The company argued that the Master Settlement Agreement between tobacco companies and states is more expensive for new entrants to the industry.

这家公司争论说，对于新进入烟草业的公司来说，烟草公司和各州之间的大和解协议更加昂贵。

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The Master Settlement Agreement was a product of work by state attorneys general, who represented their states in the negotiation, the judge ruled.

该法庭裁决到，大和解是州首席检察官工作的一个产物，他们在谈判中代表他们的州。

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The organization is battling persistent, if thus far unsuccessful, legal attacks on the Master Settlement Agreement by smaller tobacco companies, who say it is an anticompetitive scheme that allowed the big manufacturers to raise prices indiscriminately.

FORBES: The House Tobacco Built

The Master Settlement Agreement is a masterpiece of lawyerly tinkering with market economics, giving tobacco giants like Philip Morris protection from competition by requiring smaller companies to maintain their market share or face oppressive increases in their payments to the states.

FORBES: Will The Compact Clause Trump The Tobacco Settlement?

But that was long before Hanes began moving much of its production offshore, and before the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (under which the tobacco companies agreed in 1998 to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in damages for harming people's health), the leveraged buy-out of RJR by a private-equity firm, the elimination of federal farm price support for tobacco and decades of anti-smoking advertising.

ECONOMIST: North Carolina builds on the legacy of the golden leaf