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The New Deal wants to eliminate utility holding companies because it claims that they provide irresistible temptation for utility financiers to milk the public. SEC last week was given a chance to point an accusing finger at a case involving none other than Mr. Howard Colwell Hopson, boss of Associated Gas & Electric Co., a $1,000,000,000, 23-State holding company with as many as ten layers of subsidiaries in certain cases. Howard Hopson last made news when Hugo Black's Senate committee investigating lobbying discovered he had spent some $700,000 trying to defeat the Public Utility Act (TIME, Aug. 26, 1935) Last week Howard Hopson was again in hot water as President Alexander Speer of Virginia Public Service Co., an A. G. & E. subsidiary, asked the Virginia State Corporation Commission to forbid A. G. & E. to fire him. The Commission did so pending investigation of Alexander Speer's assertion that A. G. & E. has taken excessive dividends from Virginia Public Service Co., preventing needed construction of rural facilities and reducing wages. When President Speer protested, said he, President Ralph D. Jennison of Utility Management Corp., an intermediate Hopson holding company, "stated in strong language that the question of service was secondary to the interests of the Associated system."