Word: antitrust
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Robert Paxton, former president of General Electric Co., swore before Senator Estes Kefauver's Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee last week that he had just not been aware of how much illegal price fixing had been going on all around him. How come? Replied Scots-born Robert Paxton, a most emphatic witness: "I was damn dumb...
General Electric's corporate defense in the great electrical conspiracy is that the top executives were totally unaware of the shenanigans; the conspiring was done by middle-rank underlings. But last week, as the Senate Antitrust and Monopoly subcommittee, headed by Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver, continued its probe into the conspiracy, former G.E. employees told a different story. The witnesses, who were fired after they were convicted of price fixing, swore that former G.E. President Robert Paxton encouraged the conspiracy and that Chairman Ralph Cordiner at least knew about it. From Paxton and Cordiner came out raged denials...
Word leaked out last week that a new game, donated to the inmates' recreation room at Montgomery County (Pa.) prison, had arrived simultaneously with the electric-company price riggers, who were convicted in February's antitrust case. The donor: James B. Carey, prickly president of the International Union of Electrical Workers. The game: Monopoly...
...didn't expect to get caught. I went to great lengths to conceal my activities so I wouldn't get caught." So, last week, explained a witness before the Senate Antitrust and Monopoly subcommittee as it opened hearings into the shenanigans that led to the conviction of 29 electrical-equipment companies on charges of illegal price fixing. Judging by the speaker-General Electric's L. B. Gezon, former marketing manager of the low-voltage department-and nine other lower-echelon executives, the real fear was not of wrongdoing but of being caught...
Walking a Tightrope. To some of the witnesses, it was brutally plain that if they wanted to get ahead in the company they had better go along with the clandestine price fixing; others figured that, even in the face of proclaimed company antitrust regulations, they were obliged to break them just to hold their jobs. Said Paul Hartig, former general manager of G.E.'s insulator department: "It was a way of life. It was part of the job." G.E.'s George R. Fink, former sales manager of the medium-voltage department, who was ordered by his superior...