competition and control sources of fuel within the energy industry of which they are a part. Reich cites the "breakneck pace" of "conglomeration" in which the major oil companies were involved in the 1970s and 1980s:
In 1977, American companies spent $22 billion acquiring one another. In 1979, they spent $43.5 billion. That year, sixteen firms, each worth more than $500 million, were gobbled up, including Belridge Oil ($3.65 billion, bought by Shell Oil); C.I.T Financial ($1.2 billion, by RCA); and Reliance Electric ($1.6 billion, by Exxon). All records were shattered in 1981, when $82 billion was spent on acquisitions. Du Pont paid a staggering $7.5 billion for Conoco; Fluor, $2.7 billion for St. Joe Minerals; and Gulf Oil, $325 million for Kemmerer Coal (Reich, 1983, p. 54).
A merger between Sun Oil and Sunray DX in the 1960s, for example, "meshed excess gasoline supplies and marketing outlets so as to facilitate a cut-off of some private branders" (Green, Moore & Wasserstein, 1972, p. 288). Such activity tends to violate "the vital role that potential competiti
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