This authority would bring about as complete nullification as if the Supreme Court should declare the La Follette Act unconstitutional. The New York inflationist gang of gas owners ask authority to issue no-par common stock, prohibited by some State utility commissions, and to issue new common and preferred shares to satisfy their proclivities for diluting values and increasing charges to the nth degree. Increase of capital stock would be a blind to cover fraud on the public. Increase of capital stock would help serve as a basis or court excuse for high-jacking rates on the consumers and stockjobbing and unsuspecting public lured into the gambling dens of the pirates of finance. The primary purpose of stock issues surely is not to cheapen rates to consumers. The overpowering purpose is to make money out of the manipulation and sale of the stock to benefit the inside promoters and not the consuming public. Concentrated control logically calls for a retirement of stock issues. Enlarged stock issues of District of Columbia utilities logically would be for stock-jobbing purposes. Bond issues can legitimately take care of every reasonable growth of District of Columbia utilities.

Congress has repeatedly refused authority for all requests made by the gas company for an increase of its capital stock since 1896. In the absence of, and failure to obtain congressional authority to increase capital stock more than two decades ago, and to cover up 100 per cent surplus earnings out of excessive, extortionate, usurious income, upon one occasion the Washington Gas Light Co. issued a hundred per cent dividend in the form of certificates of indebtedness.

Our Potomac Electric Power Co. in the past 14 years has issued 213 per cent dividends, equal to 8 per cent per annum on inflated capital and in addition a full 100 per cent return of all of its inflated capital.

Here we have the spectacle of a few men in control of malicious, avaricious, and conscienceless monopoly corporations using excess surplus money picked from the people's pockets, exceeding 100 per cent of capital, to earn interest and dividends on this excess surplus through nefarious control of the necessities of modern life, overriding Congress and defying a community of over 700,000 inhabitants, nullifying legislation enacted by the chosen representatives of over 100,000,000 people, beseeching Congress for authority to ride away roughshod with legal consent to more swag than they have already grabbed.

Both the gas company and the power company are earning dividends off of surplus profits that have long since replaced every penny of net capital investment ever made in either corporation. They are both earning usurious returns of interest on a full 100 per cent of capital accumulated out of surplus earnings. Their dividends henceforth are nothing more nor less than interest paid by consumers on accumulated interest that has fully replaced capital and from an intrinsic net investment standpoint this capital is now all water, diluted, contaminated, and partly evaporated. If our people's counsel ever took the trouble to carry to court the case of District of Columbia Consumers v. Predatory Gas and Power High-Binding, Hi-Jacking Corporations on charges of extortion, usury, and confiscation, the consumers should get a decision that henceforth any

charge except for actual cost of service and maintenance is confiscatory and unconstitutional.

Any new capital needed for improvements, betterments, extensive in the future can easily be raised in excessive amounts on bond issues which heretofore have always been heavily oversubscribed. Therefore, there is no necessity for the issuance of another single share of common stock, but rather is there full justification for charg ing off every penny of net capital investment as having been returned over 100 per cent in full and thereby wiping the slate clean. The consumers including the United States Government, as equal partners with all the utilities, do not want to be silent partners to any involve ment in stock-jobbing schemes.

Without undue delay the people of our National Capital and suburban communities, who produce all the utilities' revenue to pay all the bills, are entitled to know just where they are at and what is what in all of our much muddled utility affairs and entangled partnerships with the gas, power, traction, and telephone corporations after having permitted unreasonable and unjustifiable aggrandizement by these extravagant semipublic corporate entities for decades. Financing of security issues to any degree or extent, all of which have their effect on rate structures, can hardly be justified or contenanced in the absence of a complete, through-going-to-the-bottom valuation of each and every one of all our utilities. This 100 per cent valuation is the essence of any and every action to be taken regarding the utilities.

The purpose of the duplicity that brings this recent request before Congress is transparent. The new gas owners come here with unclean hands after treating the law as a scrap of paper. They were by law barred out of this territory and have jimmied their way in, evidently under false colors and pretenses. But these outlaws are here legally ensconced in the utility preserves of the National Capital by methods akin to crashing through a back door or stealthily climbing a back porch and crashing through a second-story window.

They have sneaked in, these new gas owners. Their request for legalized license to water their capital stock structure is a part and parcel of a Nation-wide campaign by utility owners and holding companies that operate without regulation or restriction, especially the notorious and scandalous power combine racketeers, to hoodwink and bunco the public.

Holding companies are forever seeking more protection to heap up more concentrated wealth, rather than benefit the many. They are the means of ulimited robbery of the public actuated almost solely by their "greed to gain, to get, and to keep."

The crux of the situation that brought disaster to savings-account depositors, men and women in all walks of life, and caused hundreds of bank defalcations, deaths, and suicides throughout the country last October and November was the tricky manipulation of carloads of stocks by the mony-juggling stock jobbers, of the vassalage headquarters in Wall Street, associates of whom, engaged in the same business, are now asking of Congress permission to do as they please with the District of Columbia gas stocks cloaked with ostensible restrictions and to rubber stamp their proposals.

This gas company merger offers a country-wide study of a cross section of Wall Street.

There appears no permanent good to be derived in having Congress at this time sanction what Congress heretofore has always refused since 1896 to sanction, and that is the issuance of new gas company stock, either preferred or common or no par common. Nor is there the slightest justification for Congress to permit a complete nullification of conditions expressly forbidden by an earlier Congress-that there should be no foreign holding corporation control of our local utilities.

The main purpose of all our predatory power and other corporations is to manufacture substitutes for money, until at the present time we have not far from 100,000,000,000 of substitutes for money quoted every stock-exchange day on the blackboards of the gambling houses of Wall Street.

The New York Stock Exchange last year at one time had approximately $115,000,000,000 of listed substitutes for money, and in the October-November clean-up and shake-out of suckers, when the master manipulators found they could not justify another dollar of inflation in the sky-high quotations, due to the Senate coalitionists forcing out into the open and halting the mounting tariff schedules, framed in secret, the quoted values of listed securities shrank to approximately 60 per cent of their highest values, to $70,000,000,000. The present recovery in the overexpanded quoted values in the Wall Street gambling game of numbers has been coincident with the tariff inflationists again gaining the upper hand.

Congress chartered our local utility corporations to permit groups of men to handle semipublic institutions primarily for the benefit of the public. It was not intended that these semipublic institutions. should be the basis of stock-selling schemes any more than any recent lease made by the Post Office Department should be the basis of a stock-selling scheme. And Congress has repeatedly refused to permit the stock printing-press gas advocates to increase their issues of substitute tokens for money.

Mr. Burroughs, representing the new gas owners, has as yet offered nothing in exchange for his Trojan horse, the front feet of which are now within the law through a tricky evasion that is being challenged in the courts by a broker with claims of $78,000 in commissions. The new owners offer no public benefits, but merely a promise that they might gamble $400,000 per year to give Paul in the city a 10 per cent cut in rates presumably by robbing Peter in the suburbs, or in another direction, to offset this $400,000 gamble.

The main purpose of our present gas owners, our absentee landlords, is to promote stock gambling, because that is their business.

I am sure Congress is not interested in the new gas owners' stock schemes. I am sure Congress does not wish to accelerate the concentration of wealth in New York any faster than can be avoided.

Undoubtedly Congress has no desire to validate the gambling price of $125 or $130 per share the new owners paid for $20 gas stock which is unfairly permitted to earn 18 per cent dividends, plus surplus.

This excessive rate of return offers the new owners small comfort in their new gamble, and unless Congress authorizes them to transfer their present gamble on to an unsuspecting public with a substantial

112130-30-3

profit to themselves, they are "in Dutch," or "up Salt Creek," for a heavy loss at their own gambling game, especially when and if an honest, thoroughgoing valuation of the gas companies is made and rates are reduced to a point where no extortion, no usury or confiscation will longer be practiced against the public, a condition which has been chronic, without redress, up to now.

I know of nothing more helpful now than for Congress to direct or resolve that all pending legislation should wait until valuations of all utilities are under way.

Both the gas company and the power company have earned 100 per cent surplus capital, replacing all of their original investment in the last 20 years in addition to paying 8 per cent a year.

I have no reflection on any gentleman here who is inclined to follow the trait in human nature that is almost universal, to take a chance and gamble, but innocent people do not know they are gambling and Congress has the crux of the utility-holding business all over the country in this proposed legislation.

If I may be permitted to characterize the present attempt of a holding corporation acting through individuals to violate existing law in regard to the ownership of the Washington Gas Light Co. and the methods pursued by all their allies and associates who are constantly levying taxes upon the public to a greater extent than the total annual tax levies of Congress, in order that these master jugglers of money may live in unlimited luxury of usurpers and satraps, and dominate all of mankind through their inordinate greed, in language somewhat more incriminating and less temperate than heretofore expressed, I will say:

Whenever both House of Congress cease to regard as above the law the loaded-dice, thimble-rigging gambling fraternity of Wall Street, purloiners of the public's purse with their pockets packed with pickings whose controlling, overpowering, overwhelming sentiment is: All is well within the gates of hell, when the greed of gold assuages the soul, when a government of might puts up no fight, that the gambling dens need heed from fright, the looters and plunderers of power plants, of expanding expense and rate charges by their traction, transmission and other within-or-without-the-law conquest-by-strategy corporations, and undertake to restrain these privileged criminal money rapers who usurp governmental functions in levying tolls and taxes, appropriate the public's property and rob and plunder and shackle humanity with excessive racketeering service, license and other charges, and accept stolen money without question, then and not until then will the masses of the people, engulfed by the greed of the gougers, a greatly preponderating majority of the people nearing 90 per cent, now held under the heels of the plutocratic free-booters of pelf and the manipulators of juggled money, will begin to receive protec tion from the greatest aggregation of sordid, insatiably greedy carruptionists and unrestricted bandits ever gathered together for any purpose since the dawn of history.

My language and claims are readily justified and substantiated. The billions and billions of boodle now in unquestioned possession of financial bandits can be readily accounted for and traced.

If a return of only 2% per cent invested in public utilities is confiscatory, why have New York stockbrokers gambled $13,000,000 for

$2,000,000 worth of equity legally authorized by Congress represented by 100,000 shares of stock of the Washington Gas Light Co. out of a total issue of 130,000 shares, $2,600,000 total par, on the chance that Congress will legalize their at present unlawfully intended program so that this $13,000,000 of gambling funds can possibly be made to earn several times 24 per cent interest to meet the Supreme Court's idea of a fair and reasonable return.

Income of 2% per cent on $13,000,000 invested in 100,000 shares of gas stock on a subterfuge basis by Wall Street manipulators is all the return those Wall Street manipulators get or could reasonably expect to get when they bought the stock at sky-high prices, unless they could hoodwink Congress. Now they ask Congress to validate a situation that is illegal as it affects their plans and purposes, purposely made so under a special law of Congress to forestall the present developing consummation. The present owners can not vote their stock through a corporation without violating the La Follette antiforeign corporation control law of 1913. They have already violated the spirit and intent of the La Follette act by buying more than 20 per cent of gas stock as a holding group of brokers, unincorporated, or as an investment trust. To completely counteract, circumscribe and nullify existing law this holding group of manipulators are asking Congress to reverse itself and permit the group holders to vote stock in excess of 20 per cent as a corporation with authority to issue new and additional common stock. They will be able to do everything the La Follette act now interferes with their doing and expressly forbids, with some new privileges if Congress will obligingly repudiate the La Follette law, nullify it and in effect repeal it by passing the present innocuous-appearing legislation in the guise of merger, the merger alone and by itself being acceptable provided existing stock issues are not in the least enlarged. There is a nigger-in-the-woodpile to be sure, but up to Tuesday, April 15th, everyone connected officially with our District of Columbia utilities had accepted and swallowed the bait of the new gas owners, hook, line and sinker, inadvertently.

From the time the present group owners began buying gas stock at six or more times its par value, on an income-earning basis of less than 3 per cent per annum, in the spring of 1928, until after they had corralled more than 100,000 shares at an average price of $130 per share, cash money in the call-loan market of New York was in demand at 9 and 10 per cent much of the time. Under such circumstances no one in his sane senses would credit the new Wall Street gas owners with altruistic purposes in spending over $13,000,000 on a less than 3 per cent net income investment as against a 9 per cent call money income rate unless they expect to make up this loss later, possibly by doubling or trebling this $13,000,000 through their tried and true stock jobbing methods.

The biggest conundrum of all is how a utility issue of stock of $2,600,000 a large part or all of which undoubtedly was predicated and raised on profits from the people, extortion and usury against the people, can possibly become worth nearly $17,000,000 when the utility is taken under control of Wall Street manipulators unless the public is robbed of the difference, exceeding $14,000,000 of boodle.