Last week, Nippon Steel Corp. of Japan formally completed a takeover of U.S. Steel (USS), the venerable but diminished American industrial giant created by J.P. Morgan in 1901. The Japanese company originally placed its bid for USS in late 2023, but it ran into immediate trouble with the Biden administration. U.S. Steel, once widely regarded as an overmighty pollution-spewing relic of Gilded Age cartelization, had magically evolved to become a vulnerable “national champion” of morally superior things-making industries; and the company still has a powerful unionized workforce in U.S. rust-belt states that are electorally pivotal. Pennsylvania-born President Joe Biden wasn’t going to let a corporate brand virtually synonymous with the city of Pittsburgh be raffled off without a tussle.