No Ford in my future

My first car was a 1949 Ford, bought in 1956 for $200. Had it been a Chevy, my firstborn could have arrived in the back seat, but my sleek, two-door coupe raced through the streets and arrived at the hospital in the nick of time.

My most recent automobile purchase was a Ford, a monstrous, gas-guzzling van, complete with a television and a touch-of-the-button back seat that becomes a comfortable bed. Despite my satisfaction with Ford vehicles, I’ll never buy another one – as long as Bill Ford is in the driver’s seat at the Ford Motor Company.

William (Bill) Clay Ford, Jr. was an impressionable teenager at a prestigious Grosse-Pointe prep school when the first Earth Day happened. He spent his weekends on the sidelines at his father’s Detroit Lions football games. As a school project, he helped “clean up the river,” by participating in a litter campaign. He is a perfect example of just how effective the green propaganda machine has been at shaping the Clinton-Gore-Ford generation.

In a speech to Greenpeace’s Business Conference in London (October 16, 2001), Bill said: “We’re at a crucial point in the world’s history. Our oceans and forests are suffering, species are disappearing and the climate is changing around the world.”

Pure propaganda – right out of the environmental extremists’ handbook.

Bill graduated from Princeton in 1979, and from MIT in 1984. Then he went to work for Ford. Had his last name not been Ford, he would not have been appointed to the Board of Directors in 1988, but it is, and he was. In January, 1999, Bill became chairman of the Board of Ford Motor Company, bringing with him his new-age philosophies based on Zen, Tibetan and Vipassana Buddhism and a green mind-set based on environmental propaganda.

“I began by initiating a process of stakeholder engagement,” Bill told his Greenpeace audience. What that means in work-a-day talk, is that he called in Greenpeace, Oxfam, Friends of the Earth and other towering giants in the world of industry, to find out how to convert Ford Motor Company into the Ford “Sustainability” Company.

He immediately withdrew Ford from the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group which almost single-handedly prevented the U.N. from imposing the Kyoto Protocol on the world. He has made Ford the first major corporation to bring all of its 140 facilities in 26 countries into full compliance with the U.N.’s ISO 14001 environmental management regulations. Ford is now requiring all its suppliers to meet the U.N. standards by the end of 2001. When you are a $154 billion per year gorilla, you can make the little monkeys do what you want.

Young Bill’s environmental bent, combined with the Ford Foundation’s environmental grant making, has enraged a large, and quite significant portion of Ford’s market. In response to Bill’s speech to Greenpeace, Howard Hutchinson, director of the Arizona-New Mexico Coalition of Counties, fired off a letter advising young Bill that his board of directors has issued a call to all member counties to:

… review their purchasing policies for all Ford products. We also call upon our respective state governments’ and agencies’ to review their purchasing policies in this regard. We also call upon all counties in the nation to examine Ford Motor Company’s contributions to our mutual destruction, and act accordingly.

Hutchinson also told Ford, “Your speech to Greenpeace demonstrates your total ignorance of local, national and global environmental issues.”

Jay Walley, of the New Mexico-based Paragon Foundation, has launched an all-out war against Ford’s philanthropy, urging his readers to call members of the board, and other officers, to protest the company’s giving practices.

Ford recently gave the Audubon Society five million dollars. Audubon and The Nature Conservancy, funded the infamous “Wildlands Project” promoted by Earth First! founder Dave Foreman, and Dr. Reed F. Noss. This plan seeks to convert “at least half” of the lower 48 states to “core wilderness areas” which are off-limits to humans, and surround those areas with “buffer zones” managed by government for “conservation” objectives.

This plan, consistent with the unratified Convention on Biological Diversity, became a high priority for the Clinton-Gore administration’s Ecosystem Management Policy. These policies have shut down logging, mining and ranching operations across the west, and continue to threaten the livelihood of farmers and rural people across the country.

Rural people are among Ford’s strongest and, heretofore, most loyal customers. Young Bill has completely ignored this customer base and, instead, turned to his Ivy-League, soccer-mom, SUV-driving environmentalist buddies for advice. He is betting that they outnumber and can outspend the working-class, pick-up-driving common folks. The jury is still out.

Bill is taking the Ford Motor Company off the well-paved American road and is charting a course into the global village – using a map drawn by utopian internationalists who use environmental hyperbole to whip up emotional responses to manufactured crises. America doesn’t need such nonsense, especially now. As for me, I don’t plan any more emergency runs to the maternity ward, so there will certainly be no Ford in my future.