"Help" for the Harried

Eighteen months ago the trust-busting division of the Department of Justice got its ears pinned back by crusty Federal Judge Ferdinand A. Geiger. When he found out that the Department was quietly discussing a consent decree with big finance companies and automobile manufacturers while a grand jury at Milwaukee was mailing an anti-trust investigation of motormakers' financing relationships, he denounced such shenanigans, summarily discharged the grand jury.

Since then the trust-busting division has been queasy of talking to industries it was prosecuting, fearful of laying itself open to the indignation of hard-boiled Federal Judges, and of public suspicion that it is using criminal inquiries as clubs to beat recalcitrant monopolists into a New Deal pattern. Last week, however, Harry Hopkins' Department of Commerce stepped into the advisory breach, announced a new Government service for harried antitrust case defendants.

Hereafter, when the Department of Justice looks prosecution-wise at any industry, its representatives can go to Washington, get the advice of such experts as Dr. Willard Long Thorp, top-flight Commerce Department economist, on the "economic aspects" of any consent decree to be proposed. The Department of Commerce explained that it wants to advise Business on steps which could not properly be discussed by the prosecuting Department of Justice. Since the right hand will know perfectly well what the left hand is doing, this will make it possible for the Government to prosecute and trade with Business at the same time. First clients for the new service: a group of California oil operators, a set of executives from the potash industry, both now under investigation.

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