Victory for the Packers

Among the antitrust suits left over by the Truman Administration was one filed in 1948 against the meat industry's big four--Armour, Swift, Wilson and Cudahy. Charging them with monopolistic practices dating back to 1893, the Justice Department wanted to break the companies up into 14 separate firms. But when a Federal District judge banned any evidence before 1930, the meat was gone from the meatpacker case, and the Democrats left it in a sort of legal limbo for the Republicans.

Last week Attorney General Herbert Brownell dismissed the six-year-old suit. After months of looking into every possible way to carry on, the Justice Department decided--with the full concurrence of lawyers and section chiefs held over from the Democratic Administration--that it lacked sufficient evidence. For one thing, the big four's share of the U.S. meat market has shrunk from one-half to less than one-third in the last ten years, while 800 independents have stepped to the fore. Furthermore, the department could find no independents willing to file a complaint against the big four and no consumers who thought they were being victimized. Said Brownell: "I [am] convinced that there is no possibility of obtaining dissolution of the defendants on the basis of evidence now at hand."

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The Federal Trade Commission last week dropped monopoly complaints against Joseph E. Seagram & Sons and Schenley Industries after they signed consent decrees. Under the agreements, subsidiaries of either of the companies are forbidden to band together to fix prices or otherwise restrain trade among themselves, even though it might be all in the family. The ruling means that price-fixing agreements by different branches of a corporation are legal only if those branches are set up as divisions, as in General Motors, not as separate corporate subsidiaries.

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