Word: kaisers
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...economy might have come a month earlier except for the anguished cries of Henry J. Kaiser (TIME, March 10) for a freight cut for his Fontana steel plant. This had held up the Geneva reduction. As ICC said that it would continue to study Western freight rates, Westerners guessed that Henry Kaiser might soon get his reduction...
Help for Henry. Big Steel's Ben Fairless' retort to the protests was: nonsense. The freight cut would, he said, be passed on directly to consumers. They would get the cheaper steel which the company had promised the West Coast when it bought Geneva. But Kaiser, thrown into a bad competitive position, was undoubtedly not interested in cheaper steel if it meant closing up Fontana. And it might mean just that when the current steel shortage is over...
Fontana's costs, largely because of the $105,000,000 it still owes RFC, are far higher than Geneva's. So Kaiser's most practical move was to ask the railroads which serve him to give him the same reduction as Geneva had gotten from its carriers. He wanted lower rates on all steelmaking materials brought to Fontana as well as on his outbound shipments...
Then Henry Kaiser asked the Interstate Commerce Commission to ban the cut for Geneva. Last week, he got the help of two potent allies. Attorney General Tom C. Clark filed suit to keep Big Steel's Columbia from buying Consolidated on grounds that it would give Steel a virtual monopoly on West Coast steelmaking and fabricating. The RFC, worried about its huge investment in Fontana, also asked the ICC to hold up the Geneva reduction...
...week's end, on the day before the reduction was to go into effect, the ICC agreed to hold up the rate changes while it investigates. It looked as if the West would not get cheaper steel from Big Steel unless Henry Kaiser got a freight reduction...