In plain English, if I offer wages that are higher than other employers, my wages are very competitive.  Same for working conditions.  This can be interpreted as one wants to interpret it.

The deal requires certain things by 3/31/09 and 12/31/09.

It's Bush's deal.  He created the requirements with nothing more than his authority as President.

By 3/31/09, Barack Obama will have been President for ten weeks.  Anything Bush did that depended only on his authority as President can be undone or modified by Obama once he is President.

So even if the deal required the automakers to construct and launch a rocket to Jupiter by 3/31/09, and even if it required that every UAW member to be aboard that rocket when it launched, it wouldn't matter.

Those requirements only have meaning if Obama wants to keep them.  And there's no reason to expect that he will.

It's hard to get past the fact that the Bush Administration was happy to give far, far more than this to the financial industry with no attempt whatsoever to renegotiate anyone's wages - even though compensation is 60% of the financial industry's costs, compared to a mere 10% in the auto industry.

Even Bill Kristol, who has as little of value to say as any pundit in existence, put his finger on the problem this week.

Today, G.M., Ford and Chrysler get no respect. Maybe they don't deserve much. Detroit has many sins to answer for, and it's been doing plenty of answering. But -- and I say this as someone who grew up in non-car-driving family in New York and who is the furthest thing from an auto aficionado -- there is a kind of undeserved disdain, even casual contempt, that seems to characterize the attitude of the political and media elites toward the American auto industry.

As Warren Brown, who writes about cars for The Washington Post, recently put it, "There is a feeling in this country -- apparent in the often condescending, dismissive way Detroit's automobile companies have been treated on Capitol Hill -- that people who work with their hands and the companies that employ them are inferior to those who work with their minds and plow profit from information. How else to explain the clearly disparate treatment given to companies such as Citigroup and General Motors?"

Now there are other ways to explain the disparate treatment of G.M. and Citigroup. Finance is different from manufacturing, and banks from auto companies. It may be that the case for a huge bank bailout was strong, and that the case for a more modest auto package is not. Still, it seems to me true that the financial big shots haven't been treated nearly as roughly in Congress or in the media as the auto executives, who have done nothing remotely as irresponsible as their Wall Street counterparts.

I don't get the leap from "competitive" wages and work rules to "significantly less than".  Can you explain that leap to me?

The auto companies chose not to fund most of the costrs of pensions and retiree health benefits.  The costs would come from future revenues as require.  Well, nearly all of the difference between Toyota's costs and Detroit's are those pensions and health care benefits.  So to match the overall costs, Detroit would have to either reduce current pay to well below Toyoya rates (and Toyota is working on cutting their costs in half) or drastically take it to retirees.

Bush's Presidential pension is $191,300 plus goodies like staff and office space.  I am sure he did a lot worse job than most of the retired auto workers and he clearly spent less time at the job than they did.  The US government has a huge Bush deficit and no plan to get out of it.  Ever.  That's another precondition where he failed.  Why don't we, say, knock a $100,000 a year from W's pension and use that to reduce taxes?