Much the same thing has happened throughout America, not just the old rust belt. Here in the deep South, the same mill owners and their ilk that abandoned Fall River a century agao moved down here and started textile mills that have since closed……textile manufacturing is now done in lower labor cost locations worldwide (i.e. India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc).
Those who control the means of production (in this case, mill owners) are always on the move, looking for greater profits and lower costs to exploit, without regard for other considerations. Predatory capitalism at its finest. Thus it can be said that class warfare is alive and well, since such decisions have little to do with unionization or their supposed ‘control’ over labor costs, for at the end of the day, one cannot reasonably expect to pay an American the same as wages as the average Pakistani due to the higher cost of living found in the US.
Robbing from the poor and selling to the rich continues to be the driving force behind such vaunted “entrepreneurialism”.

Is there really that much of a marketable coolness factor for a center-automatic shifter in vehicles that really don’t need that?

To quote Hyundai… duh.

Regarding column shifters, given that the trend in modern automatics is towards paddle shifters, could we see a change in the PRNDL selector? Jaguar’s trying something interesting with the XF, and it looks a lot more usable than BMW’s Martian reproductive apparatus.

The issue of social equality, however flawed, is perhaps the greatest principle put into law by the founding fathers. The idea that each citizen is entitled to an equal say under the law is one which worked wonders for generations of immigrants and helped turn the U.S. into a great meritocracy.

Socialism, on the other hand (at least as practiced in the West), recognizes that social equality is incredibly fragile; even though the “haves” in Germany, France and many other “socialist” countries do indeed live well, the system seems to set some appropriate limits and encourage social responsibility. Unbridled markets just seem to harvest unbridled greed, and we have seen two generations of thugs who have consolidated economic and political power and now appear in control of the three branches of government.

There is something dreadfully wrong when “entrepreneurs” like Carl Icahn can take control of vital operations and then strip them of wealth which has taken decades to gather. In the case of the auto industry (Chryslerberus perhaps excepted), it has not been so much deliberate as simply a build-up of corporate plaque in the form of overpaid do-little managers “led” by greedy thugs whose sense of social responsibility ends at their own stock portfolio.

What we have seen happen to GM, Ford and Chrysler is the result of decades of poor management, each group simply leaving the festering sores to the next guy and getting out while the getting is good. All the while insisting that recovery and real leadership are “just around the corner.”

The crime perpetrated by the thieves at Enron was merely an acceleration of what has been going on in corporate boardrooms for a long time. Sadly, people seem to keep buying into the lies and too few leaders come forward who have the interest of the public in mind.

Meanwhile, the thugs set up meaningless arguments among the very folks they are stealing from so that no one really watches while their pockets, their retirement and the financial future of their children is stolen.