Trust-Busting Tobacco

摘要

If AOL can buy Time Warner to become one of the 10 biggest companies on the planet, how come Swedish Match, the maker of Red Man-brand chewing tobacco, can't buy National, the maker of my personal favorite, Beech-Nut? Most of you probably don't use this product and might not be aware that about the same time the FTC ruled to allow the AOL-Time Warner merger, it also announced that it had won an "important antitrust victory" when U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan ruled that the combination of Swedish Match and National, which are the number one and number three biggest chewing-tobacco companies, would be anticompetitive.