General Motors, Ford crack top 10 of Fortune 500 list

Two American car companies landed in the top 10 of Fortune magazine's annual top 500 public corporations in the United States.

The list, released Monday, shows Detroit-based General Motors is the fifth biggest American company, bringing in more than $147 billion in revenue and topping $9 billion in profits.

GM was joined in the top 10 by Ford Motor Co., which is also based in Michigan. Ford had more than $136 billion in revenue and more than $20 billion in profits.

The federal government loaned $80 billion to General Motors and Chrysler in a series of controversial bailouts that began under former President George W. Bush and continued under President Obama. Ford was the only U.S. auto company that did not receive a bailout, which the company has touted in advertising.

Since the bailouts, the financial health of the U.S. car companies been a potent political issue, looming large in the nascent general-election race between President Obama and his presumptive Republican opponent, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Obama's reelection campaign has sought to turn the bailouts into a political advantage for the president, who has become closely associated with them.

Democrats have homed in on Romney's stance on the bailout, using a 2008 op-ed Romney wrote in The New York Times titled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," in which he said giving the auto companies financial assistance would be worse for them than allowing them to go bankrupt.
 
Romney has argued since that he was calling for a managed bankruptcy for the auto companies, and one of his advisers said recently that the bailouts were actually the former governor's idea.

For all the talk about car companies, however, the  2012 Fortune 500 list was topped by an oil company, Exxon Mobil, which brought in more than $452 billion in revenue and made $41 billion in profit. 

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