PUBLIC POWER NEWS

...This, the resolution continued, was done at the time that REA was being denied copper with which to wire poles already placed...

...An allocation of 4,500 tons a month has been made to the REA, but they cannot get the copper...

...Utilities Getting All They Want According to official estimates, the REA has about 50,000 miles of poles and equipment set up waiting principally on the allocation of copper for wire...

...Clark also charged that OPM officials have been making it possible, through allocations, for the privately owned utilities to obtain three times as much as their normal requirements for maintenance and repair...

...Somebody else is getting it," Aiken charged...

...One high REA official stated that the investigation will determine what happened to 57,000 tons of copper which the October report of the OPM revealed to be in excess of defense requirements...

...John Rankin, Mississippi Democrat, carried the REA fight to the floor of the House when he read a resolution from the REA cooperatives in his state charging that private utilities there have enough wire to build spite-lines "to serve customers whose electric power needs could have been adequately and satisfactorily supplied from presently existing lines of REA cooperatives already in the localities...

...An ironical twist is given to the whole picture by the recent offer of two private utilities to give REA "some copper" if the government agency would "lay off building generating plants...

...He declared that OPM officials have failed to give any consideration to the contribution REA is making to the defense program...

...Using Germany as an example of a nation which has almost completely electrified its farms, Clark pointed out that such a program is vital to the defense of any nation...

...It is believed that the surplus went to private power companies despite Price Administrator Henderson's order to allocate 4,500 tons to REA for that month...

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...The Progressive has previously called attention to the active sabotage being carried on against the RE A by the corps of private utility men wielding priority power in the Heat, Light, and Power Section of the OPM...

...George Aiken, Vermont Republican, gave the demand for a Congressional investigation a warm second...

...Public Power News STEADILY RISING insistence on the part of Harry Slattery, administrator of the rural electrification program, and other individuals and groups interested in seeing power brought to rural America, has resulted finally in Congressional action to investigate the OPM conduct of priorities on such vital power materials as copper...

...Bennett Champ Clark, Missouri Democrat, charged in the Senate that "the privately owned utilities have received all the copper which has not been taken up by the defense classifications with the result than in my state, and, I am informed, in many other states, the REA cooperatives which have erected their #oles and made other installations and entered into contracts to deliver power now find themselves unable to secure any copper with which to make their wire...

...The whole copper-production picture, according to those who have been urging the probe, "smells to high heaven and is due for an airing...

...He pointed out that farmers have responded to the government's request for increased production-by purchasing new equipment which cannot be put into use because it requires electric power...

...Subsequent investigations by individual Congressmen and farm groups have resulted in disclosures of such shocking abuses that a sweeping inquiry into the whole priorities program has been initiated...

...Aiken Seconds Demand For Probe Rep...

...Reading off a list of private utility representatives in the Power Section of OPM that sounded like a convention roll call of the nation's big utility men, Rankin declared that Director Julius Krug requires private utility experience as a condition precedent to appointment in his section...