THE VISIONARY OCTOPUS

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DONALD LOOK, president and chief executive officer of the American Electric Power Co. (AEP), has a vision, and it is not unlike the visions of the Guggenheims, Rockefellers and Carnegies before him. Mr. Cook proposes to transform the hundreds of electrical companies in the United States into a dozen or so giant regional monopolies.
Of course there will be victims in this march toward economic efficiency, as there were in the earlier campaigns to monopolize the copper, steel and petroleum industries. The obvious victims are the smaller electrical systems, many of them municipally owned; and as they disappear the accountability to which they are held will disappear with them. For the move to electrical monop¬oly promises to visit an the public the usual costs of concentrated corporate Power: stagnation in research and development, further undermining of a shaky regulatory apparatus, perpetuation of injustices in rate structures, in pollution control, minority employment and plant-siting policies.
Cook's vision is now being acted upon by the giant investor-owned electri¬cal Utilities across the nation: between 1955 and 1965 more than Zoo of the smaller private systems, along with 150 municipals, were gobbled up through mergers. The trend continues and tactics that have proven successful are continually polished: Southern California Edison trains a cadre of experts to take over municipals and makes contributions to sympathetic politicians; Pacific Gas & Electric Company uses political pull to frustrate the development of generating capacity by municipalities, and sites its plants to perpetuate the company's monopoly position; a group of investor-owned heavyweights in New England conspires to head off regional public Power development; the Duke Power Co. resists the construction of federally owned transmission lines that would bring energy to small wholesalers an other than the corporation's terms; the Florida Power Corporation hires a New York public relations firm to assist in takeover campaigns and grooms friendly candidates to run for local public office. The electric monopolists resist proposals for joint ventures, Power pools and other such cooperative endeavors that would bring the economes of scale to the smaller, more local systems without eliminating them. Total control is the preferred dogma.
Every electrical giant in the country could learn a few tricks from Donald Cook's own American Electric Power Company, a $z-billion-plus holding com¬pany owning virtually all of the common stock of several utilities serving parts of Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee. AEP has more generating capacity, sells more Power and creates more pollution than does any other privately owned utility in the country. Over the last several years, it has absorbed many electrical systems strangle the smaller systems, another reached for bigger game-the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC is a theoretical obstacle to Donald Cook's theories about electrical monopoly by reason of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, which requires commission approval of the acquisition of any utility by a registered company. Now pending before the commission is an AEP application to acquire Zoo per cent of the stock of Columbus & Southern Ohio Electric Co. (C&S), whose system in south-central Ohio adjoins the AEP system, is interconnected with it and is an obvious candidate for merger. This would be no small-town takeover, for C&S serves more than one-theed of a million customers in about 170 communities, and earns annual electric revenues in excess of $6o million.
The AEP-C&S merger proceedings have supplied vivid but little noticed documentation of the vicious politics an which electrical monopolies are built. industrycurrent The experiences of the city of Danville, Va., are typical. In 1968, the city council voted to build additional generating capacity and to submit a proposed $ii million bond issue for voter approval in 1969. Responding predictably, the local AEP subsidiary (Appalachian Power Co.) invested s4,2oo to survey initial reaction to the proposed bond issue, in the process accounting improperly for the expenditures. Upon discovering that the people of Danville favored the proposal by a 3-to-1 margin, the company set about to change their minds with a front group, strategic expenditures and heavy propaganda. businesscurrent The front group was called the New Day for Danville Committee, the expenditures went into the thousands (not all contributed by AEP), the propaganda hit a high point with an ad displaying a hole in the street, coupled with the message: "We need an $ii million generator like we need another hole in Main Street."