Word: antitrust
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...Gimbel's counters. A month ago, Thurman Wesley Arnold, hiring out his trust-busting talents to Reynolds, had filed suit in Wilmington's Federal Court for $1,000,000 (treble damages) against Eversharp Inc. and Eberhard Faber Corp. on a familiar Arnold charge: violation of the antitrust laws. The two defendants, Arnold claimed, had tried to "prevent mass distribution" of the Reynolds pen until they could 1) get rid of their own obsolete stocks, and 2) produce a ballbearing pen of their own on the basis of patent rights acquired from Laszlo Joszef Biro of Argentina (TIME...
There was small chance that the antitrust division would approve of this. But some decision has to be made soon. Until a policy is reached, plans for disposing of other war-born giants like Geneva Steel and the magnesium plants would also be stalled in their tracks...
Alcoa, already defendant in an antitrust suit (in which final decision was postponed until the problem of the DPC plants is settled), had a quick reply. It called the whole business a plan to subsidize operators of U.S.-owned aluminum plants. There is no reason, said Alcoa, why "Government-owned plants cannot be successfully operated if they are efficiently managed." But few outside of Alcoa shared Alcoa's optimism. Olin Industries has already shut down the DPC plant it operated, made no offer to buy. Reynolds Metals is dickering with the Surplus Property Board to lease some plants...
Many things went to make up the legend. Some were scandalous: the rail financing of the Credit Mobilier, the fiscal shenanigans of Rail Baron Jay Gould, the first great rail antitrust suit (when U.P. was forced to disgorge the railroads it had gobbled). But most of it was the stirring stuff of pioneering, typified by the track-laying gangs of wild Irishmen. They drove the rails of the U.P. west to meet the track-laying Chinese of the Central Pacific coming east, stood guzzling while the tracks were joined with a gold spike at Promontory Point, Utah...
Having played out this sorry and expensive farce in Newark, the federal antitrust attorneys now have the facts about plastics. Their probable next step will be to start a civil suit. A typical upshot would then be an amicable consent decree, with the defendants promising to discontinue certain pricing practices that appear unjustified...