I can't remeber if I ever used Mike Lupica on this page before. Usually he does mostly sports stuff, with a dash of politics here and there. That being said, I ran across this doing show prep today and felt a need to share, which is what stolen content is all about after all.

GM CEO Rick Wagoner gets a bitter taste of the real world - President Obama's world

Monday, March 30th 2009, 4:00 AM

This is the way things work in the real world, the one where real people live and work, where they don't fly in on private jets to ask the government to bail them out after they have lost billions.

They don't get bonuses for being failures. They lose their jobs. They hit the bricks like the people whose jobs they eliminated with bad management and years of bad decisions.

You know what happened to Rick Wagoner of GM on Sunday? He became one of the guys on the line. Wagoner doesn't get to be the boss anymore because the President of the United States acted like one and fired him.

This happens all the time in sports, to coaches and managers, and it happens to executives at movie studios who back films that lose millions. It happens to network executives whose shows don't pull ratings. Sunday it happened to Wagoner.

And if the President really did it the way it's being reported he did, if his "restructuring" of GM and the auto industry meant restructuring Wagoner right out the door, good for the President. This wouldn't just be him talking tough about the auto industry or Wall Street or even Afghanistan. This would be doing something tough. There are so many workers in this country, up and down the pay scale, who wonder why the government can't restructure things so they can stay in business. Wondering where their bailout money is.

They aren't banks or bankers or AIG, the pig operation of them all. There are all the ones who own businesses that aren't GM and, when they can't pay the bills anymore, they close their doors. They become another boarded-up window in a country of them. They are out of luck and out of business.

Wagoner may have made his and may make a lot more walking out the door. He still gets to feel what it is like to lose a job in this America. His company has lost $82 billion the last four years. Lost nearly $31 billion last year. It finally took the government, the one that gave GM $13.4 billion in loans and then saw GM come back for $16.6 billion more, to call him on that.

As amazing as the losses is the fact that Wagoner lasted as long as he did. Guys like Wagoner always want to act as if they're victims. Like the bank guys want you to believe they all got hit by lightning at once.

It doesn't work that way. The wisdom on that comes from the great football coach Bill Parcells: You are what your record says you are. Wagoner's record is epic losses at General Motors. He goes.

On Monday, Obama is scheduled to tell the country his continuing rescue plans for the automobile industry. The rescue operation does not include a spot for Wagoner on the life raft.

On CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday, Obama said he talked about GM and Chrysler and all the rest of it, finally saying that he was looking for "sacrifices from all parties involved - management, labor, shareholders, creditors, suppliers, dealers."

Rick Wagoner went first. The first concession wasn't somebody on the line. It was the chairman and chief executive. The one who said that he had to spend another $20,000 flying GM's Gulfstream IV to testify in Congress because he was a busy guy trying to fix things at his company.

A couple of weeks ago, Wagoner was quoted as saying "99%" of his company's problems could be fixed. He also was quoted as saying bankruptcy might work for GM, but then again might not. He also said at the time that he'd been given no indication that he was on the verge of losing his job. So the guy was on top of things to the end.

GM will get more short-term government assistance. It will be propped up the way the banks have been propped up and AIG has been propped up. Chrysler will get more help, too.

But General Motors is the biggest car company in America. Wagoner has been on the job for eight years, a lifetime, and one during which GM was way too slow to start making smaller, more reasonably priced cars.

It would have been like staying with black-and-white televisions when color TV came around. And Wagoner was as loud as anybody in Detroit about the government saving him. The opposite finally happened Sunday. The only bonus he should get is carfare home.