Corporations: The Great Conspiracy

In a tense and packed Philadelphia courtroom last week, a drama took place that U.S. business will long remember—to its shame. The cases before him, said Federal District Judge J. Cullen Ganey, were "a shocking indictment of a vast section of our economy." They were more than that. They showed clearly that the executives of a mighty industry, publicly devoted to the concept of competition, had privately conspired to rig prices to the detriment of their customers on a scale so vast that it embraced everything from the Tennessee Valley Authority to the private utilities that supply the nation's light...