In what is an increasingly common story it looks like various bailed out-industries still don’t get it. Despite being near-disaster financially and after obtaining billions of dollars in taxpayer money, they are still behaving like they own the world and we just live in it.

Reports first indicated bailed-out banks paid up to $ 1.6 billion dollars (that’s $ 1,600,000,000.00 for those of us who write out checks to pay our bills every month) to executives in the form of wages, bonuses, benefits and the like. They also have not given up the perks like private jets and luxury vacations.

Meanwhile the auto industry has grabbed up more than $ 20 billion in loans and gifts from both US and Canadian taxpayers without making any promises about reforms. If the industry is going to survive, they need to rework their entire attitude both in terms of worker benefits (we’ve all seen the reports of how the average US union auto worker costs far more than the average non-union worker) and in terms of production and distribution (the average US auto company today has 3-5 times the number of dealers as German or Japanese companies for example).

Obviously we need to balance things here. We can’t expect workers to build cars for free and, to be sure, much of the current cost rests with retired worker benefits versus current workers. But changes need to be made and nobody seems particularly eager to do so.