise them to chickens and bring them back to the feed store to sell. From that, the company grew to become the second largest chicken company in the United States and Mexico.

In his brief speech on Wednesday, Bo Pilgrim told of the hardships he and his brother endured after their father died, and of going to live with their grandmother in a home that had no electricity, plumbing or any other conceivable modern comforts.

But, Pilgrim said, “as we’ve gone down through the years, the thing I’ve never forgotten — that I pledged to Jesus Christ — is to be faithful to him.”

He carries in his billfold a card, written in his own handwriting to remind him of life’s real gain, he said. “I’ve written, ‘if you own the whole world, it doesn’t belong to you.’ A billion dollars net worth and not even one cent belongs to me,” Pilgrim said.

“I came here today to talk to people and to college students because I have a concern that our universities are teaching students how to make a living but not how to live.”

Pilgrim spoke at the Howard Payne chapel Wednesday morning, and then at the luncheon, held in the Bullion Suites at the Mabee University Center. At both engagements, he passed out the booklets with the $20 bills folded inside. One student estimated from the chapel and luncheon attendance combined, it totaled a $6,000 gift. Pilgrim was presented the Gen. Douglas MacArthur Freedom Medal at the luncheon’s conclusion by Dr. Lanny Hall, president of HPU.

The Othal Brand Chair of Free Enterprise and Public Policy was founded in 1983 and endowed by Othal E. Brand, J.R. Beadel, Carlton Beal, Fred L. Flynn and the Hillcrest Foundation in memory of W.W. Caruth Sr. The Brand Chair operates within Howard Payne University’s Douglas MacArthur Academy of Freedom, which serves as the university’s multidisciplinary honors program. Dedicated to studying critical issues that affect the economy, society, the nation and the world, the Brand Chair sponsors lectureships, conferences, and the publication of an annual journal.

source: http://www.brownwoodbulletin.com/articles/2006/09/14/news/news01.txt
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The Money Changers
By moiv Wed May 24, 2006 at 12:08:38 AM EST
topic: Analysis of Christian Right section:Front Page email story print

Last week, Mainstream Baptist wondered What's the Matter with Texas? and referenced the Texas Freedom Network's incisive new report: "The Anatomy of Power: Texas and the Religious Right in 2006."
No one should be surprised to hear that there's a whole lot the matter with Texas, or that -- as is the case even in religion-driven politics - the root of our state's particular evil can be traced to the love of money. Here in Texas, rich men who hand money out by the bucketload are using their wealth to buy a state government that looks like their vision of the promised land.

The TFN report devotes an entire section to "God's Sugar Daddy," Dr. James Leininger.

The San Antonio physician made a fortune selling specialty hospital beds. His business empire has included a variety of other companies, including Promised Land Dairy (which places a Bible verse on each milk container), the direct mail company Focus Direct and the political consulting firm of Winning Strategies. Yet among Dr. Leininger's most significant investments have been in the careers of politicians who back his public policy agenda, including tort reform, private school vouchers, pushing religious conservative principles in public schools, and opposition to abortion and gay rights.
Leininger holds a seat on the Board of Trustees of Patrick Henry College, where "[e]ach Trustee, officer, faculty member and student of the College, as well as such other employees and agents of the College as may be specified by resolution of the Board of Trustees, shall fully and enthusiastically subscribe to the following Statement of Faith."

A. There is one God, eternally existent in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

B. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in truth.

C. Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, is God come in the flesh.

D. The Bible in its entirety (all 66 books of the Old and New Testaments) is the inspired word of God, inerrant in its original autographs, and the only infallible and sufficient authority for faith and Christian living.

E. Man is by nature sinful and is inherently in need of salvation, which is exclusively found by faith alone in Jesus Christ and His shed blood.

F. Christ's death provides substitutionary atonement for our sins.

G. Personal salvation comes to mankind by grace through faith.

H. Jesus Christ literally rose bodily from the dead.

I. Jesus Christ literally will come to earth again in the Second Advent.

J. Satan exists as a personal, malevolent being who acts as tempter and accuser, for whom Hell, the place of eternal punishment, was prepared, where all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity.

When Leininger makes that statement of faith, he puts his money where his mouth is, even though he grew up in a church that warns its faithful: "We condemn those who ... aiming to govern the State by the Word of God, seek to turn the State into a Church." But maybe that's why he's not a Lutheran anymore.

Leininger is best known for financing efforts to defund public schools with private school vouchers and push through so-called "tort reform" measures to protect corporations such as his from legal damages, but as far back as 1999, Leininger already had written checks for $2.1 million to anti-choice, anti-gay rights and conservative "family values" non-profits and PACS such as the American Family Association, the Christian Pro-Life Foundation, the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, the Heidi Group, the Institute in Basic Life Principles, and the Republican National Coalition for Life PAC.

State Rep.Frank Corte, a perennial proponent of religious school vouchers and Leininger's longtime lap dog, also shares Leininger's overweening interest in controlling women's bodies. Corte was the author of Texas HB15, a draconian 2003 antiabortion law that has drastically decreased women's access to abortion care in Texas.

And why do even moderate Republicans vote "yes" on bills like these, creating a web of statutes by now so confused that a doctor in Texas can be subject to the death penalty for providing an abortion to a minor without written parental consent? Peggy Romberg of the Women's Health and Family Planning Association was present when many lawmakers walked out of the legislative chamber, refusing to vote on yet another anti-choice bill: "I even had Republicans say to me, `I'd love to walk this one, but they'd kill me,'" she said. "Everyone knows what this is really about. They're just afraid to say it publicly."

If you serve in an elected office in Texas, you don't want to get in Jim Leininger's way.

For the 1994 school board elections, at the behest of the state Republican Party, [Leininger's friend, Bob] Offutt went out to recruit fellow travelers. He found three. One was Donna Ballard, a Pentecostal minister's wife from the Houston suburbs. Through personal funds and PAC contributions ... Leininger donated some $45,000 -- an enormous amount of money as school board campaigns go -- to Ballard and the two other Christian-right candidates. And Focus Direct, a Leininger company in San Antonio that does slick, direct mail work for companies and politicians, produced and mass-mailed a leaflet featuring a photo of a black man and a white man kissing and accusing Ballard's opponent Mary Knott Perkins of wanting to teach Texas children about oral and anal sex. Perkins, a grandmother many times over who is by no means a political radical, lost the election to Ballard. The other two Christian conservatives also won. The victories gave the elected state school board its first-ever Republican majority.
If Leininger spends $45,000 on a school board election, how much will he spend to buy the results he wants in other races? Via the Texas Ethics Commission, the Texas Freedom Network report provides some sobering numbers.

From 1997 to March 2006, the Leiningers contributed or loaned nearly $10 million to candidates for state offices and to political action committees active at the state level. During the same period, the Leiningers contributed more than $1 million to campaigns and political committees at the federal level and in other states. Those vast sums of money went almost exclusively to Republicans and far-right political committees. Indeed, Dr. Leininger has been called the "sugar daddy of the religious right" in Texas, and the name clearly fits.
If Leininger is the religious right's sugar daddy, he has some help paying child support. Lonnie "Bo" Pilgrim is best known as the founder of Pilgrim's Pride, and is recognized on sight by many Americans from his folksy appearances on billboards and television, dressed in a pilgrim's hat and often with a pet chicken under his arm. And that's one lucky chicken, because Pilgrim's Pride facilities in Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Puerto Rico and Mexico process about 30 million of her sisters every week, for a record $5.7 billion in net sales for fiscal year 2005.

Pilgrim is convinced he is on a mission from God.

That mission includes chickens. Lots and lots of chickens. Asked about that mission, Pilgrim cites the first book of Genesis, the section about God creating the fowl of the air. "He created these things to sustain man. I'm in a business that I'm proud to be part of the environment that the Lord created to support man.
"I think the Lord is using Pilgrim's Pride as an example of a Christian businessman," he said. "I believe that from the bottom of my heart. I know the Lord does that with me. He has tried me with fire and he has blessed me."

Bo Pilgrim and his family members have bestowed tens of thousands in blessings upon hard right Republicans in every election cycle -- in addition to another $450,000 for the national Republican committee in 2002 alone -- and that ain't chickenfeed, either.

Aside from his long history as a polluter of the environment second to none - in 1995 Pilgrim's Pride paid $325,000 in fines for illegal wastewater discharges, and in 2002 caused a deadly listeria outbreak that killed eight people and led to the largest meat recall in American history -- Pilgrim immortalized himself in Texas political folklore for what I like to think of as the Great Chicken Feeding of 1989.


Raising chickens made Bo Pilgrim famous. Handing out $10,000 checks inside the Texas Capitol made him notorious. In 1989, during consideration of a bill to reform the state's workers compensation laws, Pilgrim walked onto the floor of the Senate, where a committee meeting was concluding, and handed out $10,000 checks to key legislators involved in the workers comp debate. Several legislators took the checks. When the story was reported in the news media, senators returned the checks to Pilgrim. (One senator didn't exactly return the check. He had already cashed it, so he had to write a new check to Pilgrim.)
In addition to furthering his vision of a "Christian" society, his continuing political largesse to those who have no trouble voting Bo Pilgrim's conscience instead of their own has enabled Pilgrim to continue his blatant defiance of federal law as a major employer of undocumented workers. From my vantage point inside a clinic that provides abortion care, I didn't need a watchdog site to inform me of Pilgrim's hiring practices, because his company employs undocumented Spanish-speaking women in such huge numbers that our clinic has seen many of them over the years, both from Dallas and from Pilgrim's Pride headquarters in Pittsburg, Texas. They receive low pay, of course, with no health insurance and little access to family planning services.

When women working in such conditions experience unplanned pregnancies, they often feel compelled to seek abortions as a matter of economic survival. Despite the fervid insistence by the religious right that the public accept the dubious concept of "Post-Abortion Syndrome" as an article of faith, the biggest worry on these women's minds is that our doctors advise them not to spend prolonged hours on their feet for the next several days. Even though we provide Pilgrim's employees with documentation of their qualification for temporary disability under the Family Medical Leave Act, they fear that they'll lose their jobs unless they return immediately to spending ten hours a day on the processing line, elbow deep in chicken innards.

But the millions pumped into Texas politics by Leininger and Pilgrim pale in comparison to the ungodly amounts of money proceeding from the seemingly bottomless pockets of homebuilder Bob Perry, whose political activities at the national level were revealed in 2004 by his financing of the shady Swift Boat Veterans for Truth assault on John Kerry.

source: http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/5/24/0838/50640
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