Word: auto
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Despite its wealth, Oakland is feeling pain from the economic downturn. The most recent round of auto-industry cuts has walloped white collar engineers and researchers who call Oakland County home. Take a drive through the hardest-hit neighborhoods, and you'll see blocks on which one-third or more of the houses have a FOR SALE sign planted in their front yard. The mix of layoffs and a depressed real estate market has forced some highly trained workers to take jobs in other states and leave their families behind in unsold homes...
...cars have been around for almost 170 years, but it's not just the limitations of battery power that have thwarted their more widespread use. Since Scottish businessman Robert Anderson pioneered the first electric carriage in the 1830s, most electric vehicles have lacked one of the key markers of auto success: good looks. Just take a look at La Jamais Contente, designed by Belgian Camille Jénatzy in 1899, or Billard and Zarpe's space-age oddity, the Elektra King (1961). Even today's models - the REVA, or Zap!'s Xebra - are proof that the best adjective to describe...
...Louisiana bordello; the title promises and delivers burlesque. But burlesque in the older sense of parody, travesty, impudent fun. There is humid sexuality at the start of the two-hour extravaganza (topless acrobat on a phallic pole, Madonna easing a whip past her crotch, dancers gyrating in auto-massage), but it soon gives way to simpler, sunnier images. For Rain, Madonna dons demure black; the look says, ''Listen to the sad ballad, the sweet harmonies.'' For Express Yourself, she's dolled up in royal blue bell-bottoms and a frizz wig, to pay homage to the gaudy innocence...
...years. To critics, however, these seemingly encouraging figures conceal a worrisome ''hollowing out'' of U.S. manufacturing companies. As they see it, many American firms, while contributing their share to the GNP, have become reassembly plants for foreign parts and products. Nowhere is hollowing out more controversial than in the auto industry. Today some 15% of the parts in U.S.-built cars, ranging from engines to transmissions, are made abroad, and a United Auto Workers' study projects that the percentage will rise to 28% by 1995. Robert Reich, a political economist at Harvard and author of The Next American Frontier...
...list of new cuts included the elimination of the dividend on common stock, all executive bonuses and, with the apparent approval of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, health-care coverage for salaried retirees over the age of 65. In addition, GM plans to launch a new wave of buyouts among its 32,000 salaried employees while freezing their salaries for the remainder of 2008 and 2009. The benefit cuts and early retirements are expected to reduce GM's salary costs by 20%, saving the company $1.5 billion by the end of 2009, GM executives said...