Ford

With net sales of more than $42.8 billion, the Ford Motor Company has a bigger turnover than dozens of nation-states, including Iraq, Egypt, Israel, Norway and South Africa.

Ford sells more than 6 million vehicles per year worldwide, and employs more than half a million people.

If Ford had spent $11 per car to stop Pintos from spilling gas in rear-end collisions, the lives of hundreds of burn victims each year would have been saved. But according to then-Chairman L* Iacocca, "Safety doesn't sell."

The three Ford brothers-Henry II, Benson, and William-share among themselves and their families more than $20 million a year in Ford dividends.

As a manufacturer of military materials-from ammunition components to electronic sensors for satellites-Ford receives over a quarter of a billion dollars worth of U.S. tax money each year.

In Germany, France, Belgium, and Holland, over 75 percent of Ford's production-line workers are migrant workers from southern Europe and Turkey-men and women "imported" to work long hours under constant threat of job-loss and deportation, without union representation.

In case you think it unfair of us to look critically at a U.S. auto builder when foreign cars are flooding the market, reflect on the fact that Ford's next small car, a "world car" projected for 1984 release, will have an engine designed by Toyo Kogyo Co. of Japan, which will be built in Mexico.

Huge corporations like Ford are shaping the future of all of us. What they do is our business.