Byron Dorgan: “I am concerned when I hear, day after day and week after week, new proposals--friendly or hostile proposals--to merge…”

“I am concerned when I hear, day after day and week after week, new proposals--friendly or hostile proposals--to merge America's largest businesses into larger and larger enterprises. We have seen merger mania in this country before, a wave that came and went, but it now seems to be coming again. You only have to pick up a newspaper these days to see who is buying whom, some with leveraged buyouts, some in hostile takeover proposals, and others simply friendly mergers. But it is inevitably true in this country that when two corporations become one larger corporation, especially in multibillion-dollar deals, it impedes competition. You have less competition in this country as you have more concentration. Nobody seems to care very much about it. We have a thousand attorneys working in the Federal Government on antitrust issues. Under the leadership of Anne Bingaman down at Justice, they are more active now, and I salute them for that. We need to get more and more active to make sure that these mergers are in the public interest.”