Word: icc
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Critics of the Interstate Commerce Commission have long argued that it manages to be captive and senile at the same time. Last year seven law students, directed by Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader, delved deep into the ICC's record and conducted more than 500 interviews, mail surveys and statistical analyses. Last week they issued a 1,200-page draft report, devastating in detail, which argues persuasively that the public good would best be served if the ICC were abolished altogether...
...essence of their report, hardly news to official Washington, is that the 83-year-old ICC does not exactly regulate the 17,000 railway, trucking, shipping and pipeline companies under its jurisdiction. Rather, it operates a cartel on their behalf. According to the report, the commission in effect presides over thousands of local transport monopolies, protecting inefficient carriers from competition at the expense of the public. It permits massive discrimination in rates, a practice that it was expressly set up to forbid. Where railways have no water-borne competition they have charged shippers five times as much, computed...
...business. In The Triumph of Conservatism, Kolko argues that most Government regulation was enacted at the behest of leading corporations, which wanted railroad legislation, meat inspection or fair-trade laws to save them from increasingly anarchic competition. They lost no time gaining control of regulatory commissions like the ICC that were intended to supervise their activities...
...Interstate Commerce Commission refused to allow the Louisville & Nashville to scrap the only remaining train between St. Louis and Atlanta. If patronage was poor, the ICC said, it was due "in no small measure to a marked deterioration in service." Neither food nor beverage vending machines, noted the indignant commission, were provided on the 609-mile...
...industry that lost $200 million on passenger service in 1968, horror stories of unconscionable service and rachitic equipment are a valuable asset. They help trains to become "un-derpatronized"-and therefore eligible for cancellation under ICC rules. There were 1,400 intercity passenger trains in 1958; now there are only 488. Every road in the U.S. is out to emulate the half a dozen carriers, from the Boston and Maine to the Frisco, that have succeeded in eliminating passenger business entirely. President Louis W. Menk of Northern Pacific might have been speaking for the industry in November when he told...