Floor Statements

Madam Speaker, I would like to thank Speaker of the House Pelosi. Over the years we have worked, along with Chairman Lantos, on many human rights issues, and it has always been the people of Burma that were the most inspiring of those people that we sought to stand with over the years in these human rights causes that have unified us and Congressman Smith and so many others in this body.

Chairman Lantos again, of course, has provided such leadership. His life, of course, is exemplary of a person who holds such values as human rights and democracy and that we hold dear and affirm today.

Today, the Congress of the United States speaks with one voice. The people of Burma, we are on your side. Be courageous. You are not alone.

To the gangsters in uniform who have held the people of Burma in bondage for decades, you will be held accountable. Now is the time to join with the people of Burma. If, instead of joining them and trying to build a new Burma, that you bloody your hands even more, you will be held accountable. Your bank accounts will be frozen and you will be arrested for crimes against humanity if you leave your country.

And I can promise that those of us who hold dear human rights in this Congress will not rest until those actions are taken against you as individuals if you are committing these crimes against the people of Burma.

We call on those in the Burmese military, who take orders from the gangster regime that runs that country, we call on them to change sides. Now is the time for the Burmese military to join the people of Burma in creating a democratic and free society.

The military clique that gives orders to the military of Burma has no lawful authority. They are criminals. They are the criminals who have made deals with the government in China to steal Burma's natural resources and to impoverish the people of Burma in the process.

Let us not overlook the role of China in this crime. China has provided the military junta in Burma with over a billion and a half dollars of military aid over the last few years. It is the government of China that has enabled this monstrous dictatorship to hold 50 million people in bondage. It is China which has blocked the actions of the United Nations to stop the junta slaughter of Burmese monks and other peaceful demonstrators who, right as

we speak, are losing their lives in the cause of human freedom.

I ask my colleagues to support my efforts and others' efforts who have come here. We have several people who have already cosponsored a resolution to hold China accountable for what they are doing in Burma. This is only a taste of what we're going to experience around the world as China becomes a monstrous power in this planet. We have built up their economy. We have not only permitted them to become a powerful force in the world; we have subsidized the growth of power of this Chinese monster that now not only supports Burma, but is involved with the genocide in Darfur.

The United States should not be participating in an Olympics that is being hosted by a regime that commits genocide in Darfur and Burma.

Finally, let us today remember Aung San Suu Kyi. She represents not just the people of Burma, but she is the one who represents the higher aspirations and the higher ideals of humanity. She has suffered for many long decades peacefully in her home. Now, she has been taken from house arrest and sent to a prison. We do not know what fate she is suffering. We know that she is in the hands of murderers. We know she is in the hands of people who torture and would slaughter peaceful monks in the streets. So our hearts go out to her, and we keep her in our prayers, but we also suggest that if anything happens to Aung San Suu Kyi, the rise of anger will be heard not only from Washington but from around the world, for every decent and freedom-loving person will rise up. So those criminals who now slaughter the monks on the streets of Rangoon should understand that we are watching and the whole world is watching, and we speak with one voice.

Mr. Speaker, tonight I'd like to share a few thoughts about national security and about American foreign policy. We have many challenges that confront us today, and we live in perplexing times, but we also live in a time when there are great challenges as well as great opportunities, as long as we, the American people, have the courage to live up to our potential as a country that could lead the world into a better way than we have known throughout the history of humankind.

We are indeed in a new millennium, and this new millennium, coupled with the technological capabilities that we have and the vast wealth that is available to the free societies of the world today make it possible that we can build a better world than any human being has ever known. But, again, a lot of this has to fall back on the United States of America and our willingness as Americans to live up to the responsibility that we've been handed.

Ronald Reagan used to say that America has a very special role to play in this world. He used to say that because we Americans are a very special kind of people. We are not of one race. We're not of one religion nor one ethnic group, but instead, we are made up of people who come from every part of this planet and every racial background and worship God in every way that you can imagine. And in fact, there are many atheists who don't worship God at all and have that right, but we've come here to live in freedom and to show the world and to lead the world as a country that's made up of people from all over, that lead the world toward that direction which will enable it to overcome those trials and tribulations, those hatreds, ancient hatreds that have plagued mankind for so long.

And yes, today, the United States is the great superpower, thanks of course a lot to Ronald Reagan who I just talked about. The fact that during the Cold War he was willing to act responsibly to make tough decisions, in a way that ended the Cold War in a very real sense, he oversaw the demise of communism in the Soviet Union. It was Ronald Reagan who everyone knows brought down the Berlin Wall and not George Herbert Walker Bush, George W. Bush's father.

But as the Berlin Wall came down because of the policies of Ronald Reagan, we too must make the right decisions to ensure that the challenges that we face today are overcome in time for the next generation to enjoy greater freedom and to free themselves from the threats of fear that we face today. This will not happen unless we act responsibly, unless we act with courage, but, most importantly, unless we stand up and proclaim that, yes, we are from every nation of the world and every race and every religion, and we are the ones who will promote freedom and liberty on this planet. It is that alliance that we can have with those people in every country, that we have are, as I say, those people within our own society who can reach out to every country with that message, that we are allied with those good and decent people throughout the world who would stand with us to create a world where human freedom and liberty and justice and treating people with respect is something that is commonplace rather than the exception.

Sometimes it's a little difficult to think of a world becoming free, and the expansion of liberty and justice in this world, when we hear the reports that we heard today coming out of Burma. Burma, for these last 4 decades, has lived under tyranny, a horrible, horrible tyranny. It has been a closed society. Burma is a country that is so rich in natural resources that after the Second World War it was thought that Burma would be the breadbasket of Asia, that Burma would indeed be one of the richest countries of Asia.

Instead, Burma has sunk year after year, suffering from tyranny but, as a result of that tyranny, its people have lived in deprivation and in hunger and in want that was never ever thought would happen. No one ever thought that would happen after the Second World War.

But if we have learned anything from Burma and from the other countries that are poor today, it is that poverty is not created by too big a population. Poverty is not created by even a scarcity of resources, natural resources. Poverty is created because of tyranny. Tyranny and dictatorship bring corruption and bring about a strangling of those creative impulses within any society and those productive people within every society that will build, that will create the wealth necessary to uplift the people of any society. Instead,

tyranny drags them down, no matter how prosperous the country could be in terms of its natural resources.

The report today is that Burma had its chance, or perhaps it still does, but that the ruling regime, the gangsters that have run that country for decades, have now unleashed their firepower upon the Buddhist monks and the other people in that society who are calling for a liberalization of the Burmese regime. Apparently, thousands of people have been slaughtered.

In fact, an intelligence officer for the Burmese military has defected, and he now is reporting to Western newspapers that it was his orders, by his commanding officers, to round up hundreds, if not thousands of monks, and put them in trucks and take them into the deep jungle and murder them and dump their bodies in the jungle.

He could not do that, and so he defected. He grabbed his child and ran for the border. It is time for the other military officers in Burma and the police not just to take their children and run because they can't obey an order, but to realize that the orders they are being given by their generals, their so-called generals, are not lawful orders. It is time for the army of Burma to side with the people of Burma.

Any military leaders in Burma today who side with the people will become national heroes and will be renowned and remembered by their people for generations to come. They will receive the gratitude not only of the people of Burma, but to all the good and decent people of the world. The soldiers in Burma and the police in Burma should turn their guns on their generals. They should side with the people of Burma, their fathers, their mothers, their brothers and sisters who want honest government and clean government. They should not be slaughtering their fellow family members who want nothing more than clean, honest, Democratic government.

The regime, as I say, is headed by what they call generals, but these are not generals. These are gangsters who have put on military uniforms. No Burmese soldier owes them any allegiance. These generals, these gangsters, have sold out their country and their countrymen to foreign interests, namely, the Chinese. Yes, the dictatorship in Beijing is treating the government, which means the generals, in Burma as if Burma was a vassal state of China.

In exchange for the $1.5 billion worth of military equipment that China has given Burma, the Burmese gangsters who run that country are permitted, the government in Beijing and the Chinese, to rape the natural resources of the people of Burma, the teakwood, the gems, the uranium, the rich minerals that Burma has are being taken away. They are being eliminated from the future of the people of that country in order to pay for the weapons that repress the people of that country. The Chinese have demanded of the Burmese Government a facility on their ocean so that they can be in a position to outflank India and to interfere with the trade, ocean trade in that part of the world.

All of this is being given away by those leaders, so-called leaders in Burma. They are giving away the rightful legacy of the people of Burma to Chinese outsiders, gangsters in China now in league with gangsters of Burma.

This is the type of relationship that China will have with other countries if we permit them. And it is clear, for those of us who are looking, that the military troops that are now shooting down those who seek democracy in Burma would not be doing so if the Chinese would have objected and sent any message to their Burmese stooges not to shoot and not to commit violence against those who are peacefully advocating change, democratic change in Burma.

Yes, they have a regime. But unlike in other countries, like we faced in another issue which I will talk about in Iraq, in Burma, there is an alternative. There is an alternative to the Burmese dictatorship. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Prize winner, won with her party elections back in the 1990s when the generals were so deluded that they believed their own propaganda in thinking they were more popular than they were, and they permitted a free election. In that free election, they were wiped out.

The fact is that Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma and the people of Burma went to polls and the people of Burma overwhelmingly supported democratic reform and Aung San Suu Kyi. The election was, of course, immediately discarded; the generals mobilized their troops. Aung San Suu Kyi was sent into House arrest.

Aung San Suu Kyi, I went to Burma and met her several years ago, one of the great heroes of our time, a saintly person, someone who is depending on us like the people of Burma to make a strong stand. If nothing else, the American people must let the people of Burma know that we are on their side, and we must let the ruling junta know that we oppose them and we oppose their oppression of the Burmese people.

This should be clear to them, and we must make sure that those Burmese generals and those military officers who were committing atrocities against the people of Burma realize they are not just murdering their fellow Burmese, they are committing crimes against humanity, and they will be followed and pursued just like the Nazis before them, and they will be held accountable and brought to justice.

I am calling on our government to freeze any assets that any leader of the Burmese Government might have, and our government should be working with other governments to issue arrest warrants for any member of the Burmese Government who travels abroad.

Furthermore, we must join with other nations and suggest that China is not doing its part and is playing a horrible role when it comes to freedom in Burma, as it will play the same role in the Philippines and elsewhere as its strength as a country grows.

China has prevented the United Nations from stopping the atrocities that are now going on, as we speak, in Burma. China has been pulling the strings. The Burmese regime would never have opened fire without permission in Beijing. The people of Burma should know that. The people of the world should know that.

It is time for the people in the United States to quit closing their eyes to the monstrous nature of the Beijing regime. Without that regime, the Burmese dictators, the gangsters in Burma, would not be able to succeed in holding down that population and by brutalizing their people.

I have a piece of legislation before the Congress, and I would ask my colleagues to join me. The legislation is H.R. 610. It is a bill suggesting that we go on record as being in favor of boycotting the upcoming Olympics to be held in China.

There is no reason, while China remains the world's worst human rights abuser, and that includes Burma, I might add, the Chinese are the world's worst human rights abuser, and why should we ever hold an Olympics, which stands for some of the higher aspirations of humankind, why should we ever hold an Olympics in China while it has that type of monstrously dictatorial government. Yes, in China they not only are involved with repressing the people of Burma, but they are deeply involved with criminal acts against their own people, especially against religious believers.

Isn't it fascinating that in Burma, those who would try to lead the country to a better and more Democratic way are those Buddhist monks who now, in a very peaceful way, have presented their case and are answered with an iron fist. They are answered by bullets, they are answered by brutality.

In China, it's the same. We have people of the religious faith, whether they are Muslims in the far reaches of China or whether they are people in Tibet, who have been so brutalized, or other religious believers, Christians, Catholics, and, yes, the Falun Gong, the Falun Gong who have a spiritual belief that is somewhat similar to yoga and somewhat meditation. Yet, this very simple and pacifist religion has been vilified by the communist party of China, and thousands and thousands of Falun Gong practitioners believing in meditation and yoga have been arrested. They are picked up, and they disappear.

The women are raped in prison; they are murdered. Perhaps worst of all, when they disappear, they are sent to prisons, and now we have reports coming out of those prisons that Falun Gong prisoners, people who are pacifists, who are simply believing in meditation and yoga, they are, what, they

are being murdered for their organ parts which are then being sold. Sometimes they sell them to Americans who come there. Falun Gong prisoners are killed right before a doctor, who would then remove the cornea from their eye and sell it to people in the West who spend thousands of dollars to get these body parts.

If there is anything more ghoulish than this, even the Nazis, I don't think, could sink that low, but they sank about as low as one could ever expect. But that is the type of thing that goes on today, and we are giving the Chinese the ability to hold the Olympics, to cover up, to put a good face on this type of monstrous regime.

It is time for the people of the United States Congress to join with me in agreeing that as long as China is doing, number one, what it's doing in Burma and in Darfur, where they are again behind the scenes playing a horrible role, it is time for us to join together and say we will not participate in an Olympics hosted by such a criminal government.

And I am happy to announce today Neil Abercrombie, my colleague from Hawaii, has joined me in supporting this legislation.

China, of course, even beyond, if it was simply a nondictatorship, there would be major problems with China. China is a predatory nation. China is a nation, for example, it is a nation, as a nation state it's huge, and it has more territorial claims than any other major power in the world. China has been built into a huge power, an economic power, which is now being translated into military power. Even though it has claims against India, huge areas of India and Russia, large areas of the ocean are claimed by China. If one remembers, it was just a few years ago when one of our planes, our surveillance planes flying in international waters was forced down in China, and they claimed that their territorial waters extended way beyond anything the United States would recognize. And all they wanted for us to get the crew back was for us to apologize and to acknowledge that we were in their territory.

What does that mean? They would have murdered these American military personnel in order to assert their claim to huge areas of ocean. In fact, they claim the ocean right up to the shore line of the Philippines. They claim the Sprattley Islands, which are only 100 miles from the Philippines and 500 to 600 miles from China. Huge areas, as I say, of India and of Russia.

This is a country that we have built an economy over these last two decades, we have built from a weak country, we now have created a Frankenstein monster. And when I say ``we,'' I mean the policies of the United States Government have uplifted the economic capabilities of a country that has had no liberalization, no political reform of their dictatorial system.

We were told for 20 years, when I first got here, vote for most favored nation status for China, because if we interact with China economically, they will liberalize. What they need to do is, we have to prove to them not to fear us. This is a reoccurring theme by which people who live in democratic societies fool themselves into thinking that the criminals who run other governments, dictatorships are in some way motivated by the same motives that people are in free societies, that people in free societies will fear someone, thus they will agree to certain expenditures, military expenditures.

The Chinese know exactly who we are and who they are. The Chinese people are not the enemy. Those people in Beijing want to hold on to power, just as the dictators in Burma want to hold on to power. And as we move forward and try to determine what our policy should be in the future, let us note the policies of trying to engage China economically, permitting huge transfers of dollars of capital assets, of technology, of American know-how, of opening our markets, even though their markets were closed, letting them manipulate the currency, letting them get away with policies that shifted wealth from the United States into China. That did not have a positive impact on their government. Their government is still corrupt. Their government is still a government of criminal dictators, people who oppress their people and, as I say, are the worst human rights abusers in the world.

So first and foremost, in dealing with China, as in dealing with Burma, we must differentiate how we treat a dictatorship and how we treat a democratic country. Those leaders in China should not be granted the status of acceptability that goes with hosting the Olympics with our blessing.

Yet, we have, for the last two decades, seen an army of American corporate leaders rushing to China to invest and build factories and in partnership with the Chinese Government set up these factories and create manufacturing units that sell goods back to the United States, putting American workers out of work, selling goods back to the United States that have such poor standards that some of them are made of toxic material, as we've just seen with Mattel Toys, American corporate leaders, who are looking for two, three, maybe 4 years' worth of big profit for themselves, then they can cut and run and go off to their vacationland homes and enjoy themselves.

Those corporate leaders have created a monster with the blessing of the United States Government, because it's been our policy to permit them to transfer the technology, the know-how, and the investment dollars that were needed to build China into what it is today. And today, the Chinese are destroying the manufacturing base of the United States, and we have turned a blind eye to the fact that they manipulate the currency, that they manipulate access to their markets, and that they steal American intellectual property. We have turned a blind eye to that, just as we have turned a blind eye to the fact that the Chinese repress their own people.

And when you talk to these corporate leaders who've gone over there and built this monster, created this Nazi-like government, you ask them, they say, well, you know, when we do more and more economic interaction, we have more business; that's what's going to create more liberalism and reform there. How many times have we heard that? We've been listening to that for 20 years. The first speech I heard about this on the floor for most favored nation status for China was saying just that 20 years ago, yet it never happens. This is called the ``hug a Nazi, make a liberal theory.'' Just get close to them and they won't fear you anymore.

Well, the fact is China has been getting worse since, over these last two decades. It was Tiananmen Square that was the turning point. Up until Tiananmen Square, there was a legitimate reason for us to try to build the economy of China, to create closer ties, because there was an evolution going on, both economically and politically in China. And when it reached a point, at Tiananmen Square, you might say the tipping point, the United States didn't stand up. The Chinese gangsters, just like in Burma, where the military regime had to make its decision, was it going to open fire on their own people, the Chinese Government was facing this decision, and our government did nothing and we said nothing.

It is my contention that had George Herbert Walker Bush, then President of the United States, sent a message to China and to the Chinese leaders that if you murder and try to slaughter the democratic movement in China, we are withdrawing from our economic cooperation that we have agreed to, they would not have done so. And I will tell you tonight, Ronald Reagan would have sent that letter in a millisecond. Ronald Reagan would have been told that the democratic movement was on the verge of success, but they would be slaughtered if they sent the troops in and they need to send a message to the leadership of China saying that we are going to withdraw our economic cooperation with them if they, indeed, mowed down their own people. Reagan would have done it.

This President Bush's father did not; and thus we have had, in the last two decades, not a transition to democracy, but only a growing of their economy, which now gives them greater military capabilities and gives them greater wealth from which to try to undermine the United States.

And, again, as we look at this threat, what is really important is the same thing that's important in Burma and elsewhere, the basic message that we need to understand tonight, that when confronting regimes like China and

Burma, and confronting radical Islam that hates America, let's remember that it is the people who want to live decent lives and live in democracy who are America's greatest allies. The people of China, the people of China are the ones we must ally ourselves with. They need to know that we are on their side. They need to know that the people of the United States and the people of China all long to treat people decently and to live in freedom and justice. The people of China will be on our side if we are on their side. The people of Burma are on our side as long as they know we are on their side. Good and decent people throughout the world know this.

But, instead, we have been so busy building an economic infrastructure that permits wealth to flow to China that we have not bothered to make the demands on the government or to create, to help create the democratic movements within China that would move their government from within.

One example, by the way, of how we have done this is the fact that we have built a conveyor system for trade across our oceans, especially across the Pacific, especially from Shanghai into the ports that I represent, Long Beach and Los Angeles. We have built, with American taxpayer dollars, an incredibly efficient system so that American businessmen could go and set up factories in China, manufacture their goods over there, and ship them to the United States via a system that we've paid for, and come into our market and undercut our own American working people and our own American manufacturers who've stayed at home. We built this for them.

That's why I've long been an advocate of a container fee system so that at least, at the very least, if they're going to send containers filled with goods here, why should we build the ports and spend billions of dollars of infrastructure so that they can very efficiently send containers filled with goods into our society and undercut our own manufacturers?

I have not received the support that I believe that idea justifies. In fact, you see people in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, oh poo-pooing that as if it was a tax on the American people. We are not charging those American manufacturers who go to China. We're not. We are subsidizing them in their shipment of goods here to undercut our own people. That makes no sense. But it makes sense to those businessmen. It makes not only sense; it makes dollars for them. And as I say, they make a really quick profit; 4 or 5 years and they're done. They're even done with their own companies after 4 or 5 years. But we are the ones with our manufacturing base destroyed who have to pick up the pieces.

In my own city, in Huntington Beach, where I live, a manufacturer of paint and coatings was the person who sold the coatings to Mattel Toys for Barbie dolls. And in the year 2000, Mattel Toys gave an award to this company as the number one supplier for Mattel Toys. And then Mattel Toys sold out to the Chinese, decided to manufacture everything in China. The Chinese came to this gentleman and said, give us the formula for your coatings, and we will be partners. As soon as he gave them the formula, the Chinese disappeared. They disappeared, and he was never able to get a hold of them. And next thing you know, they aren't using his formula. They're using lead in the formula. And my children at home, who have Barbie dolls now, and all the other American children who have Barbie dolls, may have been infected with lead poisoning because Mattel Toys took the easy way out, along with the other American manufacturers who went to China in order to not pay our own American workers a decent wage.

They want to get a 10 percent or 20 percent higher profit in China rather than paying American workers a decent wage and having half as much profit. Who is paying the price for us? The American people in the end will pay the price as China grows into a massive, economic, and military power, which goes with that.

Of course, during the Clinton years, what did we find? There was not only technology transfer in the economic area, but they had actually polluted our political system as well. Campaign contributions flowing into the American political system and American missile technology leaking out in the other direction. The scandal during the Clinton years of American missile technology being transferred to the Chinese through Hughes and Lorel Corporation is a disgrace. And the evidence of Chinese influence and especially financial support during that election makes that even worse.

But we need to make sure that we bypass our own business leaders, bypass the leadership, the gangsters that run Beijing and Burma and like countries, and go directly to the people throughout the world with our message of hope, democracy, liberty, and justice. The people of Burma and the people of China are our greatest allies. These Burmese soldiers now have to make a decision as to whether they will fire upon their own people. The Chinese people should not permit their children, and they only have one child per family, to go into the military so that it can be used to suppress their own people.

This is not unlike the war we fight today, not with Burma or China but, of course, with radical Islam. China is not an enemy today. China is an adversary today, a very powerful adversary. We are, in fact, making that adversary so powerful, it's becoming frightening. But we are at war with radical Islam. We are at war with radical Islam. And again let me note that when I say that, I emphasize that Muslims throughout the world who do not hate America, Muslims throughout the world who love their faith, as they should, which it has meant very much to their lives and over a billion people, Muslims throughout the world who know that their prayer time and their other religious ceremonies and beliefs have meant a lot to their life and have added great depth to their life, those people are not our enemies. Those people are our friends.

We believe in freedom of religion. We respect other people's religion. We ask only that other people respect our religion. And, by the way, our respect for religion doesn't just go to other faiths, but it goes to people who don't believe in God at all, who don't choose to worship.

Our Founding Fathers did not come here, as some of my conservative friends say, to create a Christian Nation. We came here to create a Nation where freedom of religion was respected and that we acknowledged God but we did not in any way want to force those beliefs on those who were nonbelievers.

It is right that the people of Islam worship the way they choose, whether here or abroad. Those people who only want that freedom and are willing to grant that to others are our friends. But a radical fringe which hates everything we stand for has now arisen in the Muslim world.

Let me note that during the 1920s we had terrorists and in years past we had terrorists who were Christians. In 1920, the biggest political force in this country was the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan, as we know, carried around banners with crosses and declaring their love of Christianity. And the fact is that Christian churches in the South did not condemn the Ku Klux Klan, as they should have. The good and decent people of the American South, when they knew that these Klansmen were murdering people, they were terrorizing the black population, murdering them, hanging them, all kinds of torture that was going on in our country against our own black population, the Christian people did not stand up in those areas when they knew that the Klansmen were right there in church with them.

Well, that was a hundred years ago. Our Muslim brothers we are expecting to do better than we did when it came to the Klan because al Qaeda is the Ku Klux Klan of Islam. Al Qaeda are the hate mongers. Al Qaeda are those who would bring people who believe in God and put them at war with one another rather than trying to bring them together in peace and brotherhood.

In Afghanistan after 9/11, the United States went to Afghanistan and allied itself with moderate Muslims. During the 1990s, there was a mistake by this government just as we made a mistake with China. We tried to work with the Taliban. In fact, during the Clinton administration, the Taliban came into

being. And, in fact, it is very easy to see the historical record that the Clinton administration reached an agreement with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and our government was involved in creating the Taliban.

During that time period, I was a Member of Congress, and because I had spent time in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets, I spent considerable time in Afghanistan working with those people who would oppose the Taliban. I begged the powers that be that they support King Zahir Shaw, a moderate Muslim, a man who was much beloved by all Afghans, to support his return. And, instead, our government, under Madeleine Albright and all the others of the Clinton administration, did what? They decided to go along with the Saudis and to go along with the Pakistanis in creating a religious force, that they said because the people of Afghanistan are devout, this is what will draw them together, by supporting religious fanatics.

I told them at the time it was ridiculous. I told them that it would backfire on them during the war with the Soviets. The Pakistanis had passed on aid to Hikmatyar Gulbadin, a horrendous terrorist who was, again, a radical Islamist. But there were many others whom we helped during the war against the Soviets. I was there with them. And whether it was Abdul Haq or Commander Massoud or others like them, there were many others, Galani's forces and others, who were very, very mainstream Islamic people who were not anti-Western but were just trying to free their own country from the atheistic dictatorship of the communists, and we helped them. But after that, as we walked away, when the Soviets walked away, we made this deal with the Saudis and with the Pakistanis to let them finance the reconstruction and determine who would be in power in Afghanistan, and that is when the Taliban was born, as I say, at that time over my serious objections, and I spent 5 years going in and out of Afghanistan meeting with those people who would later become the Northern Alliance.

So as we look back on Afghanistan now, years after the Taliban has been defeated and al Qaeda was driven out of that country, let us remember the success that we had was because we went to the people.

There is a mistaken belief that we are not ``winning'' in Iraq because we didn't have enough boots on the ground. We didn't send in enough American troops. Well, in fact, we had probably 100 boots on the ground when Kabul was liberated from the Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the aftermath of 9/11. In fact, that liberation of Afghanistan was accomplished with very few American soldiers on the frontlines. In fact, the people of Afghanistan liberated themselves, and we did not liberate them. And we went into that war, and we reached agreements with those leaders, tribal leaders. They are often called warlords, but that was the Northern Alliance. And it was the Northern Alliance and those good people in Afghanistan who worked with me in the Mujahideen to fight against the Soviets. Those are the people who drove out the Taliban.

When we went into Iraq, it was a different story, unfortunately. Mistakes have been made, yes. Mistakes have been made in Iraq. There is no doubt. We sent in a military force, a strong military force, and they did their job. What did not happen was the political job that was necessary to complement the fact that we had dispossessed Saddam Hussein of his military might. Instead of making agreements as we did in Afghanistan with the tribal leaders, we did not, as we did in Afghanistan, reach out to the local powers that be that were moderate Muslims, and there are many moderate Muslims in Iraq. What we instead did was tell the people of Iraq that we were going to rebuild their entire country and that, for example, there would be no room. Mr. Bremer is quoted as saying to tribal leaders that there would be no room in a modern democratic Iraq for tribalism. Thus in our effort to make the decision for those people, rather than going to the people and their leaders ourselves, we have put ourselves in what has been a horrific quagmire.

How we extricate ourselves from Iraq will go a long way in defining what type of world my children live in and, in fact, what kind of world the young people who are with us today will have. If we try to pull out precipitously and look like we are running away, if we look like we are surrendering, if it looks like we have been defeated, we will embolden those people in Iraq who hate everything about the United States, and we will embolden the radical Islamists throughout the world. There is no doubt about that. That is not to say, again, that we should not be admitting our mistakes and doing what we can to extricate ourselves in a responsible way. That is why I have been supporting General Petraeus and his efforts to have a phased withdrawal, a responsible phased withdrawal, that will then permit those elements within Iraq that do not want to be ruled by radical Islam or those elements that would like to be friends of the West to give them a chance to step up. If we are viewed as retreating and abandoning those people, there will be a heavy price to pay.

And let us admit that with the mistakes that I have already mentioned, it is a tempting target for people involved in our political system to use what is going on in Iraq as a political vehicle in the upcoming elections.

Now, the people here in Congress, we have to search our souls to make sure what we are doing is based not on political motives but instead is based on what is the long-term interest of the people of the United States.

I go down and welcome home the troops, the reservists and National Guard, all the time that come in and out and leave Iraq or are coming back from Iraq, and I welcome them back, and I know, because I have supported this effort, that I must pay special attention. But let us note that we have to be doing this and looking at this and analyzing what is happening in a nonpolitical way. I am afraid that there are some forces at play that would try to politicize what is going on in Iraq.

Those people who oppose our efforts to have a phased withdrawal, would like immediate withdrawal from Iraq, those people who see America as the big problem in the world instead of as the world's only hope, those people cannot attack American soldiers because they realize that all Americans are proud of the men and women who are defending our country in uniform. But what we are witnessing now is what I would consider a maneuver on the part of those who, if they could, would attack American military troops. What they are doing is attacking American security companies who have been brought to Iraq to try to supplement our war effort there. By and large these American security companies are made up of people who have perhaps 10 times the experience of our own soldiers. American security companies like Blackwater, for example, hire on special forces and other extraordinarily well-trained American military personnel when they retire from the military so that their skills can still be put to use in the defense of our country and in the promotion of human freedom.

Their personnel are essential to the success of any of our military goals, but they're also essential to the success of a phased pull-out of Iraq. Otherwise, there will be no buffer. Otherwise, there is no means for us to have the type of withdrawal with success. Otherwise, it is a retreat.

Blackwater, as I say, has been working now, I think, since 1997. It's run by a young man named Eric Prince. He inherited his money. And the fact is he could have done a lot of other things with his money and made a lot more money. He could have gone to China and made 10 times the profit that he makes by creating a security company that would work side by side with American forces and American diplomats overseas to try to offer protection to our country and to those State Department and other people who are working in the United States Government overseas. He could have gone and made much more money.

Instead, now he's being called, I've seen him called ``murderer,'' I've seen the people in Blackwater being called ``thugs,'' when in fact almost every one of these people who work for Blackwater, like Eric himself, are former Special Forces people. Eric was a Navy SEAL for 5 years. And then, rather than just living the life of luxury that he could have done when he

inherited his money, he decided to do something good for his country. Those people who are retiring from our military and have good pensions, yes, they could live the life of Riley; they could go fishing every day. But, instead, they are putting their skills to use by putting their lives in danger for us. Yet, they are being attacked unmercifully by people who just basically oppose the fact that this President got us involved in Iraq in the first place.

We should not be taking it out on the people of Blackwater. Those men and women who are in Blackwater are very honorable people. And not to say they haven't made some mistakes, just as our own military personnel have made mistakes; but, in fact, Blackwater probably has a better record than our own military because they are, as I say, they are people with vastly more experience than that of our own soldiers and sailors and airmen.

So tomorrow there will be a hearing on Blackwater. I would hope that Blackwater and the people of Blackwater, those people who have made enormous contributions to the safety and security of our operations in Afghanistan and in Iraq, that they are not brutalized, that they're treated fairly, and that we do not permit the politicalization of this fight with radical Islam and this effort that now goes on in Iraq to be used in a way that will, number one, hurt brave people who are risking their lives for us, but at the same time, undermine our efforts for the long-term security of our country so that we will have a phased withdrawal that will give the good people of this world a chance.

We need to give the people of Burma a chance. We need to give the people of China a chance. We need to give the people of Iraq a chance. They are our greatest allies.

The people of the world who would live in democracy and see America as a positive force and, fortunately, many of them see America as a positive force, yet many people here in the United States for some reason do not share that opinion of their own country and believe that the United States is a negative force in the world. And that's what motivates many of them in their actions when it comes to Blackwater and it comes to this war.

Finally, let me note this: this President has made a lot of mistakes. And I have supported the President when he has been right; I have been opposed to him when he's wrong. This President seems to be headstrong, and I think that's a pleasant way of putting it. That does not mean that all the decisions that he has made have been wrong. We need to support him when he's right; we need to try to work with him and try to steer American policy when he is wrong. The idea of a phased withdrawal from Iraq is right.

But this President did not get us in this war with radical Islam. This war that we are in with radical Islam was created in the previous administration. We need to document that. It needs to be documented what the policies of the Clinton administration were towards the Taliban. I will be giving a speech in the next few weeks again detailing that, about how I pled, as a senior member of the International Relations Committee, for the documents from Madeleine Albright to prove what our policy was towards the Taliban; why it was that we were giving our foreign aid to the Taliban in radical Islamic areas of Afghanistan and giving short shrift to Commander Massoud and the pro-Western Muslims in Afghanistan.

We need to document these things. We need to document whether or not bin Laden was someone who could have been handled, if we were courageous enough to do it, 5 years, 10 years before 9/11.

We know now that some of the documents that the 9/11 Commission was supposed to read were not available to them. We had a commission that went to study why we had 9/11, but yet we know today that the National Security Adviser to President Bill Clinton stole documents out of the National Archives to prevent that commission, the 9/11 Commission, from seeing certain information that would be relevant to the war on terrorism. Part of his agreement, Sandy Berger, the National Security Adviser to President Clinton, when his theft was discovered, he volunteered, as part of his plea agreement, to give a lie detector test to the Justice Department if so requested to determine exactly what were the documents that he stole from the National Archives.

At the beginning of this year, a majority of Republican Members of this body signed a letter to the Justice Department, under the leadership of Tom Davis, asking the Justice Department to give that polygraph test, after so many years, I think it's been 4 years, it could be 3. For 3 years Sandy Berger has not been given the polygraph test to see exactly what documents he stole from the National Archives.

It is time for the American people to demand that we know what caused 9/11, and we will not know that until Sandy Berger, the National Security Adviser to the Clinton administration, is given a polygraph test, which won't happen until the Department of Justice gives that polygraph test and demands it.

Today, I am calling upon the new Attorney General to put Sandy Berger on the line, to give him a polygraph test and determine what documents he stole from the National Archives and to give us a full accounting of what led up to 9/11, what happened during the Clinton administration that was so heinous that Sandy Berger, the National Security Adviser to the President, would risk everything, would risk his reputation and go into the National Archives and steal documents.

Could it be that during the Clinton years that, for example, there was evidence of technology transfers and Chinese involvement in our political system? Could it be that a Gorelick memo, who at that time the lady was an important player in the Clinton administration, she had a mandate that domestic and international intelligence groups and law enforcement could not work together, could that have something to do with a Chinese connection?

What did Sandy Berger steal from the National Archives? We need to know. We should not be ignored. If this was a Republican, I can tell you that every newspaper in the country would be clamoring until we found out exactly what documents were stolen from the National Archives by the President's National Security Adviser.

So, tonight, I hope that my colleagues would join me, number one, in telling the people of Burma we're on their side; and joining me in calling for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics; of supporting a phased withdrawal, responsible withdrawal from Iraq; supporting our people both in uniform and in our protective companies like Blackwater, making sure we do not mistreat them; and finally, join me in calling for the truth in what Sandy Berger, the National Security Adviser for Bill Clinton, stole from the Archives. He needs to be given his polygraph test. The Justice Department needs to act.

So with those requests for my fellow colleagues, I now yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 10 o'clock and 40 minutes p.m.), under its previous order, the House adjourned until tomorrow, Tuesday, October 2, 2007, at 9 a.m., for morning-hour debate.

Madam Speaker, it was very disturbing to learn that the Vietnamese dictatorship is seeking to become a nonpermanent member of the U.N. Council when the 62nd session of the U.N. begins to meet this week. Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung is scheduled to address the General Assembly on Thursday.

It is great shame that in 2006 the Bush administration's State Department removed Vietnam from the list of Countries of Particular

Concern and gave Vietnam PNTR status, which led to its membership in the WTO. As a result of the Vietnamese dictators achieving everything that they wanted, it was predictable that in early 2007 they would revert to their old tactics. They have again begun broad-scale detention and physical abuse of religious and human rights leaders and the destruction and confiscation of private property.

What role can the United States play to align ourselves with the Vietnamese people who are struggling for their freedom? I agree with Ngai Xuan Nguyen, the overseas representative of the Vietnam Democratic Movement, that our Nation must condition its approval for Vietnam's bid to sit on the Security Council on three requirements:

(1) A definitive improvement in human rights with the release of all political and religious prisoners.

(2) A dramatic show of progress for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press.

(3) Allowing multiparties as part of the political process.

Last week when I met with Ngai Xuan Nguyen he gave me a list of over 100 names of political and religious prisoners. I wish to submit these names to be printed at this point in the Record.

I strongly urge the administration to vigorously pursue these cases. Our country should be a beacon of hope for people who struggle for freedom, democracy and rule of law. Access to cheap Vietnamese labor that will only benefit big business should not be the foundation of our Vietnam policy. The benefits of open markets and free trade will follow free systems. Economic deals with dictators will not lead to the long- term security that we seek from our relations with Asian nations. I am honored to work with people like Ngai Xuan Nguyen and I wish success for all Vietnamese who are struggling for freedom in Vietnam.

List of Political and Religious Prisoners Still Detained

1. Le Van Tinh, People Action Party of Vietnam (PAP),

Advisory Board member to Unified Buddhist Church, arrested

25/01/95, sentenced to 20 years in Xuan Loc prison, Dong Nai.

2. Nguyen Tuan Nam, PAP, sentenced to 19 years, Xuan Loc

prison, Dong Nai Province.

3. Nguyen Van Trai, PAP, sentenced to 16 years, Xuan Loc

prison, Dong Nai.

4. Tran Cong Minh, PAP, sentenced to 13 years, Xuan Loc

prison, Dong Nai.

5. Le Dong Phuong, PAP, sentenced to 12 years, Xuan Loc

prison, Dong Nai.

6. Bui Dang Thuy, PAP, sentenced to 18 years, Xuan Loc

prison, Dong Nai.

7. Nguyen Anh Hao, PAP, sentenced to 13 years, Xuan Loc

prison, Dong Nai.

8. Nguyen Huu Phu, PAP, sentenced to 10 years, Xuan Loc

prison, Dong Nai.

9. Nguyen Van Hau, PAP, sentenced 8 years, Xuan Loc prison,

Dong Nai.

10. Vu thi Ngoc An, PAP, sentenced to 8 years, Z30 D

prison, Ham Tan.

11. Tran Thi Le Hang, arrested 12/04/07, founder to United

Workers and Farmers Association, (UWFA) prison camp B5, Dong

Nai.

12. Lawyer Tran Quoc Hien, spokesman to UWFA arrested 12/

01/07, sentenced to 5 years, Bo La prison camp, Binh Duong

Province.

13. Doan Van Dien, arrested 12/04/07 UWFA, prison camp B5,

Dong Nai.

14. Doan Huu Chuong, arrested 12/04/07, UWFA, prison camp

B5, Dong Nai.

15. Nguyen Tan Hoanh, arrested 12/04/07, chief to UWFA,

prison camp B5 Dong Nai, reportedly missing.

16. Tran Khai Thanh Thuy, temporarily detained, not yet

tried.

17. Tran Thi Thuy Trang, temporarily detained, not yet

tried.

18. Vu Hoang Hai, temporarily detained, not yet tried

19. Nguyen Ngoc Quang, temporarily detained, not yet tried.

20. Pham Ba Hai, temporarily detained, not yet tried.

21. Rev. Nguyen Van Ly, Catholic priest, sentenced to 8

years (Founder of the Bloc 8406).

22. Nguyen Phong, sentenced to 6 years, Thang Tien Party

Progressive Party of Vietnam, PPV), prison camp of Thanh Hoa.

23. Nguyen Binh Thanh, sentenced to 5 years (PPV), prison

camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

24. Lawyer Le Thi Cong Nhan, sentenced 4 nam years (member

of the Bloc 8406, spokeswoman to the PPV).

25. Lawyer Nguyen Van Dai sentenced to 5 years (member of

the Bloc 8406).

26. Dr. Le Nguyen Sang, sentenced 5 years (Chairman of the

People's Democratic Party PDP).

27. Lawyer Nguyen Bac Truyen, sentenced 4 years (PDP).

28. Huynh Nguyen Dao, sentenced to 3 years (PDP).

29. Hoang Thi Anh Dao (PPV), probation of 2 years.

30. Luu Van Si, fugitive (UWFA).

31. Truong Quoc Huy, born 22/09/80, arrested 19/610/2005.

32. Ngo Van Ninh 87 years of age, president to Buu Son Ky

Huong Buddhist Church, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai

province.

33. Nguyen Si Bang, life sentenced in the Campaign the Red

Jacaranda of Hoang Viet Cuong, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai

province.

34. Pham Xuan Than, life sentenced in the Campaign the Red

Jacaranda of Hoang Viet Cuong, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai

province.

35. Truong Van Duy, life sentenced, the Campaign the Red

Jacaranda of Hoang Viet Cuong, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai

province.

36. Le Kim Hung, the Free Vietnam Organization (FVO),

prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

37. Ho Long Duc, FVO, sentenced to 20 years, prison camp

Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

38. Nguyen Thanh Van, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai

province.

39. Nguyen Van Phuong, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai

province.

40. Nguyen Ngoc Phuong, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai

province.

41. Nguyen Hoang Giang, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong

Nai.

42. Nguyen Van Huong, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

43. Son Nguyen Thanh Dien, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong

Nai.

44. Nguyen Minh Man, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

45. Nguyen Van Minh, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

46. Huynh Buu Chau, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

47. Huynh Anh Tu, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

48. Huynh Anh Tri, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

49. Nguyen Van Than, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

50. Tran Van Duc, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

51. Vo Si Cuong, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

52. Ngo Thanh Son, FVO, prison camp Xuan Loc, Dong Nai.

53. Tran Van Thai, Viet Nam Tu Do, trai giam Xuan Loc, tinh

Dong Nai.

54. Do Thanh Van (tu Nhan), Viet Nam Tu Do, trai giam Xuan

Loc, tinh Dong Nai.

55. Dinh Quang Hai, Viet Nam Tu Do, trai giam Xuan Loc,

tinh Dong Nai.

56. Lam Quang Hai, Viet Nam Tu Do, trai giam Xuan Loc, tinh

Dong Nai.

57. Nguyen Anh Hao, trai giam Xuan Loc, tinh Dong Nai.

58. To Thanh Hong, Viet Nam Tu Do, trai giam Xuan Loc, tinh

Dong Nai.

59. Mai Xuan Khanh, trai giam Xuan Loc, tinh Dong Nai.

60. Tran Van Thieng, trai giam Xuan Loc, tinh Dong Nai.

61. Phan Quoc Dung, trai giam Xuan Loc, tinh Dong Nai.

62. Nguyen Van Hoa, trai giam Xuan Loc, tinh Dong Nai.

63. Nguyen Van Chung, trai giam Xuan Loc, tinh Dong Nai.

64. Nguyen Sinh Nhat, trai giam Xuan Loc, tinh Dong Nai.

65. Bui Re, trai giam Xuan Loc, tinh Dong Nai.

66. Nguyen Huu Cau, trai giam Xuan Loc, tinh Dong Nai.

67. Le Thi Hang (Dang Thang Tien Party) sentenced to 18

months of probation.

68. Nguyen van Ngoc, Dong Nai, temporarily detained, not

yet tried.

69. Ho Thi Bich Khuong, arrested in Nam Dan district, Nghe

an province.

70. Hang Tan Phat, arrested 20/10/06 in Nha Trang.

71. Le Trung Hieu, temporarily detained, not yet tried.

72. Ngo Luot, victim of unjustly expropriated properties,

Phan Thiet, Binh Thuan province, arrested 03/08/07.

Mr. Speaker, tomorrow the Foreign Affairs Committee will mark up legislation dealing with the tumultuous events now taking place in Burma. I am an original cosponsor, and I would ask my colleagues to support the bill.

Mr. Speaker, we may be witnessing an historic event taking place in Burma. Religious leaders are bravely confronting a violent, brutal military dictatorship. The people of Burma are telling the generals who have oppressed them and looted their country for decades to peacefully step aside and let a democratically elected government rule the nation.

Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy overwhelmingly won elections back in 1990, but corrupt and brutal generals betrayed their people. They ignored the election results.

The SLORC, which is what the Burmese military regime called itself, then commenced to murder, torture and imprison anyone who would oppose their tyranny. Further, they have plundered Burma's vast natural resources, with the help of their Chinese masters and other foreign looters.

Now, at long last, the people of Burma have a chance. This is their moment. I urge all Burmese soldiers: do not kill your own people to further the greed and corruption of those who have sold out your country to the Chinese.

You are not a vassal state of Beijing. It is your country. Those demonstrating for democracy are your brothers and sisters and your family. Do not turn your weapons on them.

I warn the Burmese military officers: if you slaughter the monks and those calling for democracy, when your regime falls, and it will fall, you will be pursued to every corner of the globe and hunted down like the Nazi criminals before you.

The bamboo ramparts of tyranny are coming down. The American people and free people everywhere are with the brave souls in Burma who are seeking to free themselves from the gangsters who oppress them and steal their wealth.

To the people of Burma: you are not alone. Your cause is our cause. Have courage. We are with you.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to the rule, as well as opposition to the underlying legislation.

Let us note that this debate has been limited today, which is consistent with the substance of this legislation. The process, as well as the substance of H.R. 1908 is totally unacceptable. This bill should be called the Steal American Technologies Act Part 2.

Yes, Mr. Berman and I have worked on this legislation over the years, and I thought that we had a compromise bill in 1999, with Howard Coble and others; and this bill just negates all of the compromises that were made and the honest attempts to reach a good patent bill.

Yes, there was a patent bill that was passed and went into law in 1999, let us note. This isn't the first patent reform legislation in the last 50 years; it's only the worst patent reform legislation over the last 50 years. This legislation, under the guise of reform, will dramatically diminish the constitutionally protected rights that were mandated by our Founders and that have been the impulse behind our Nation's prosperity and security.

H.R. 1908 will dramatically weaken the patent rights of ordinary Americans and make us even more vulnerable to the outright theft of American-created technology and innovation. This legislation represents a slow-motion destruction of our patent system.

So what's in the bill? First and foremost we know what's in the bill is a mandate to publish every patent application within 18 months, or after 18 months of that application being applied, whether or not that patent has been granted.

So we are giving every thief in the world in India and in China and Japan and Korea the details of our most up-to-date innovative ideas, even before they are protected by the patents. We are being told, of course, Mr. Issa has an amendment that will handle this.

Don't be fooled. Whether or not the Issa amendment passes, this legislation will still mandate the publication of most patent applications before the patent is issued.

America's secrets will be exposed to a world filled with infringers and thieves. So don't be fooled by the Issa amendment, just the way we shouldn't be fooled by the very nature of this bill being called a reform bill when it should be called the Patent Destruction Act.

Secondly, this bill opens up new avenues of attack before and after the patent has been issued, again weakening the inventor, strengthening the infringers, both foreign and domestic.

Third, the bill changes the criteria of deciding the validity for a patent, again at the cost of the inventor. Fourth, the bill changes the way damages are calculated, again, at the expense of the inventor, and in the process creating havoc in our courts and forcing judges to be economists.

The most fundamental of all, of course, we change the legal basis of our system from first-to-invent, which has been, historically, for 200 years, the basis of the patent system, and now we are changing it to first-to-file, the way they do in Europe and in Japan. Do we really want to have a country like Japan? Look at their creative history. They rely on all of our ideas to perfect.

In short, every promise of H.R. 1908 is anti-inventor, and every provision weakens the right of inventors and undermines one's ability to protect his or her invention. The electronic and financial industry billionaires who are pushing this are pushing it to facilitate their theft of new innovation. Yes, these guys are important to our economy, but the opposition to H.R. 1908 from the other economic sectors in our economy is deep and wide.

Many of those quoted by Mr. Berman as having testified in these hearings are opposed to this bill. Biotech, pharmaceuticals, labor unions, universities, small businesses, all are against, adamantly against, this bill. Let us protect the little guy from foreign and domestic scavengers who would steal our country's newest ideas from the best and most creative minds of our country.

I urge my colleagues to oppose this legislation and this rule.

I thank my friend from Texas.

I rise in strong opposition to H.R. 1908.

The proponents suggest that it is the most fundamental and comprehensive change of American patent law in over a half century. Well, that's true, and that's why it should be defeated, because the changes are almost all aimed at undermining the technological creators and strengthening the hand of foreign and domestic thieves and scavengers who would exploit America's most creative minds and use our technology against us. It would be a disaster for individual inventors, with an impressive coalition strongly opposing this legislation: universities, labor unions, biotech industries, pharmaceuticals, nanotech, small business, traditional manufacturers, electronics and computer engineers, as well, of course, the patent examiners themselves who are telling us this will have a horrible impact on our patent system.

They are all begging us to vote ``no.'' This so-called reform will make them vulnerable to theft by foreign and domestic technology thieves. Our most

cutting-edge technology will be available to our enemies and our competitors. That is why I call this the Steal American Technologies Act. The billionaires in the electronics industry and the financial industries who are supporting H.R. 1908, many of them already have built their factories in China, would do away with the patent system altogether if they could. They are so powerful and arrogant that they have set out to fundamentally alter our traditional technology protection laws, laws that have served America well for over 200 years.

Yes, this is an issue vital to the well-being of the American people, to our standard of living; yet we find ourselves with a severely limited debate. There is only 1 hour of debate. Those of us who are opposing this legislation haven't even been given the right, which is traditional in this body, to control our own time. Yes, the way we are handling this debate is a disgrace. There will be 12 minutes available for those of us who oppose a bill that they claim is so important for the future of our country.

What do we know about this bill? It is a horror story for American inventors and a windfall for foreign and domestic thieves. We don't even know what is in the bill. The manager's amendment has been changed even after the committee did its business. So it wasn't even fully debated in the committee and much less fully debated at the subcommittee level. No, what we are doing is a power play here. That is what we are witnessing. The opposition doesn't even get the chance to argue our case adequately before this body or before the American people. Our inventors and our innovators are begging us not to pass this legislation. Foreign and domestic technology thieves are licking their chops. Let's not let the big guys beat down and smash the little guys, which is what the purpose of this legislation is.

There are problems in the Patent Office, that is true, that can be fixed without having to fundamentally alter the principles that are the basis of our patent system, which is what this legislation does. This legislation, in the name of reform, is being used as a cover to basically destroy the patent system that has served us so well. In the long term, it will destroy American competitiveness and the standard of living of our working people. That is what is at stake here. Overseas, the people in India, China, Japan and Korea are waiting. We have quotes from newspapers suggesting that as soon as this bill passes, they will have a greater ability to take American technology even before a patent is granted and put it into commercial use against us.

This is a shameful, shameful proposal. The American people have a right to know. We are watching out for their interests. I don't care what the billionaires in the electronics industry and the financial industry say. We should have more debate on this. We should have had 2 or 3 hours of debate on this if it is as important as they say. Instead, we have been muzzled, and it is a power grab. Vote against

Mr. Chairman, parliamentary inquiry.

Does the person who controls the time against the manager's amendment have to be against the manager's amendment?

Who controls the time in opposition?

I would suggest that whoever does control the time should be in opposition, and if Mr. Smith, who I respect greatly, does not oppose the manager's amendment, he should not be in control of the debate against the manager's amendment, and I would note that there are others of us who would like to have that.

Mr. Chairman, I rise to claim the time in opposition to the manager's amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to yield 5 minutes of the 10 minutes in opposition to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) for her to control that time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Manzullo).

How much time do I have left?

And the time on the other side?

I yield myself 3 minutes.

Let's just note when we are talking, Ms. Kaptur and Mr. Manzullo talk about one of the horrible provisions of the bill, which changes the whole concept of how damages are assessed, and who has benefited by this.

We have to ask ourselves, we talk about the Wright brothers, the little guys who actually made all the difference in whether or not America has a high standard of living, the damages that these inventors have when people violate their rights and how those damages are assessed. That's right in this legislation.

Yes, they are changing it to the benefit of the infringers. They are beating down the little guys, making it more difficult for the Wright brothers and for all the other little guys who have come up with these ideas in order to help the big corporations.

By the way, let me just add this thought: we are not just talking about American corporations here. We are not talking about making inventors just vulnerable to the big American corporations. We are talking about multinational corporations, and we are talking about foreign corporations.

Our little guys, with just this change, are going to be dramatically damaged. Their ability, in order to protect their rights, will be dramatically reduced.

This is just one example of the type of diminishing of the rights of the inventor in this bill. Yet, we aren't able to discuss it fully. One hour of debate for a bill that's being described here as one of the most important pieces of legislation in the century? One hour of debate in which the opposition was not given a chance to control any time in opposition? This is a disgrace. What's going on?

This alone should raise the red flag to all of our Members saying something is going on here; there is a power play people in our legislation aren't being able to control their time. What's happening here? We have a manager's amendment now that was permitted to be changed after it left committee. There wasn't even a proper debate on this bill then and this manager's amendment in the committee, much less the subcommittee.

So what we have here is a power play by somebody. The rules don't count when it comes to the bill, because somebody out there really wants it really bad in order to not give us a chance to give the other side, not give the full committee a chance even to discuss these details that are changed in the manager's amendment, not to let the subcommittee play its role.

Now, all I am suggesting is this should raise a red flag for all of our Members. All of us should be aware that when these types of shenanigans are being played, something is going on, that the legislation that's being pushed through probably is not good legislation, but, instead, helps a small group of powerful people.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

First and foremost, let us note that over and over again we hear, well, they are not opposing the bill. Well, the labor unions and others, many of them are opposing the bill. But the ones you're describing, you're just saying they aren't necessarily supporting the bill. What we are saying, they are not supporting the bill. This has been reconfirmed by what my colleagues have said in the last 10 minutes.

Also, let us note, over and over again we hear, we're going to work this out. We're going to work all these things out in the bill as it moves through the process, which means to all of us there are major flaws in this bill, huge flaws in this bill, and we have to take it just on faith that they're going to work out all these flaws as it goes through the process.

I would suggest that we take this, we vote ``no'' on this bill, and then let's correct those flaws and come back to the floor when you've got a bill that isn't flawed. Let's go back to the floor when you can support a bill with an honest debate and not be so afraid of a debate that you'll neuter the chances and mute our opposition voices by giving us almost no time to discuss the issues.

I would yield to my friend, Ms. Kaptur.

Reclaiming my time, Ms. Kaptur has made a really important observation here, and that is, at the end of the day, yeah, the Issa amendment does make some changes, but at the end of the day, there will be American patent applications in which the inventor would like to keep secret until he gets the patent issued to him, which will be published for all of the thieves in China and India and Japan and Korea and elsewhere who would like to have all of that information before the patent is issued. There will still be a significant number of patent applications published for the whole world to see, and the patent applicant doesn't want that.

I certainly will.

So in the end, where Mr. Issa's amendment does take things one or two steps forward, the fact is it doesn't come anywhere close to offering the protection that currently exists in the law that is being destroyed by the language in the Steal American Technologies Act, H.R. 1908.

Let me just note, for my own situation, in terms of the chairman asking

me about my credentials in terms of being associated with labor, I was a member of a labor union. I actually scrubbed toilets at times in my life. I have had menial jobs. I care about the working people. My family comes from working class farmers, poor farmers and people who went off to defend this country.

The American people, the standard of living of ordinary people depends on technology. This bill that's being proposed will give our technological secrets to our competitors which undermines the working people's chances here of competing with cheap labor overseas.

I certainly will.

If this bill passes, those people who will be our competitors overseas, even if Mr. Issa's amendment passes, they will have our secrets before the patent is issued and be outcompeting us with our own technologies.

Announcement by the Acting Chairman

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

This is yet another example of why this overall bill should be defeated. The fact is that we shouldn't be changing the provision and permitting outside agencies and taking authority away from us from setting the basic ground rules about patents in the first place. This idea that, well, let me put it this way. This bill is so filled with this type of imperfection, and as we have had our guarantee from those people who brought this bill to the floor so precipitously, they will work really hard to make sure all the flaws are out. I would suggest that that statement alone should have all these red flags going up for all of us. And then the muting of the opposition and not permitting us an adequate amount of time to actually discuss the provisions of the bill and not giving us time to control our own opposition, again, should be the red flags for all of us who's listening to this debate.

I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert).

Mr. Chairman, how much time do I have?

I yield 1 minute to Ms. Kaptur.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Let me just note I think it is really much more important to talk about provisions of the bill rather than trying to point out things about each other, and that is one of the reasons we needed more time in this debate so that we could actually get into the provisions of this bill.

The fact that no matter what happens with Mr. Issa's first amendment, that still there will be patent applications that will be published for the world to see even before the patent is issued; that our overseas competitors will then have information that they will be able to use to outcompete us even before our patents are issued to those inventors who have applied for patents. Those are the issues we need to talk about.

We need to talk about why the assessment of damages has been changed in a way that helps these big guys, these big companies that Ms. Kaptur has just outlined, as well as the foreign corporations, I might add, at the expense of the small inventor. The inventor is just trying to prevent theft of his lifetime of work. We have to know why we have had different ways of determining the validity of a patent and opening up challenges in the front of the patent as well as afterwards so that we add cost after cost after cost to the little guy.

We need to discuss these things in detail. Instead we have 1 hour in which the opposition, I think, had 12 minutes in order to discuss these issues. This should raise a flag to everyone listening to this debate. Why is Congress trying to stampede the rest of the Members of Congress into voting for an act that could be so damaging to the American people?

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the gentlewoman's amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to Mr. Manzullo.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to Mr. Gohmert from Texas.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to Mr. Roscoe Bartlett, Ph.D., a man who holds 20 patents, a man who is greatly respected for his scientific knowledge and who has been deeply appreciated for the advice he has given us in that endeavor in the last 15 years in Congress.

(Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Let's note that there are several amendments that were not permitted by the Rules Committee. I did not submit amendments because those of us who have been following this bill realize it is fundamentally flawed. The purpose of the bill is to support those large corporations that Ms. Kaptur noted who are dramatically supporting the legislation. And it is being opposed, I might add, by a large number of universities, unions, pharmaceutical industries, biotech industries, et cetera, et cetera. So we have everybody except the electronics industry and the financial industry, who are already over in China making their profit at our expense, are opposed to the bill.

I yield my remaining 30 seconds to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett).

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

I would, first of all, submit for the Record a list of several hundred organizations, including unions and universities, et cetera, all of whom have raised objections to the patent legislation, H.R. 1908, not necessarily that they're all opposed to it, but they have strong objections.

Organizations and Companies Which Have Raised Objections to Patent

Legislation (H.R. 1908)

Organizations and Companies Raising Objections to H.R.

1908, the Patent Reform Act of 2007: 3M, Abbott, Accelerated

Technologies, Inc., Acorn Cardiovascular Inc., Adams Capital

Management, Adroit Medical Systems, Inc., AdvaMed, Advanced

Diamond Technologies, Inc., Advanced Medical Optics, Inc.,

Advanced Neuromodulation Systems, Inc., Aero-Marine Company,

AFL-CIO, African American Republican Leadership Council.

Air Liquide, Air Products, ALD NanoSolutions, Inc., ALIO

Industries, Allergan, Inc., Almyra, Inc., AmberWave Systems

Corporation, American Conservative Union, American

Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), American Seed

Trade, Americans for Sovereignty.

Americans for the Preservation of Liberty, Amylin

Pharmaceuticals, AngioDynamics, Inc., Applied Medical,

Applied Nanotech, Inc., Argentis Pharmaceuticals, LLC,

Arizona BioIndustry Association, ARYx Therapeutics, Ascenta

Therapeutics, Inc., Association of University Technology

Managers (AUTM).

Asthmatx, Inc., AstraZeneca, Aware, Inc., Baxa Corporation,

Baxter Healthcare Corporation, BayBio, Beckman Coulter, BIO--

Biotechnology Industry Organization, BioCardia, Inc., BIOCOM,

Biogen Idec, Biomedical Association, BioOhio, Bioscience

Institute, Biotechnology Council of New Jersey.

Blacks for Economic Security Trust Fund, BlazeTech

Corporation, Boston Scientific, Bridgestone Americas Holding,

Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb, BuzzLogic, California Healthcare

Institute, Canopy Ventures, Carbide Derivative Technologies,

Cardiac Concepts, Inc., CardioDynamics, Cargill, Inc.,

Cassie-Shipherd Group, Caterpillar, Celgene Corporation, Cell

Genesys, Inc., Center 7, Inc., Center for Small Business and

the Environment, Centre for Security Policy, Cephalon,

CheckFree, Christian Coalition of America.

Cincinnati Sub-Zero Products, Coalition for 21st Century

Patent Reform, Coalitions for America, CogniTek Management

Systems, Inc., Colorado Bioscience Association, Conceptus,

Inc., CONNECT, Connecticut United for Research Excellence,

Cornell University, Corning, Coronis Medical Ventures,

Council for America, CropLife America, Cryptography Research,

Cummins Inc., Cummins-Allison Corporation.

CVRx Inc., Dais Analytic Corporation, Dartmouth Regional

Technology Center, Inc., Declaration Alliance, Deltanoid

Pharmaceuticals, Digimarc Corporation, DirectPointe, Dow

Chemical Company, Dupont, Dura-Line Corporation, Dynatronics

Co., Eagle Forum, Eastman Chemical Company, Economic

Development Center, Edwards Lifesciences, Elan

Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Electronics for Imaging, Eli Lilly and

Company, Ellman Innovations LLC, Enterprise Partners Venture

Capital, Evalve, Inc.

Exxon Mobile Corporation, Fallbrook Technologies Inc.,

FarSounder, Inc. Footnote.com.

Gambro BCT, General Electric, Genomic Health, Inc., Gen-

Probe Incorporated, Genzyme, Georgia Biomedical Partnership,

Glacier Cross, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline, Glenview State Bank,

Hawaii Science & Technology Council, HealthCare Institute of

New Jersey, HeartWare, Inc., Helius, Inc., Henkel

Corporation, Hoffman-LaRoche, Inc.

iBIO, Imago Scientific Instruments, Impulse Dynamics (USA),

Inc., Indiana Health Industry Forum, Indiana University,

Innovation Alliance, Institute of Electrical and Electronics

Engineers (IEEE)-USA, InterDigital Communications

Corporation, Intermolecular, Inc., International Association

of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), Invitrogen

Corporation, Iowa Biotechnology Association, ISTA

Pharmaceuticals, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Johnson &

Johnson, KansasBio, Leadership Institute, Let Freedom Ring,

Life Science Alley, LITMUS, LLC.

LSI Corporation, Lux Capital Management, Luxul Corporation,

Maryland Taxpayers' Association.

Masimo Corporation, Massachusetts Biotechnology Council,

Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council (MassMEDIC),

Maxygen Inc., MDMA--Medical Device Manufacturer's

Association, Medical College of Wisconsin, MedImmune, Inc.,

Medtronic, Merck, Metabasis Therapeutics, Inc., Metabolex,

Inc., Metacure (USA), Inc., MGI Pharma Inc., MichBio,

Michigan Small Tech Association, Michigan State University,

Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Milliken & Company, Mohr,

Davidow Ventures, Monsanto Company.

NAM--National Association of Manufacturers,

NanoBioMagnetics, Inc. (NBMI), NanoBusiness Alliance,

NanoInk, Inc., NanoIntegris, Inc., Nanomix, Inc., Nanophase

Technologies, NanoProducts Corporation, Nanosys, Inc.,

Nantero, Inc., National Center for Public Policy Research,

Nektar Therapeutics, Neoconix, Inc., Neuro Resource Group

(NRG), Neuronetics, Inc., NeuroPace, New England Innovation

Alliance, New Hampshire Biotechnology Council, New Hampshire

Department of Economic Development, New Mexico Biotechnical

and Biomedical Association, New York Biotechnology

Association.

Norseman Group, North Carolina Biosciences Organization,

North Carolina State University, North Dakota State

University, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Northwestern

University, Novartis, Novartis Corporation, Novasys Medical

Inc., NovoNordisk, NUCRYST Pharmaceuticals, Inc. NuVasive,

Inc., Nuvelo, Inc., Ohio State University, OpenCEL, LLC.

Palmetto Biotechnology Alliance, Patent Cafe.com, Inc.,

Patent Office Professional Association, Pennsylvania Bio,

Pennsylvania State University, PepsiCo, Inc., Pfizer, PhRMA--

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America,

Physical Sciences Inc., PointeCast Corporation, Power

Innovations International, PowerMetal Technologies, Inc.,

Preformed Line Products, Procter & Gamble, Professional

Inventors' Alliance, ProRhythm, Inc., Purdue University, Pure

Plushy Inc., QUALCOMM Inc.

QuantumSphere, Inc., QuesTek Innovations LLC, Radiant

Medical, Inc., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Research

Triangle Park, NC, Retractable Technologies, Inc.,

RightMarch.com, S & C Electric Company, Salix

Pharmaceuticals, Inc., SanDisk Corporation, Sangamo

BioSciences, Inc., Semprius, Inc., Small Business Association

of Michigan--Economic Development Center, Small Business

Exporters Association of the United States.

Small Business Technology Council, Smart Bomb Interactive,

Smile Reminder, SmoothShapes, Inc., Solera Networks, South

Dakota Biotech Association, Southern California Biomedical

Council, Spiration, Inc., Standup Bed Company, State of New

Hampshire Department of Resources and Economic Development,

Stella Group, Ltd., StemCells, SurgiQuest, Inc.

Symyx Technologies, Inc., Tech Council of Maryland/MdBio,

Technology Patents & Licensing, Tennessee Biotechnology

Association, Tessera, Inc., Texas A&M, Texas Healthcare,

Texas Instruments, Three Arch Partners.

United Technologies, University of California System,

University of Illinois, University of Iowa, University of

Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota,

University of New Hampshire, University of North Carolina

System, University of Rochester, University of Utah,

University of Wisconsin-Madison, US Business and Industry

Council, US Council for International Business.

USGI Medical, USW--United Steelworkers, Vanderbilt

University and Medical Center, Virent Energy Systems, Inc.,

Virginia Biotechnology Association, Visidyne, Inc.,

VisionCare Opthamalogic Technologies, Inc., Washington

Biotechnology & Biomedical Association, Washington

University, WaveRx, Inc.

Wayne State University, Wescor, Inc., Weyerhaeuser, Wilson

Sonsini Goodrich &

Rosati, Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF),

Wisconsin Biotechnology and Medical Device Association,

Wyeth.

And we know there are many, many people who have strong reservations, even by the wording of what we have heard from the other side of this debate, that there are people who have serious questions, even though they may not officially be in opposition.

Well, if there are so many serious questions around that we have amendments like that of Mr. Pence and the other amendments that we've heard, we shouldn't be having this bill on this floor at this time, much less muzzling the opposition so we have only an hour to debate on the central issues of the bill. Instead, we have had to argue our case hamper-scamper here as opposition to the amendment to the bill only to get time to offer a few objections. That's not the way this system is supposed to work. And it's not supposed to work that we bring bills to the floor and ask Members to vote on it so that we can fix it later on. That should raise flags for everybody that there is something to fix in this bill. And the fact that this bill has been brought to the floor very quickly and that debate has been limited, that alone should cause people to want to vote ``no'' on H.R. 1908 and send it back to committee and see if we can have a bill that doesn't require Mr. Pence to be up here.

And also this, before I yield to Ms. Kaptur: Yes, there are problems with the Patent Office, as has been described. Bad patents are being issued. This bill does nothing to cure that. What this bill does is use that as a cover to fundamentally change the rules of the game that are going to help those huge corporations that Ms. Kaptur talked about, as well as the overseas people who are waiting to steal our technology.

We can correct those problems, and I would support that. You bring a bill to the floor that gives more money to the patent examiners, more training to the patent examiners, keeps the money that goes into the Patent Office there to improve the system, you're going to have lots of support. But don't use the imperfections of the Patent Office as an excuse to change the fundamental protections for American inventors.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur).

How much more time is left in this debate?

I would yield myself the right to close, and this is the final, I guess, arguments in this debate.

We can correct the flaws at the Patent Office. We do not need to destroy the American patent system as it has functioned for 200 years. We do not need to make all of our inventors vulnerable to foreign theft so foreigners and large corporations can steal their creative genius and use it against us. That is what this bill does. It is being foisted off on us. The process has been flawed. As we can see, we have had limited debate. They brought this to the floor admitting there are flaws in the bill. We need to defeat the Steal American Technologies Act and go back and work on it so we can make real reform rather than a bill that is going to help America's economic adversaries.

I would ask my colleagues to join me in supporting the little guy against the big guy and demonstrating that that is the rules of the game here.

Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw my requests for recorded votes on the amendments numbered 2, 3 and 4, to the end that each such amendment stand disposed of by the voice vote thereon.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Speaker, tomorrow is a critical day for America. Tomorrow, the House will consider legislation that will dramatically diminish a constitutionally protected right that has served this Nation well. We are talking about fundamentally altering the laws governing the ownership of technology in our country. America's patent system is on the line.

In short, if H.R. 1908, the bill in question, passes, there will be a tremendous negative, long-term consequence not just for America's inventors but for our country as a whole.

It is American technology that has made all the difference in our country's security and our people's way of life. Those patriots who laid the foundation for our country wrote into the Constitution a provision they firmly believed as a prerequisite to progress and freedom.

Article I, section 8 of the Constitution states in part that, quote, Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries, end of quote.

Our Founding Fathers obviously held the right of owning one's ideas, creations and inventions as equal to the rights of speech, religion and assembly. In fact, in the body of the Constitution, the word ``right'' is only used in reference to patents and copyrights. The Bill of Rights was added later.

In short, we have had since our country's founding the strongest patent protection in the world, and that is why in the history of mankind there has never been a more innovative and creative people. It has been no accident that Americans have been the world's great inventors, scientists, and technologists. Black Americans, in particular, have excelled in the creation of new technologies. This was no accident. It was a result of the protections that we put into our law to secure for all people the right of ownership for their inventions and their creations.

Americans were the inventors of technology that produced more wealth, with less labor, and thus elevated the standard of living of all people which, in turn, opened the doors of opportunity for all people.

Let us understand that it was not raw muscle, nor was it the hard work of our people that built this country. There are people who work hard all over the world. They work hard and they use their muscles and they struggle; yet, they live in abject poverty. So it's not just the use of one's physical strength that will change the world and make it a better place. It was not our vast territory and our natural resources that gave us a standard of living of which we are so proud. No, it was not these things. It was our ingenuity, our intelligence and, yes, the legal system that was established to protect ingenuity and creativity that brought us the joys of freedom and the benefits of freedom.

We treated intellectual property rights, the creation of new technologies, as we treated property, personal and other political rights, and that is what America has been all about. Every person's rights were to be respected and protected; and as I have just demonstrated, the idea of the right to own one's creation was fundamental to this concept of the American Dream that was laid in the constitutional foundation of our country by our Founding Fathers.

Today, we face a great historic challenge, and this challenge comes exactly at the time when our country faces economic threats from abroad as never

before. We must prevail over our economic competitors who are at war with the well-being of the American people. We must win or our country and our people will lose. If we lose this battle, our people will suffer. It is as simple as that.

Future generations could well see their standard of living decline, and there is evidence of that already. We can see their standard of living decline, and they may well see the safety and the strength of our country compromised, to which the security of their families will be in jeopardy, which all leads us to the legislation that we will consider tomorrow.

Let's be clear and specific. The legislation in question, H.R. 1908, will dramatically weaken the patent rights of ordinary Americans and make us even more vulnerable to outright theft of American-created technology and innovative ideas. This legislation represents a slow- motion destruction of our patent system.

And, yes, there are some real problems that need to be solved with our patent system. We need patent legislation that speeds up the examination process and the issuance process and makes it more accurate. We need patent legislation that provides training and compensation for our patent examiners. Patent examiners are overworked; they're undertrained. They need to have higher pay to make sure we keep the good patent examiners on the job.

We need patent legislation that helps us protect our inventors against theft, especially from foreign theft. We need legislation aimed at fixing these problems, and it would be justified and it would be welcome, but the legislation on the floor tomorrow does not fix the system. It simply weakens the protection of American inventors using these festering problems as a cover.

Some people might even suggest that the reason that these problems with our patent system have been permitted to fester was so that people could use them as an excuse to undermine the very basis of the patent system itself. Unfortunately, what we are witnessing is a replay of the strategy used in the illegal immigration debate of just a few months ago.

The American people have been crying out for protection against a huge invasion of illegal immigrants into our country, one that is affecting their standard of living, their safety as a people, and their economic well-being. Special interests who benefited by this flood of illegals tried to push through a bill that would have made the situation worse. That's right, a bill in the name of stopping the illegal immigration flood that would have actually made it worse.

To confuse the public, they kept calling it a comprehensive bill, as if it was designed to fix the problem. Instead, the purpose of that comprehensive bill, as we all are aware, was to give amnesty to all those who are in our country illegally, and that of course, would have attracted tens of millions of more illegals. It would have made a bad situation worse, and its only intent was amnesty. Yet, with a straight face, they kept using the phrase comprehensive reform, implying there was a fix.

Well, that same strategy seems to be used by those behind this effort to undermine or destroy America's patent system as it has worked since the founding of our country over 200 years ago. Instead of arguing their case that we need to move away from the patent protection-type situation, they are simply calling their legislation a comprehensive bill. Instead of attacking the small inventor, instead of saying we're going to have a bill that actually restricts the rights of our citizens in this area because we believe that the small inventors are abusing the system, instead, they're calling it a comprehensive bill to make it sound like they are fixing some problems within the system.

This bill, let's remember, H.R. 1908, is not new. This is very similar to legislation that we barely beat back 10 years ago. I called that the Steal American Technologies Act; and guess what, we beat them but they're back.

So this could be called, and it would be accurate to call H.R. 1908, the Steal American Technology Act Part 2. By the way, those of us who mobilized opposition to the 1997 patent legislation negotiated a compromise that passed in 1999 and then became law in the year 2000. This legislation on the floor tomorrow represents a negation of all the compromises that we worked out in 1999.

So those of us, Mr. Manzullo who will be with us in a moment, Marcy Kaptur and myself and others who insisted on certain things for that patent bill in 1999 and were given compromises in that legislation, we now face a bill that negates all of those compromises. I don't know if that's meaningful to those people who are examining this process, but it suggests the level of the attack on our patent system that we are experiencing.

Even at this late moment, we are not certain what will be exactly in that bill because, at this moment, as we speak, there are changes being made in that bill that we are being told about, and we don't know exactly what those changes will be until tomorrow when it hits the floor because deals are being made as we speak.

So first and foremost, no matter what the details, because we probably won't have a chance to look at all the details, let it be noted that H.R. 1908, which will be on the floor tomorrow, was specifically designed to weaken the patent protection of the American inventor. This was the purpose of the bill.

We supported and will support any real reforms of the patent system, but those proposed in H.R. 1908 will cause the collapse of the patent system that has sustained America's wealth, our prosperity and, yes, our national security for over 200 years.

The negative impact of the totality of this bill is reflected in the wide spectrum who are in opposition who have mobilized against it.

For the record, I would submit, Mr. Speaker, the list of those companies and those organizations and those individuals, prominent individuals and companies and universities who are now fervently opposed to H.R. 1908 and begging us not to pass this legislation, and I would place it in the Record at this point.

Organizations and Companies Which Have Raised Objections to Patent

Legislation (H.R. 1908)

Organizations and Companies Raising Objections to H.R.

1908, the Patent Reform Act of 2007: 3M, Abbott, Accelerated

Technologies, Inc., Acorn Cardiovascular Inc., Adams Capital

Management, Adroit Medical Systems, Inc., AdvaMed, Advanced

Diamond Technologies, Inc., Advanced Medical Optics, Inc.,

Advanced Neuromodulation Systems, Inc., Aero-Marine Company,

AFL-CIO, African American Republican Leadership Council.

Air Liquide, Air Products, ALD NanoSolutions, Inc., ALIO

Industries, Allergan, Inc., Almyra, Inc., AmberWave Systems

Corporation, American Conservative Union, American

Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), American Seed

Trade, Americans for Sovereignty.

Americans for the Preservation of Liberty, Amylin

Pharmaceuticals, AngioDynamics, Inc., Applied Medical,

Applied Nanotech, Inc., Argentis Pharmaceuticals, LLC,

Arizona BioIndustry Association, ARYx Therapeutics, Ascenta

Therapeutics, Inc., Association of University Technology

Managers (AUTM).

Asthmatx, Inc., AstraZeneca, Aware, Inc., Baxa Corporation,

Baxter Healthcare Corporation, BayBio, Beckman Coulter, BIO--

Biotechnology Industry Organization, BioCardia, Inc., BIOCOM,

Biogen Idec, Biomedical Association, BioOhio, Bioscience

Institute, Biotechnology Council of New Jersey.

Blacks for Economic Security Trust Fund, BlazeTech

Corporation, Boston Scientific, Bridgestone Americas Holding,

Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb, BuzzLogic, California Healthcare

Institute, California Healthcare Institute (The), Canopy

Ventures, Carbide Derivative Technologies, Cardiac Concepts,

Inc., CardioDynamics, Cargill, Inc., Cassie-Shipherd Group,

Caterpillar, Celgene Corporation, Cell Genesys, Inc., Center

7, Inc., Center for Small Business and the Environment,

Centre for Security Policy, Cephalon, CheckFree, Christian

Coalition of America.

Cincinnati Sub-Zero Products, Coalition for 21st Century

Patent Reform, Coalitions for America, CogniTek Management

Systems, Inc., Colorado Bioscience Association, Conceptus,

Inc., CONNECT, Connecticut United for Research Excellence,

Cornell University, Corning, Coronis Medical Ventures,

Council for America, CropLife America, Cryptography Research,

Cummins Inc., Cummins-Allison Corporation.

CVRx Inc., Dais Analytic Corporation, Dartmouth Regional

Technology Center, Inc., Declaration Alliance, Deltanoid

Pharmaceuticals, Digimarc Corporation, DirectPointe, Dow

Chemical Company, Dupont, Dura-Line Corporation, Dynatronics

Co., Eagle Forum, Eastman Chemical Company, Economic

Development Center, Edwards Lifesciences, Elan

Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Electronics for Imaging, Eli Lilly and

Company, Ellman Innovations LLC, Enterprise Partners Venture

Capital, Evalve, Inc.

Exxon Mobile Corporation, Fallbrook Technologies Inc.,

FarSounder, Inc. Footnote.com.

Gambro BCT, General Electric, Genomic Health, Inc., Gen-

Probe Incorporated, Genzyme, Georgia Biomedical Partnership,

Glacier Cross, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline, Glenview State Bank,

Hawaii Science & Technology Council, HealthCare Institute of

New Jersey, HeartWare, Inc., Helius, Inc., Henkel

Corporation, Hoffman-LaRoche, Inc.

iBIO, Imago Scientific Instruments, Impulse Dynamics (USA),

Inc., Indiana Health Industry Forum, Indiana University,

Innovation Alliance, Institute of Electrical and Electronics

Engineers (IEEE)-USA, InterDigital Communications

Corporation, Intermolecular, Inc., International Association

of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), Invitrogen

Corporation, Iowa Biotechnology Association, ISTA

Pharmaceuticals, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Johnson &

Johnson, KansasBio, Leadership Institute, Let Freedom Ring,

Life Science Alley, LITMUS, LLC.

LSI Corporation, Lux Capital Management, Luxul Corporation,

Maryland Taxpayers' Association.

Masimo Corporation, Massachusetts Biotechnology Council,

Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council (MassMEDIC),

Maxygen Inc., MDMA--Medical Device Manufacturer's

Association, Medical College of Wisconsin, MedImmune, Inc.,

Medtronic, Merck, Metabasis Therapeutics, Inc., Metabolex,

Inc., Metacure (USA), Inc., MGI Pharma Inc., MichBio,

Michigan Small Tech Association, Michigan State University,

Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Milliken & Company, Mohr,

Davidow Ventures, Monsanto Company.

NAM--National Association of Manufacturers,

NanoBioMagnetics, Inc. (NBMI), NanoBusiness Alliance,

NanoInk, Inc., NanoIntegris, Inc., Nanomix, Inc., Nanophase

Technologies, NanoProducts Corporation, Nanosys, Inc.,

Nantero, Inc., National Center for Public Policy Research,

Nektar Therapeutics, Neoconix, Inc., Neuro Resource Group

(NRG), Neuronetics, Inc., NeuroPace, New England Innovation

Alliance, New Hampshire Biotechnology Council, New Hampshire

Department of Economic Development, New Mexico Biotechnical

and Biomedical Association, New York Biotechnology

Association.

Norseman Group, North Carolina Biosciences Organization,

North Carolina State University, North Dakota State

University, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Northwestern

University, Novartis, Novartis Corporation, Novasys Medical

Inc., NovoNordisk, NUCRYST Pharmaceuticals, Inc. NuVasive,

Inc., Nuvelo, Inc., Ohio State University, OpenCEL, LLC.

Palmetto Biotechnology Alliance, Patent Cafe.com, Inc.,

Patent Office Professional Association, Pennsylvania Bio,

Pennsylvania State University, PepsiCo, Inc., Pfizer, PhRMA--

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America,

Physical Sciences Inc., PointeCast Corporation, Power

Innovations International, PowerMetal Technologies, Inc.,

Preformed Line Products, Procter & Gamble, Professional

Inventors' Alliance, ProRhythm, Inc., Purdue University, Pure

Plushy Inc., QUALCOMM Inc.

QuantumSphere, Inc., QuesTek Innovations LLC, Radiant

Medical, Inc., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Research

Triangle Park, NC, Retractable Technologies, Inc.,

RightMarch.com, S & C Electric Company, Salix

Pharmaceuticals, Inc., SanDisk Corporation, Sangamo

Biosciences, Inc., Semprius, Inc., Small Business Association

of Michigan--Economic Development Center, Small Business

Exporters Association of the United States.

Small Business Technology Council, Smart Bomb Interactive,

Smile Reminder, SmoothShapes, Inc., Solera Networks, South

Dakota Biotech Association, Southern California Biomedical

Council, Spiration, Inc., Standup Bed Company, State of New

Hampshire Department of Resources and Economic Development,

Stella Group, Ltd., StemCells, SurgiQuest, Inc.

Symyx Technologies, Inc., Tech Council of Maryland/MdBio,

Technology Patents & Licensing, Tennessee Biotechnology

Association, Tessera, Inc., Texas A&M, Texas Healthcare,

Texas Instruments, Three Arch Partners.

United Technologies, University of California System,

University of Illinois, University of Iowa, University of

Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota,

University of New Hampshire, University of North Carolina

System, University of Rochester, University of Utah,

University of Wisconsin-Madison, US Business and Industry

Council, US Council for International Business.

USGI Medical, USW--United Steelworkers, Vanderbilt

University and Medical Center, Virent Energy Systems, Inc.,

Virginia Biotechnology Association, Visidyne, Inc.,

VisionCare Opthamalogic Technologies, Inc., Washington

Biotechnology & Biomedical Association, Washington

University, WaveRx, Inc.

Wayne State University, Wescor, Inc., Weyerhaeuser, Wilson

Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Wisconsin Alumni Research

Foundation (WARF), Wisconsin Biotechnology and Medical Device

Association, Wyeth.

I would submit for the Record a letter dated September 5, 2007, from the Communication Workers of America, who are coming out against and are very, very specific in their opposition to H.R. 1908, and there is a rumor going around right now that the unions have now decided not to be opposed to H.R. 1908, but, instead, are neutral on the issue of H.R. 1908.

Communications Workers

of America,

Washington, DC, September 5, 2007.

Hon. Patrick Leahy, Chairman,

Hon. Arlen Specter,

Ranking Member, Senate Judiciary Committee,

Hon. John Conyers, Chairman,

Hon. Lamar Smith,

Ranking Member, House Judiciary Committee, Washington, DC.

Dear Chairman Leahy, Ranking Member Specter, Chairman

Conyers, and Ranking Member Smith: We are writing you to

express our concerns regarding the current U.S. patent system

and the potential negative impact of H.R. 1908 and S. 1145 on

this system.

The American economy relies on the ingenuity and

imagination of inventors who help drive our economy and job

creation. Without a fair patent system that rewards

inventors, both job creation and ingenuity will suffer. Our

union members work in the technology and manufacturing

sectors, both of which will be affected by these pieces of

legislation. We want to see a system that solidifies our

leadership in innovation and helps the American economy

produce the jobs and products of the future.

The National Academies of Sciences (NAS) have suggested a

set of improvements for the patent system. However, the

Patent Reform Act of 2007, while offering some needed

changes, does not reflect the body of improvements suggested

by NAS. We are concerned that two sections of the proposed

legislation, the post-patent review process and apportionment

of damages, will have a negative impact on innovation and

research.

The courts already follow a multipoint system for the

appropriate consideration for damages. This should remain

intact rather than constricted so as to limit damage

settlements. The post-patent review process adds a third step

to the two existing review processes available. This third

one opens the process to serial patent challenges. For some,

this can become a business strategy of continual reviews

designed to elicit settlement. For the firms facing

challenges, they can decide it is easier to outsource their

products to a vendor rather than deal with the legal process.

In a system that is already overwhelmed meeting the review

needs of current patent filings, this is an unnecessary step.

At a time when the rampant piracy of intellectual property

by our global competitors is being continuously challenged,

Congress should not give these competitors yet another

advantage over American workers. We hope to work with you in

your effort to improve the current patent system without

disadvantaging American workers and stifling American

innovation. We appreciate your leadership on this issue and

we look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Sincerely,

Jeff Rechenbach,

Executive Vice President.

Let me note that only one union has changed its position and become neutral on 1908, but, instead, all the other unions, the wide swath of unions in this country, are just heavily opposed to H.R. 1908. So why are all these people, unions, universities, the biotech industry, pharmaceuticals, and, of course, especially small business, why are these people so opposed to this bill, H.R. 1908, which I call the Steal America's Technology Act No. 2.

Number one, let's look at some of the requirements of the bill. What will it do? Number one, it will require that all patent applications be published 18 months after the application is filed.

By the way, we negotiated this. We are joined right now by Mr. Manzullo, who is beside us. Mr. Manzullo and I fought hard in 1999 to ensure that the average right of the American inventor, to keep confidential his patent applications until that patent was issued, would be maintained.

In that legislation, they said, if an American inventor does not want to have his patent published for the whole world to see, his patent application, even before the patent is issued, he can opt out of a requirement that would require him to have his patent application disclosed.

This opting-out feature was a compromise. Now, those who negotiated with us, and long hard negotiations, have negated their compromise. That's the type of integrity that we are up against here, negating someone after you have actually made honest compromises? How can we trust what's in this bill if that is the basis of the organization of the structure of the bill?

H.R. 1908 removes the opt-out provision that was put into the law by our negotiations back in 1999. Now, let's

note that last year 20,000 inventors, three-quarters of all the small businesses who applied for patents, chose to keep their inventions secret and to opt out of the provision that once you apply for a patent, that after 18 months, whether or not you have the patent, it will be put on the Internet for every thief in the world to see. No wonder why these 20,000 inventors decided to opt out of that.

The thieves and infringers overseas are licking their chops, waiting to pounce on their new ability to get the details about American technology. Just look at this quote that Mr. Manzullo showed me from the Economic Times of India, dated July 23, 2007. ``A crucial bill making its way through the U.S. Congress is set to give a new inexpensive option for Indian drug makers to attack the patents that give monopoly rights to the top-selling MNC [multinational corporations] brands in the largest pharmaceutical market.''

What that means is the Indian people who are involved with stealing our technology and copying it, especially those technologies in the pharmaceutical area, are getting ready for the changes that will be brought about by this legislation so that by the time our pharmaceutical companies are ready to go on the market with their goods, the Indian copiers will have already stolen the product of all of their research and development and turned it in to the market in India and elsewhere.

This is horrendous. This is right up front, they are telling us. We are getting ready to steal hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, worth of information that was based on the research, the investment that we made in research in the United States of America, to benefit their companies.

Well, it has been estimated that the U.S. economy loses $250 billion a year at this time from global intellectual property theft. If this bill passes, that number will triple or quadruple as a result of the passage of this legislation.

Number 2, this bill opens up new avenues of attack before and after a patent has been issued. New attacks are now available in the pre-grant to the opposition, to someone who would like to try to make it more difficult for an inventor to get his patent in the first place and to hold up the issuance of his patent. Section 9, part B of H.R. 1908 says any person may submit for consideration an inclusion in the record of a patent application any patent, published patent application or other publication of potential relevance to the examination of the application.

This means we are opening up the process so people can argue against the issuance of the patent, where before that was kept very confidential, and confidential for a purpose. Because if you have people arguing at that level, what happens is the patent is delayed. What do they want to do if it's delayed? They want to publish it for the whole world to see.

Pre-grant opposition allows for outside folks like China or other countries who may have people they have hired here, people, I might add even domestic corporate scavengers, to look at applications and then dig up damaging concepts and, perhaps, ideas that would cloud the issues at hand and submit it to the patent examiners in order to defeat or to delay an application. Not only the examiner, but the whole world will be looking at these applications if those who wrote H.R. 1908 have their way. So China can steal our technology and defeat our patent applicants even before they get their patents.

Another thing this bill does, of course, is afterwards it gives a post-grant review, a new system to post-grant review, to challengers to prove that the patent is not valid, and it changes the standards of validity and how that validity is to be determined.

The standard is being changed from a preponderance of evidence, and this will be replaced, and that a preponderance of evidence will replace the current clear and convincing evidence, which is the current standard.

Now, why are they changing these standards? They are not changing the standards to make it more difficult for people to challenge someone who owns a piece of technology, to make it easier for our inventors to defend themselves. It makes it more difficult for our defenders, for our inventors to defend themselves.

Why are they changing that criteria? It's not aimed at helping the inventors, the innovators. It's aimed at helping the scavengers.

Number 3, and in one moment I am going to ask Mr. Manzullo to join me, H.R. 1908 constricts the options available to rightful patent owners. So there are restrictions on what the actual patent owners, the people who have been issued the patents can do, especially in the area of which courts will be deciding their issues; limits on, as I say, limits on court venue, where either party resides, and where the Defendant has committed an alleged act of infringement, has established this, of course, will place incredible new challenges for our inventors. These are, again, aimed at trying to put restrictions on the inventors and give leverage to those who would steal that technology.

It requires the court to break down the value of individual components of a product and calculate the damages based on the value. That's not the way right now it works. If someone infringes on someone's patent, that person who owns that property who has been wronged can sue that company.

But it's not just based on how much that one component is worth. It is how much that person who owns that technology would have charged that company if it had been an honest contract and an honest negotiation.

Again, what we are doing is restricting and making it more difficult for the inventor to protect his interest.

In the end, this change alone will mean that the large corporations will be able to steal from the little guy and the foreign corporations will be able to steal from the other guy and just say, well, come at me. It's going to cost you more money to actually attack us in court and to fight us in court than you will be able to get out of it if you attack us in court.

That change alone is going to undermine the rights of the inventors to control their inventions and creativity. That's the purpose of the bill.

Patents would be awarded, again, and this is one of the more dramatic changes. In our country's history, we have always had a system that patents were awarded not to those who would have been the first to file for a patent, but, instead, to those who actually invented and could prove that they had invented a piece of technology. That has worked well for our country, and it is different in other countries.

Japan and Europe have had different systems. This system is aimed at helping the big business rather than the small inventor, because big business can issue, can apply and pay for patent after patent application after patent application. Make one little step forward, and then you apply for a patent based on that step forward, rather than on a completed invention or a completed project.

That change is fundamental to our system. We have always been recognizing the person who has invented the technology, not the company who can pay the lawyer to arrive at the patent office first.

Well, number seven, and, finally, this bill creates a new proceeding to determine the inventor with the right to file an application on a claimed invention. The patent trial and appeal board would be established in this case, which, again, would so complicate this system. This is a whole new addition that will so complicate this process. It is not aimed at simplifying and making our system more effective. It's aimed at undermining the validity of this system.

This change would flood the patent system, making it more expensive to get a patent. In short, every promise in H.R. 1908 is anti-inventor. Every single one of the provisions of 1908 that have been added are aimed there to undercut the inventor. Every provision weakens the rights of the inventor and undermines his ability to protect his or her rights as the inventor.

This bill will only double or triple the losses that we have in terms of intellectual property theft overseas. Our own technology will be taken away from us, will be stolen, and it will be used to destroy us, as foreigners will have all the information they need about our advances, about our research, and then they will put that information to work to destroy us, to out-compete us, to put us out of business.

H.R. 1908 would open up the doors for attack both before and after a patent is issued. So before a patent is issued, the

inventory will have to go through more hoops, and after the patent is issued, the inventor will go through more hoops.

What we have got here is a piece of legislation that will go against the whole purpose that our law was established and the Founding Fathers put into the Constitution so many years ago, that inventors and writers and other creators, that their rights will be protected.

I now would like to ask Mr. Manzullo if he would like to join me and share with us a few of his thoughts. Let me note that in 1997, Mr. Manzullo and Marcy Kaptur and myself and John Campbell of California, there were just a few of us, fought a battle. We were up against the most powerful forces in the world, these multinational corporations who were trying to sneak this through, and we were able to defeat them with the mobilization of the public behind us.

This time, at least, we do have the major universities with us. This time we have the biotech industry and the pharmaceutical industry and the labor unions behind us. But we need to make sure that the American people understand what's going on here tomorrow and the vote and the significance of that vote tomorrow.

I yield to the gentleman from Illinois.

I would ask the gentleman, isn't it very clear when you're looking at that change, and there are about, as I was going through, six or seven changes, what was the purpose? What was in the mind of those people who wrote this into law and pushed for this change to be made?

There it is. The bottom line is, you go through this bill and there are about 20 different provisions like the damage provision that you're talking about, and each and every one of them is designed to weaken the protection and hurt the person who's the innovator.

And what has been our greatest asset in the United States of America? Is that we protected those innovators.

If the gentleman would yield for one moment, we do have a gentleman with us from Maine who would like to say a few words, and I would yield whatever time you would consume to Congressman Michaud from Maine.

I appreciate the support of the gentleman from Maine for this position. It lets us know that this is as bipartisan an issue as any one that I have ever been on. From day one it was Marcy Kaptur and others who have played a major role in this fight.

We have unions who are traditionally supporting the Democratic Party who are very deeply involved in this fight, right alongside small businesses, which quite generally have been Republicans. So this goes across the board. This is an issue, because it is the American people who are going to suffer the consequences.

We need to ask ourselves, if all of these groups are against it, who the heck is for this bill?

And this is a power grab. This is a classic power grab, and it's being headed by companies that are basically controlled by billionaires from the electronics industry.

Now, let's take a look at the electronics industry. What do they want to do?

The electronics industry has a product that they have to include various elements that are created by innovators and by inventors. This isn't like the pharmaceutical industry or a small business person or the biotech industry or the nanotech industry. Usually, what we've got with those industries, we've got one new invention or one creative improvement that serves as the basis for their profit.

No, when you're in the electronics industry you have a computer or some other type of piece of electronics that has three or four elements in it, and if an inventor comes up with something new, they either have to include it in their product, or they will be non-competitive.

I certainly will.

Right. So what we have got is the electronics industry knows that if there are new ideas that improve things, they will have to include it in their product in order to remain competitive. They just don't want to buy those new ideas. They don't want to pay for it. They want to be able to steal those ideas and minimize the consequences of that theft. That's the ultimate purpose for what is going on here.

The electronics industry is different than these other industries. And as you can see by the wide scope and breadth of the opposition to this bill, the other industries know that this will be dramatically harmful to them. But it will permit the electronic industry billionaires to increase their profit.

And, by the way, what does the electronics industry do now? They are the ones who, of course, go to China and build their factories in China and increase the technology capabilities of that country, which is, of course, run by a regime that is the world's worst human rights abuser. These are electronics companies, some of which have gone to the dictatorship in China and helped them sort of restructure their computer systems so they can track down religious dissidents who are trying to use the Internet. This is the type of people who are behind this bill.

This power grab of the electronics industry would send even more technology to China and India. It would permit the people in Korea and Japan and others to be able to basically beat our inventors into the ground. And it has been our creative genius that has protected our country against these types of regimes in the past.

In fact, as Americans, we don't match people man for man. We don't match our competition with muscle power and sweat. We can beat the competition in this modern world by making sure our people have a technological edge over their competitors. The working people in those other countries may work for a pittance, but American workers should have the competitive edge.

People in the electronic industry who are behind this bill don't care one iota about those American workers or America's long-term competitiveness because they consider themselves multinational corporations.

Well, I am here to say that the coalition of Democrats and Republicans on the floor of the House opposing this bill do not consider ourselves multinationalists or globalists. We consider ourselves patriotic Americans, and we have got to watch out for the interests of the American people.

Yes, I will.

I think that's a good description.

I appreciate that.

I think that we need to understand that there are so many parts of this bill, as Mr. Manzullo has pointed out, whether we are talking about damages or whether we are talking about challenges before and after the patent can be filed and hoops to be jumped through, each and every one of them designed basically to thwart the little guy, thwart the inventor. And, as I said, the group behind it, the electronics industry, their purpose, I believe, is to be able to promote the theft.

But what do they say? What do the people who are the proponents of this legislation say is their motive? They claim that we have to have this patent reform in order to harmonize the patent laws of the United States with those of the rest of the world. Harmonization.

Well, we have had the strongest patent protection of any country on this planet, which has guaranteed the success of our country and the high standard of living of our people. That is what we got from the strongest patent protection because we considered that strong protection of our rights the same protection that we would give for speech or freedom of religion or the other rights that we hold sacred.

Well, if we have the strongest patent rights in the world, patent protections in the world, and if we want to harmonize them with the rest of the world, that means we are going to decrease the protection of our citizens.

What would happen if we told our citizens in order to have harmony with the rest of the world's laws, we are going to meld them all together and harmonize our laws of freedom of speech and religion with the rest of the world and we would be told, well, maybe we could enjoy the freedoms now at the level of the people of Singapore or someplace like that? Well, there would be a revolt in this country if we tried to diminish the protections of our people to harmonize it with the rest of the world. But that is what they are doing for the economic freedom that we are talking about today. The economic rights of our people are being harmonized in terms of their ownership of their creation, their patents and innovations. They want to harmonize that with the rest of the world.

Well, if there should be one standard for the rest of the world, let them harmonize with our laws. Let us bring up their standards. The Japanese and the Europeans do have a different standard on this, and that is why the Japanese are incapable of creating new technologies. They just take what we have and try to improve it.

The fact is we have had the strongest patent protection rights in the world and we have thus had more innovation and a higher standard of living of any other people of the world. The common man here has had the opportunity that common people in other parts of the world do not have because of American technological superiority. We can't let those who profit already by setting up factories in China and other dictatorships that are totally contrary to our way of life to tell us they want to make even more money to be able to steal even the technology and the new ideas so that those factories over there will be able to produce the newest and cutting-edge technologies coming out of our innovators even before our innovators are able to commercialize it in the United States.

Well, perhaps if you are a corporate elitist, the idea of harmonizing our rights with the rest of the world and harmonizing our property and bringing down certain levels of protection makes sense. If you are a corporate leader who lives behind a gated community and you are not affected by the fact that American workers are becoming less competitive because we are sending our technology overseas, no, you don't understand that because you are in the corporate boardroom. But the American people understand that. And that is why the unions are against this bill. That is why we have a broad coalition of Democrats and Republicans against H.R. 1908.

What we have is a disguised destruction of the fundamental patent system that has been in place in our country for a long time, for over 200 years. As I read, it was part of our own Constitution.

Well, this attempt to steal the little guy's creation is not new to our country. Even with our patent protection, it has been a rough haul for our inventors.

There is a statue in the Capitol of the United States. There are many statues in the Capitol. My favorite statue is right downstairs. It is the statue of Philo Farnsworth. Anyone visiting the Capitol, I would suggest, should go see the statue of Philo Farnsworth. It's there with the rest of the heroes of freedom and a bunch of politicians who have made statues to themselves. Philo Farnsworth was the quintessential American inventor, individual inventor. He was a poor person, of course, but had limited education, probably a master's degree. I'm not really sure what his education level was. But he came from a rural area in Utah, and through his own creative instincts and his understanding of physics and other theories and electronics, he was able early in the last century to fully understand how to create a picture tube. He was actually the ``father of television.''

RCA at that time had spent hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars investigating, doing research, trying to find the secret of how you could turn radio waves into a television tube. They never were successful.

He discovered it. He was the one who had the breakthrough idea of how it could be done. Philo Farnsworth. And he wrote to RCA and said, I have discovered this. I understand you are doing a lot of research. I know how to do it.

And the head of RCA's research department came out all the way on a train to see Philo, and he went through his small laboratory and showed him what he had discovered. And it was with an understanding that Philo, perhaps a very naive understanding, was going to work with RCA and develop this picture tube so all of the American people would have now a whole new way of life with the television set. And television has changed our way of life.

The guy from RCA took all the notes, and he sped away on the train back to New York, saying, ``We're going to get right back to you so we can get moving on the development of this technology.''

Well, Philo waited and he waited, and there never was a phone call from New York. And guess what. He read in the paper a few months later that RCA had made a huge discovery, and it was the discovery of how to produce the television picture tube and how they had had this incredible breakthrough in their laboratories.

Philo Farnsworth fought for 20 years to get recognition that he was indeed the inventor of the picture tube. It was an incredible fight. David Sarnoff, an arrogant head of RCA, a corporate leader who could give a darn about little guys like Philo Farnsworth, ended up doing what? Instead of paying royalties and recognizing and giving credit to this wonderful inventor, he decided to smash him like a bug, decided to fight him and use every bit of the treasure that was available to RCA to beat this guy into submission, this little guy who thought he had the right to challenge the great David Sarnoff.

It went all the way to the Supreme Court. And God bless America, the Supreme Court decided for little Philo Farnsworth against one of the great arrogant corporate giants in America, David Sarnoff.

Unfortunately, Philo Farnsworth, by that time most of the patent time had run out, he never made much money from his great discovery that changed the world we live in. But I will tell you, today, as you go through the Nation's Capitol, you can take a look at the statue of Philo Farnsworth right here and you can understand that we pass laws here to make sure the rights of the little guy are protected, even when that little guy is in a fight with a powerful interest like RCA. David Sarnoff does not have a statue in this Capitol. So let us note this, that in this Capitol is the statue to the little guy and to the rights of the little guy.

Tomorrow we will face a bill, H.R. 1908, that is designed to smash down the little guys, the inventors, so that arrogant corporate giants can steal their technology, corporate giants who do business overseas who consider themselves globalists and multi-nationalists taking American technology overseas. That's what is at hand. That is the issue that is being discussed.

Mr. Speaker, I would call on my colleagues to join me and Marcy Kaptur and members of the Democrat Party and Republican Party who are watching out for the little guy tomorrow. Join with the universities and the unions and other corporate interests and manufacturers in the United States who are trying to protect intellectual properties so they can compete overseas. Join us in defeating the Steal American Technologies Act II, H.R. 1908.

And with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, let me just note for my colleague who just finished his very, very appropriate remarks concerning the passing of Jennifer Dunn, I have three children at home, little Tristen and Anika and Christian; and as a parent, I am very grateful to Jennifer Dunn for the leadership that she provided in helping make our country safer for our children, the children that we all love so much.

And when we talk about the future and I think about my children, we have to think that whatever we do here, we are creating a better world, and it is a better world for our children because they are going to be around a lot longer than we are.

Well, Mr. Speaker, on Friday the House will consider legislation that will have a huge impact on the well-being of the American people and, yes, the well-being of America's children as they get older. Yet this bill will have a great deal to do with whether or not our children have good jobs and live in a secure country.

This bill is receiving very little attention. Very powerful interest groups are trying to sneak this one by us, and if they succeed, they will be enriched and the American people will be worse off.

So what's new? Well, what's new is that this special interest foray is not aimed at just adding an earmark or changing a clause in the tax law to help a specific company. It is a maneuver to dramatically diminish a constitutionally protected right that has served our Nation well. It is a fundamental change in a system that has been in place since our country's founding. That is a lot different than the special interest forays in the past just aimed at changing little elements of the law for their own benefit.

We are talking about fundamentally altering America's patent system. Now, if H.R. 1908, the bill in question, passes, there will be tremendous negative long-term consequences not just for America's inventors but for the country.

Now, patent law is thought to be so complicated and so esoteric that most people tune out once they realize that that is the subject of a discussion. We have probably lost people right now who are reading the Congressional Record or watching C-SPAN or our colleagues who are watching this from their offices. But the technology that we are talking about is vitally important to the well-being of our country. Patent law is not so complicated and esoteric because it is that vital to the well-being of our country. Our technological genius and the laws protecting and promoting that genius have been at the heart of America's success as a Nation.

America's technological edge has made American workers competitive with low-priced laborers overseas. It has provided the American people with the highest standard of living in the world, and it enabled our country to sail safely through the troubled waters of world wars and international threats. It is American technology that has made all the difference for our country's security and our people's quality of life.

Protecting individual rights, even for the little guy, has been the hallmark of our Nation. Patent rights, the right to one's own creation, which is what we are talking about when we talk about patent rights, have been considered a fundamental part of our system since our country's founding. In fact, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and others of our Founding Fathers were not the only people who believed in freedom and democracy. They believed in technology and progress.

Visit Monticello and see what Thomas Jefferson did with his time after he penned the words to the Declaration of Independence and after he served as President of the United States. He went back to Monticello and spent his time inventing gadgets and pieces of equipment that would lift the burden from the shoulders of labor. And, by the way, Jefferson was America's first Patent Commissioner.

And then there is Ben Franklin, the inventor of the bifocal and the potbellied stove. Before Benjamin Franklin people could only heat themselves at a fireplace and project heat in a room only from a fireplace. And Benjamin Franklin invented the potbellied stove, which started the whole concept of modern heating. This grand old man, who was present at the Declaration of Independence and the writing of our Constitution, once lamented his own death not by talking about the fear of the unknown and dying but by lamenting that he would not be able to see the great human progress that was bound to happen, the technological advances that would be the byproduct of a free people in the United States of America.

Our Founding Fathers believed that with freedom and with technology, we could increase the standard of living of all our people, not just the elite. Our founders were visionaries, not just about political structures but about a way of life for ordinary people and the future of humankind. Those patriots who laid the foundation of our country wrote into the Constitution a provision they firmly believed was a prerequisite to progress and freedom.

Now, last night after I gave a similar speech on the floor, a teacher, a so-called teacher of history, called my office to complain, ``There is nothing about copyrights or patents in our Constitution.'' I don't know how long he has been a teacher. He said he has been teaching 20 years. But my staff member took out a copy of the Constitution and read to him article I, section 8 of the Constitution, which states in part: ``Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.'' They held the right of owning one's ideas and creations and inventions as equal to the rights of speech, religion, and assembly. In fact, in the body of the Constitution before the Bill of Rights, the word ``right'' is only used in reference to patents and copyrights. So that shows you the priority that our Founding Fathers placed on the technological development that would create the dream of America that they felt that they were establishing here on this continent.

In short, we have had the strongest patent protection in the world, and that is why in the history of mankind there has never been a more innovative and creative people. And it has been no accident that Americans are the world's great inventors, scientists, and technologists. No, it is not just the diversity of our people, but diversity certainly plays a role and we can be proud of that and it has contributed to our capabilities. It wasn't just our natural resources, although we were blessed with vast territory and natural resources. Our innovation and progress can be traced to our law from the very beginning. It was the intent of those who wrote these protections into our fundamental law, into the Constitution in those earliest days of our Republic, and it was their vision of optimism that motivated them to write this into the law. Our history is filled with stories of technological achievement that flowed from the fact that we had established a country that thought that the rights of ownership of what you create is just as important as your right to speak or the right to worship God as you so choose.

We found people who emerged among us, Eli Whitney, for example, who not only invented the cotton gin but who invented the interchangeable parts for manufacturing. This revolutionized industrial production and dramatically uplifted the well-being of millions of people and, yes, people who were yet to be born.

Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper. Before that the food supply for our

people was limited. People went to bed hungry, large numbers. Cyrus McCormick invented a reaper that made sure that every person would have bread enough to eat, that children would be fed.

Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, which eventually led, of course, to the telephone and revolutionized a whole idea of communications throughout the world. Thomas Edison, the light bulb and so many other inventions.

Interestingly, black Americans were prolific inventors even at times when they were terribly discriminated against because patent law was one law that was justly applied to them for the most part, although there were issues of discrimination even in that area. But compared to the other areas where they were totally discriminated against, there was some leeway in our society. And black inventors emerged, as is predictable, because that was their avenue to rise up. Men like Jan Matzeliger, who invented a machine that was used in shoe manufacturing that dramatically changed the shoe industry to the point that the average person after Matzeliger's invention could afford to have more than one pair of shoes in his life.

Before that they were so expensive, people had one pair of shoes that they repaired for the rest of their lives.

George Washington Carver, another great black inventor, a great scholar, a world-respected scientist, and so many more like him. We are proud that our history advanced technologies because we know, as Americans, as we have always known, that through our country's history, that the inventions that we're talking about produced more wealth with less labor, thus increased the standard of living of all people and the opportunity for all people who are part of our country's brotherhood and sisterhood to share in the benefits, in the fruits of this free society.

And yes, we have had problems in the past and there was discrimination against black Americans, obviously. Slavery was a blight on our system, a sin. But as we have tried to produce more wealth, and the more wealth that has been produced and the more opportunity that's been available, the easier it's been for our society to try to correct those terrible crimes and sins of the past. And black Americans have done their share, more than their share, in producing these inventions that have helped our country.

By and large, the inventors were not part of large corporate structures. They were, by and large, little guys, people who didn't have vast companies behind them, which leads us, of course, to the Wright brothers.

We remember the Wright brothers, men with little education that worked in a bicycle shop. They owned a bicycle shop and ended up inventing something a little more than 100 years ago that they were told was impossible to invent, impossible to build by the experts. They had no huge corporate structures behind them, so thus they didn't have a board of directors that prohibited them from their research or directed them in a way that would have prevented them from being successful. They went forward, they invested their time, and they invested their limited resources. And they changed the future of humankind forever as they took mankind's feet off the ground and put us on the road to the heavens. The patent issued to the Wright brothers is perhaps one of the most significant documents in the history of all mankind.

Let us understand that it was not raw muscle nor was it just hard work that built our country. People work hard all over the world and live in abject poverty. It is not our vast territory or natural resources. It was, instead, our ingenuity, our intelligence, and yes, the legal system that was established to protect that ingenuity and the intelligence and the creativity of our people.

We treated intellectual property, the creation of new technologies, as we treated property and personal rights and political rights. They were held in the same esteem in the United States of America. And that is what America is all about, that every person's rights were to be respected and protected. As I say, we didn't always live up to that dream, but it was our standard. We held those high standards and it served us well. Now we have people trying to undermine those standards for personal gain.

Today we face a great historic challenge, and this challenge comes exactly at a time when our country faces economic threats from abroad as never before. We must prevail over our economic competitors. They are at war with the well-being of the American people. We must win, or our country and our people will lose. My children, Anika, Tristen and Christian, they will lose. Your children, all of our children will have worse lives in the future if we lose this battle, this economic battle that we are fighting today. Yes, our people will suffer.

Future generations could well see their standard of living decline, the opportunity of their young people vanish, as well as the safety and strength of our country, which all leads us to the legislation that will be considered on Friday. Very powerful corporate interests, mainly billionaires in the electronics industry and the financial industry, are on the verge of fundamentally changing the U.S. patent system, and it will have dire consequences for the American people. So our colleagues need to pay attention.

Let us be clear and specific; the legislation in question, H.R. 1908, will dramatically weaken the patent rights of ordinary Americans and make us even more vulnerable to the outright theft of American-made technology and innovative ideas.

The purpose of the legislation is to weaken the patent system. Those people in the electronics industry and the financial industry do not want to pay royalties; they do not want to be hampered by watching out for and respecting the ownership rights of our inventors anymore.

This legislation is a slow-motion destruction of the patent system. No one will be candid enough to admit it, but the real reason for this and past forays against the patent system is aimed at the destruction of the system; it is not to make it better. No one is going to admit it. They're going to say they're here trying to reform the system. It is not aimed at that; it is aimed at destroying the system. The word ``reform'' is being used as a cover just as it was a cover in the immigration battle. We all remember that. People talked about comprehensive immigration because the real purpose, as we all know, was amnesty in that bill that was making its way through Congress. Everybody knows that. And amnesty would have brought tens of millions more here, at least that was debatable. Well, we should have talked about it and debated that issue. Instead, we heard about comprehensive reform as if it was going to solve a problem and make the immigration influx into our country, bring it under control. No. The purpose of that bill was amnesty.

When they talk about reform of our patent system, what they're really talking about is destroying the patent system and weakening its protection. They couldn't pass it otherwise.

There are some real problems that need to be solved with our patent system. Unfortunately, the legislation making its way through the system does not correct the problems, just as the comprehensive amnesty bill or comprehensive immigration bill didn't solve the problems. The problems are being used as an excuse to act. But the proposed changes are aimed at a totally different and indefensible goal. It is a power grab, a classic power grab where we are not having an honest debate, an honest exchange of ideas with the American people.

So we readily admit, those of us who are in opposition to the bill that will come to the floor Friday, H.R. 1908, we admit that we need patent legislation, legislation that speeds the examination and issuance of patents, helps the process, the examination process and the issuance process, provides training and compensation for patent examiners. We need legislation that does just that. We need legislation that will protect our inventors against theft, especially against foreign theft, where our own creative genius of our people is being taken and stolen by foreigners and then put into their manufacturing to outdo the United States, to put us out of business; our own creative genius used against us. Yes, we need to fix these problems with the patent.

The bill has this goal, and supposedly they talk about it. And if that was the

goal, it would be welcomed. Well, it also has been a straw man to justify this revolutionary altering of our patent system, of course. What we need, of course, is to correct the problems in the current system, not to destroy the system.

This comprehensive bill that we face, interestingly enough, is similar to a bill that came up 10 years ago that we managed, with public outcry, just like the outcry that stopped the immigration bill in the Senate. We stopped a bill like this 10 years ago. I called it the ``Steal American Technologies Act.'' Well, the same group of people, the same interest group that tried to push that is back. And so if you take a look at this bill, we might call it the ``Steal American Technologies Act Part 2.''

So just what does H.R. 1908 do? First and foremost, it is designed, as I say, to weaken the patent protection of American inventors. So we support real reforms, but the proposed changes in H.R. 1908 will cause the collapse of the patent system that has sustained America for the past 200 years.

The negative impact of the totality of this bill is reflected in the wide spectrum of opposition who are now mobilizing against it.

For the Record, I would submit this list of those who are opposing H.R. 1908, and I would ask this to be included in the Record at this point.

Organizations and Companies Which Have Raised Objections to Patent

Legislation (H.R. 1908)

Organizations and Companies Raising Objections to H.R.

1908, the Patent Reform Act of 2007: 3M, Abbott, Accelerated

Technologies, Inc., Acorn Cardiovascular Inc., Adams Capital

Management, Adroit Medical Systems, Inc., AdvaMed, Advanced

Diamond Technologies, Inc., Advanced Medical Optics, Inc.,

Advanced Neuromodulation Systems, Inc., Aero-Marine Company,

AFL-CIO, African American Republican Leadership Council,

AIPLA--American Intellectual Property Law Association.

Air Liquide, Air Products, ALD NanoSolutions, Inc., ALIO

Industries, Allergan, Inc., Almyra, Inc., AmberWave Systems

Corporation, American Conservative Union, American

Intellectual property Law, Association (AIPLA), American Seed

Trade, Americans for Sovereignty.

Americans for the Preservation of Liberty, Amylin

Pharmaceuticals, AngioDynamics, Inc., Applied Medical,

Applied Nanotech, Inc., Argentis Pharmaceuticals, LLC,

Arizona BioIndustry Association, ARYx Therapeutics, Ascenta

Therapeutics, Inc., Association of University Technology

Managers (AUTM).

Asthmatx, Inc., AstraZeneca, Aware, Inc., Baxa Corporation,

Baxter Healthcare Corporation, BayBio, Beckman Coulter, BIO--

Biotechnology Industry Organization, BioCardia, Inc., BIOCOM,

Biogen Idec, Biomedical Association, BioOhio, Bioscience

Institute, Biotechnology Council of New Jersey.

Blacks for Economic Security Trust Fund, BlazeTech

Corporation, Boston Scientific, Bridgestone Americas Holding,

Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb, BuzzLogic, California Healthcare

Institute, California Healthcare Institute (The), Canopy

Ventures, Carbide Derivative Technologies, Cardiac Concepts,

Inc., CardioDynamics, Cargill, Inc., Cassie-Shipherd Group

(The), Caterpillar, Celgene Corporation, Cell Genesys, Inc.,

Center 7, Inc., Center for Small Business and the

Environment, Centre for Security Policy, Cephalon, CheckFree,

Christian Coalition of America.

Cincinnati Sub-Zero Products, Coalition for 21st Century

Patent Reform, Coalitions for America, CogniTek Management

Systems, Inc., Colorado Bioscience Association, Conceptus,

Inc., CONNECT, Connecticut United for Research Excellence,

Cornell University, Corning, Coronis Medical Ventures,

Council for America, CropLife America, Cryptography Research,

Cummins-Allison Corporation.

Cummins Inc., CVRx Inc., Dais Analytic Corporation,

Dartmouth Regional Technology Center, Inc., Declaration

Alliance, Deltanoid Pharmaceuticals, Digimarc Corporation,

DirectPointe, Dow Chemical Company, Dupont, Dura-Line

Corporation, Dynatronics Co., Eagle Forum, Eastman Chemical

Company, Economic Development Center, Edwards Lifesciences,

Elan Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Electronics for Imaging, Eli

Lilly and Company, Ellman Innovations LLC, Enterprise

Partners Venture Capital, Evalve, Inc.

Exxon Mobile Corporation, Fallbrook Technologies Inc.,

FarSounder, Inc. Footnote.com.

Gambro BCT, General Electric, Genomic Health, Inc., Gen-

Probe Incorporated, Genzyme, Georgia Biomedical Partnership,

Glacier Cross, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline, Glenview State Bank,

Hawaii Science & Technology Council, HealthCare Institute of

New Jersey, HeartWare, Inc., Helius, Inc., Henkel

Corporation, Hoffman-LaRoche, Inc.

iBIO, Imago Scientific Instruments, Impulse Dynamics (USA),

Inc., Indiana Health Industry Forum, Indiana University,

Innovation Alliance, Institute of Electrical and Electronics

Engineers (IEEE)-USA, InterDigital Communications

Corporation, Intermolecular, Inc., International Association

of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), Invitrogen

Corporation, Iowa Biotechnology Association, ISTA

Pharmaceuticals, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Johnson &

Johnson, KansasBio, Leadership Institute, Let Freedom Ring,

Life Science Alley, LITMUS, LLC.

LSI Corporation, Lux Capital Management, Luxul Corporation,

Maryland Taxpayers' Association.

Masimo Corporation, Massachusetts Biotechnology Council,

Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council, MassMEDIC,

Maxygen Inc., MDMA--Medical Device Manufacturer's

Association, Medical College of Wisconsin, MedImmune, Inc.,

Medtronic, Merck, Metabasis Therapeutics, Inc., Metabolex,

Inc., Metacure (USA), Inc., MGI Pharma Inc., MichBio,

Michigan Small Tech Association, Michigan State University,

Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Milliken & Company, Mohr,

Davidow Ventures, Monsanto Company, Motorola.

NAM--National Association of Manufacturers,

NanoBioMagnetics, Inc. (NBMI), NanoBusiness Alliance,

NanoInk, Inc., NanoIntegris, Inc., Nanomix, Inc., Nanophase

Technologies, NanoProducts Corporation, Nanosys, Inc.,

Nantero, Inc., National Center for Public Policy Research,

Nektar Therapeutics, Neoconix, Inc., Neuro Resource Group

(NRG), Neuronetics, Inc., NeuroPace, New England Innovation

Alliance, New Hampshire Biotechnology Council, New Hampshire

Department of Economic Development, New Mexico Biotechnical

and Biomedical Association, New York Biotechnology

Association.

Norseman Group, North Carolina Biosciences Organization,

North Carolina State University, North Dakota State

University, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Northwestern

University, Novartis, Novartis Corporation, Novasys Medical

Inc., NovoNordisk, NUCRYST Pharmaceuticals, Inc. NuVasive,

Inc., Nuvelo, Inc., Ohio State University, OpenCEL, LLC.

Palmetto Biotechnology Alliance, Patent Cafe.com, Inc.,

Patent Office Professional Association, Pennsylvania Bio,

Pennsylvania State University, PepsiCo, Inc., Pfizer, PhRMA--

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America,

Physical Sciences Inc., PointeCast Corporation, Power

Innovations International, PowerMetal Technologies, Inc.,

Preformed Line Products, Procter & Gamble, Professional

Inventors' Alliance, ProRhythm, Inc., Purdue University, Pure

Plushy Inc., QUALCOMM Inc.

QuantumSphere, Inc., QuesTek Innovations LLC, Radiant

Medical, Inc., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Research

Triangle Park, NC, Retractable Technologies, Inc.,

RightMarch.com, S & C Electric Company, Salix

Pharmaceuticals, Inc., SanDisk Corporation, Sangamo

Biosciences, Inc., Semprius, Inc., Small Business Association

of Michigan--Economic Development Center, Small Business

Exporters Association of the United States.

Small Business Technology Council, Smart Bomb Interactive,

Smile Reminder, SmoothShapes, Inc., Solera Networks, South

Dakota Biotech Association, Southern California Biomedical

Council, Spiration, Inc., St. Louis University, Standup Bed

Company (The), State of New Hampshire Department of Resources

and Economic Development, Stella Group, Ltd., StemCells,

SurgiQuest, Inc.

Symyx Technologies, Inc., Tech Council of Maryland/MdBio,

Technology Patents & Licensing, Tennessee Biotechnology

Association, Tessera, Inc., Texas A&M, Texas Healthcare,

Texas Instruments, Three Arch Partners.

United Technologies, University of California System,

University of Illinois, University of Iowa, University of

Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota,

University of New Hampshire, University of North Carolina

System, University of Rochester, University of Utah,

University of Wisconsin-Madison, US Business and Industry

Council, US Council for International Business.

USGI Medical, USW--United Steelworkers, Vanderbilt

University and Medical Center, Virent Energy Systems, Inc.,

Virginia Biotechnology Association, Visidyne, Inc.,

VisionCare Opthamalogic Technologies, Inc., Washington

Biotechnology & Biomedical Association, Washington

University, WaveRx, Inc.

Wayne State University, Wescor, Inc., Weyerhaeuser, Wilson

Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Wisconsin Alumni Research

Foundation (WARF), Wisconsin Biotechnology and Medical Device

Association, Wyeth.

This list includes biotech industries, the pharmaceutical industry, small businesses, labor unions, universities, patent examiners, and of course inventors. And that's just a very small part of the list, as you will see with those people reading the Congressional Record.

And why are so many of these people, why are such a large number of people opposed to it? Perhaps the easiest to understand of why people are against this bill is the issue of disclosure. In this bill, disclosure is called ``publication.'' From the time of the founding of our country until recent years it was mandated by our law that every patent

application would be held confidential until the patent was issued. In fact, if a patent examiner left out some information about a patent application, they could end up in jail. It was a felony. Well, this bill is going to change all of that.

We have had a system that's been dramatically different from the rest of the world in this confidentiality, and it was this element that has been a major success for us. Yet in the legislation, H.R. 1908, as well as the legislation we beat 10 years ago, that's one of the first things they're trying to do is end the confidentiality. In fact, this bill, H.R. 1908, at this point eliminates the right of confidentiality for American inventors. H.R. 1908 would mandate the publication of all patent applications 18 months after the patent is applied for, whether or not the patent has been granted. Is everybody getting that? This bill will mandate that the people of India and China and Korea and elsewhere will have all of the details of our patent applications, our most cutting-edge secrets, before the patent is issued. It will be on the Internet.

Now, let's look at the numbers. 89,000 American patents were issued by the Patent Office last year; 32 percent of them went to small business or those companies who employ less than 500 employees. Twenty percent of U.S. origin patents, 20 percent of the patents chose to opt for the current provision of law that will prevent their application from being published before the patent is issued. So right now they have a right to opt for that because if people that apply for international patents, their patent is published after 18 months. But we have 20 percent of the U.S. origin patents opted not to permit their patent application to be published after 18 months. Last year, that means 20,000 inventors, about two-thirds of all small business inventors, chose to keep their patent secret and keep it away from the prying eyes of China, Japan, Korea, India and others who would steal their new innovations.

And you don't have to take my word that these countries want the bill passed for sinister purposes. Just look at this quote from the Economic Times of India dated July 23, 2007. Listen to this, and I quote, ``A crucial bill making its way through the U.S. Congress is set to give new inexpensive options for the Indian drug makers to attack the patents that give monopoly rights to the top-selling multinational corporation brands in the largest pharmaceutical market.'' Did you get that? That means they're waiting so that our pharmaceutical companies can invest hundreds of millions of dollars to try to develop a new drug, and they know they're going to get it. The Indians already are saying it's an inexpensive option for the Indian drug makers because they're going to be able to take that information and get more drugs on the market there before our own people are able to get those drugs, and the hundreds of millions of dollars of research of our companies will be just stolen.

That's why the pharmaceutical industry is against this bill. It is estimated that already at this time the U.S. economy loses $250 billion a year from global intellectual property theft. This bill would double or triple that loss, and in the long run, equip our economic adversaries with what they need to compete with us and to drive Americans out of business. Got that? Our own technology being used to destroy American jobs.

It's our technology and our technological advancement that has let American workers compete with low-price workers overseas. Now they're going to change our laws because certain elements in our high-tech industries, meaning the electronics industry and the financial industry, do not want to pay royalties to our inventors; that we're going to provide this information to the rest of the world so they can steal it and use it against us. Doesn't sound like anybody's watching out for the interests of the American people.

Well, it should be easy for everyone to understand that part of the bill. And, in fact, the authors of the bill, even though they stuck to this, they put it in the bill originally. And 10 years ago they tried to push this same thing. They now say they're going to try to amend the bill so that provision isn't as tough.

Well, what about the other provisions of the bill? Even if this provision comes out, because they know it is just too easy to understand how horrible that would be for America, the other provisions are just as bad. It is just that they are harder to understand.

So if the publication requirement comes out, people should understand that that, too, is part of a strategy to get the rest of the bill in which would undermine America's inventors. Those pushing H.R. 1908 want China, Japan, Korea and India and others to know every detail of developing technologies and our creative ideas, even before the patents have been issued. So we understand, this will facilitate that. That is pretty easy to see when you are talking about giving them all the information.

Just as bad, however, this bill opens up new avenues of attack for those foreign and domestic business predators who would purposely infringe on the inventor's patent rights. So, what we are doing, the rest of these provisions, that is easy to understand, this publication, you know, anyone can see, that is asking everybody around the world to steal our ideas and use them against us. Well, these other ideas are just as damaging. They basically would help foreign and domestic predators against our inventors.

H.R. 1908 would open up new doors of attack both before a patent is issued and after it is issued. Before, in expanded, what they call inter partes examination which, in effect, gives the infringers of a patent another opportunity to challenge every patent that they are infringing upon.

Once at the Patent and Trademark Office, and if unsuccessfully, if they fail the first time, they can try again in a court after the patent has been issued. So even if they had challenged the issuance of a patent beforehand in the current process, this bill allows them then to again challenge it after the patent has been issued in court, which dramatically increases the cost for the inventor, freezing out the little guys. It allows powerful corporate third parties to sit in and state their case while someone is trying to get their patent.

Yet again, this is an avenue given to the large corporate interests. And what does it do? It punishes the little guy. Then afterwards, we have a whole new postgrant review. Now that is in the beginning. They have a right to sit in on the process and to basically try to disrupt the patent process in the very beginning stages so the little guy has a tough time getting it granted. But then afterwards, there is a whole new postgrant review. This means that after the patent has been issued, we make it easier for the big guys to keep coming back and attacking the right of the person who developed this new technology. The new postgrant review lowers the bar of proving that a patent is invalid. Thus, we have actually changed the standard that has protected our inventors against aggressive and unjustified attacks by people challenging them.

Currently, the patent challenger must prove a patent's invalidity, prove that a patent is invalid by clear and convincing evidence. That is a quote, ``by clear and convincing evidence.'' They are going to change that to the ``preponderance of evidence.'' How will that affect the patent system? What we have here is an attempt to change that wording and change the standard in a way that weakens the foundation that a patent holder relies upon in terms of all of the legal defenses that he has to make. We end up with a situation where investors are going to hesitate to get involved with any small inventors because we now have changed the basic rules that have protected the small inventors against unjustified attacks.

In fact, Mr. Speaker, as with the immigration bill, this is not a fix. None of this is a fix. It will just make it worse. The corporate elite tells us that this will reduce lawsuits. Well, Mr. Speaker, I am confused, because the system that is now being used in Europe which is the system that they are proposing that we now put into our system, the same postgrant review system, they are trying to change our rules to make the same rules as they do in Europe. Well, Europe has three times the number of lawsuits that are filed in attempts to steal the patent rights of the inventor through lawsuits than we have in the United States.

So what is this going to do? It is going to flood our system with lawsuits. Of course, lawsuits are expensive. The little guy loses. In fact, Japan dropped this element from their system because it produced too many lawsuits. They dropped it in 2004. So while we are strengthening the chance of the big guy to attack the little guy even after the patent has been granted, they found it to be a disaster in Japan. They discarded it. In Europe, it causes three times the number of lawsuits.

Mr. Speaker, this is not the right path to take. It is not reform. It will make things worse.

I am going to yield to my good friend, Marcy Kaptur, in one moment. But let me just note one other element here before we do. We hear about the widespread problem with patent lawsuits. This is something we hear about all the time. This is why we have to pass this legislation. Well, there are horror stories concerning some companies that have been tied up, very few, but some have been tied up and eventually having to relent to trial lawyers because of delays in the patent system. We also know about the examiners who are overworked. We know that our patent examiners are underpaid. They aren't getting the training they need and the proper education they need. Yes, we need to fix that.

In reality, patent lawsuits, of course, do not stem from these problems. Lawsuits are not a major problem. In fact, between 1993 and 2005, the number of patent lawsuits versus the number of patents granted has held steady. So although we have problems in the system, that is not what is resulting in a higher number of lawsuits. In fact, in 2006, there were only 102 cases that actually went to trial.

Mr. Speaker, this number is far below the average number of cases that that one District Court judge sees annually. And it is far fewer than what they have over in Europe. Of course, there is room for improvement, and I readily admit that. But this is not a crisis that demands us to dramatically change the fundamental nature of the system.

Mr. Speaker, as we get into more of a discussion of this, my friend, Marcy Kaptur, who has stood beside me in this fight for the last 10 years trying to protect the little guy, realizing that unless we protect the American inventor and American technology, that American workers and the standard of living of our people are going to decline, and that countries like Japan, India and others will steal our technology and use it to put our people out of work, this is a champion of the working people of our country. And we have a Republican-Democrat coalition here, as we will see on Friday.

I would now yield whatever time she may consume to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur).

There are 102 cases over a year, which is basically what one judge sees. There is no litigation crisis. But again, as you are aware, what we have here is they are trying to use that as cover to try to do something else, because the bill is not aimed at correcting that. The bill is aimed at permitting these large companies to take, at will, from America's inventors.

The fundamental rules that were laid down 200

years ago on the very subject, for example, not just the confidentiality, which they are trying to destroy, but the subject that you brought up is first to file, versus the concept that we had in our system for over 200 years, which is that we respect the person who is the first to invent.

Inventors have told me over and over again that if we change our system, and, by the way, in Europe and Japan that is the way their systems are, and, of course, they don't protect the little guy. Their systems were designed at a time when they weren't talking about individual rights, but were trying to protect corporate interest in their country.

But first to file would flood our system with patent applications day after day after day. The large corporations who can afford to make a new filing every time there is a little step forward, you would end up flooding the system, as compared to what it is today. Talk about delays in the patent system. It would have a horrible impact.

In fact, some of the other things that they are suggesting also in terms of these, on June 7th, 2007, a letter to Congress from Chief Judge Paul Michael of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the U.S. Federal Circuit Court warned Congress that the learning curve for all of these changes that they are talking about, especially the first to file and the various changes in the standards, will result in additional court delays that would be severe and would add additional attorneys fees and costs.

So that is what we have. In the name of trying to prevent a glut, which they say now is flooding our courts, when there are only 102 cases, they are going to create changes that will flood our courts and add dramatically to the cost for an individual inventor.

If I might add, the protections we have had, there are penalties that companies will pay, and you mentioned that those large corporations paid $2 billion, or I forget the exact figure you used, in terms of damages. Well, this bill would reduce the amount of damages that can be collected from a patent owner, an inventor who has been violated by an infringer.

If a company steals someone's nice idea and does not pay them for it and starts using it, especially foreign companies, this bill actually reduces the amount of money that can be expected by changing the criteria of how you can assess damages. What you will end up with is it won't be worthwhile for the inventor to have to pay the lawyers and go after these infringers, and our inventors will be high and dry, the technology that they do invent will go overseas, so they will cease to invent.

Who is going to be worse off? Everybody is going to be worse off.

It is easy to understand why it is going on, because the bill that is coming forward on Friday, H.R. 1908, that bill is designed not to help American competitiveness. That bill is not designed to protect the property rights of inventors. That bill is totally designed for the purpose of weakening the system for the American inventor and protecting the ability of the big guys, the guys who are shipping the jobs to China already, that is how much they care about us, to protect their ability to use technology and to steal it without having to pay for it. That is the purpose. It weakens it. The whole bill is designed to weaken the patent system.

As I have used the example of the immigration bill before, where people didn't want to talk about amnesty, everybody knows that was the real purpose. They used the word ``comprehensive'' to cover up that and not to debate amnesty.

This bill, the ``comprehensive reform bill,'' is designed to weaken the system, but they are using ``reform'' as a word to make it sound like they are trying to improve things.

Let us note the reason. If you ask these big companies and the people proposing this why we have to do it, they are not going to tell you we are doing it for the big guys. We are doing it because the financial industry and the electronics industry, they don't want to pay royalties, and they do their manufacturing overseas, so they don't care about the American worker anyway. They are not going to say that. What they are going to say is we need to harmonize all of our laws dealing with economics. We need to get up with the rest of the world. It is called harmonization. We heard that 10 years ago. We have to harmonize our law with the rest of the world.

We have had the strongest protection for patent rights of any country in the world since our country's founding, and it has served us well. Now they want to harmonize it with the rest of the world by lowering our standards, by lowering our protection.

If we did that with other freedoms, the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, there would be a revolution in our country, because if we want to push for all countries to have one standard, well, they should be increasing their standards to meet our level of protection of rights, not having us lower the protection that we have for our individual citizens.

Right, because they don't want the foreign interests to have all that information even before they get issued the patent.

Clearly, when we are talking about harmonizing our laws with the rest of the world, this is not an excuse to dramatically bring down the rights that have been enjoyed, the protections our people have enjoyed, and which have assured America's prosperity and the security of our people.

In fact, let's take a look at these huge electronics corporations and huge financial interests that are pushing H.R. 1908. These are the same companies that build their manufacturing units in China and have built up the economy of China so they can outcompete Americans. These are the same companies that have actually worked with a despotic gangster regime in Beijing so that their computers can be used to help track down political dissidents.

They tell us, well, we have to improve the economy of China in order to have them evolve into a more peaceful and more Democratic country. That is baloney. What they are doing over there is getting a quick profit. They are sitting over there getting their blood money at a 25 percent profit a year, when if they would have the same projects and have the same manufacturing in the United States, perhaps they would only make a 5 or 10 percent profit.

What it is, they have no loyalty to American ideals and they don't have a loyalty to the American worker. Without American working people standing up for these principles, these big companies would have nothing. We would live in a world that would be awash with tyrants, if it wasn't for the American people who defend liberty and justice throughout the world.

But yet these corporations take all of them for granted, just like they take for granted these small inventors. They look at them as nerds. These big executives, who will live in gated communities and go to the country clubs, they look at these inventors as nerds. The creative types are just the creative types. We have seen it over and over again.

That is the way they treat the American people as well, with arrogance and with a total lack of consideration. They go over and they invest in China, when they should be giving jobs, decent paying jobs, to the American people. But their profit margin would be a little less.

By the way, that profit margin that we are talking about, this isn't a profit margin that goes just to their stockholders. We are talking about big corporate billionaires who give themselves huge corporate salaries. And what are they doing? They are putting American workers out of work and sending it over to China.

This bill is their bill. H.R. 1908 will permit them to not only take the jobs to China, but to take the technology that is invented in our country to China to outcompete the workers here that are left.

The gentlewoman is right on target. What you have to do to understand how evil that is is realize that the Chinese couldn't have built that tire company because they did not have the equipment to do it. We have a major corporation from the United States sending our technology and our equipment over there, where American workers in the past would be able to outproduce low-paid Chinese workers because we had the technology. Our corporate leaders now have sent jobs over there by giving them the technology they need to outcompete American workers.

I will have to say we have a little disagreement on trade in terms of democratic countries, because I don't see anything wrong with trading with democratic countries. What we are referring to right now is something we both totally agree on, how can we have free trade with despotic regimes like China and other dictatorships around the world, where they keep their own people in abject poverty, and we are going to let our corporations take our technology over there, take even our investment there? A lot of times it is done with government-guaranteed loans from our government.

So this is all part of an overall problem, not a problem, but a threat to the American people, and this is a new wrinkle. In H.R. 1908, this is just the part where they are going to take the technology that is invented here immediately over and let their companies overseas steal it and use if, and then say to the inventors, go ahead and sue us. Try to get it.

One thing we know is that today's corporations are far different than in the past. We have corporations that are basically multinational corporations. Yeah, American citizens may lead up these corporations, but they consider themselves to be the head of a huge multinational organization, and their loyalty isn't to the people of the United States, it is to, supposedly, the corporate structure which, of course, could mean that they put thousands of Americans out of work and not give it even a second thought.

We cannot rely on these corporate elites to make the policy that will determine the future of our country. And that is what is happening here. The corporate elite, basically the high-tech billionaires, have come around and written H.R. 1908, and it will be a disaster for the American people if we let this go by because in the long term it will eliminate our technological edge over our competitors.

People need to know that H.R. 1908 will be coming to the floor on Friday. I call it the ``Steal America's Technology Act,'' and we need to defeat this bill. We need to have the support of the public and of our colleagues, and we are asking for that support today.

I would like to close with one story. It is a story of a statue of a man downstairs. If someone is going through the Capitol, he needs to look at the statue. There are many statues here, but it is a statue of a man named Philo Farnsworth. He was the personification of an individual inventor. He discovered, with his creative genius, the picture tube, the secret that created the picture tube for television. RCA had spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to find that secret. Philo Farnsworth made the mistake of trusting David Sarnoff, the head of RCA, with the secret, thinking we are going to work together to develop this for all humankind.

Sarnoff immediately cut off all communications with this man and tried to steal this invention, claiming credit for RCA itself. For 20 years, poor Philo Farnsworth, the personification of the little guy, was being beaten down by David Sarnoff because he didn't want to pay the royalties or give the credit to this one little guy, this one lone American.

That case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court, God bless America, sided with the little guy, sided with Philo Farnsworth and reaffirmed that we are talking about rights that are guaranteed by our Constitution for all our citizens, the big guys and the little guys.

This bill, H.R. 1908, is a big guys' bill designed by the big guys to steal from the little guys and in the long run it will hurt all Americans.

I proudly stand by Marcy Kaptur and Mr. Manzullo and others who will be leading, helping us fight this back on Friday. We need everyone's support. We need all constituents to talk to their Congressman on this issue.

Mr. Speaker, tonight I would like to raise a red flag to draw attention, the attention of my fellow Members, who are here assembled, as well as those listening on C-SPAN and those who will be reading this in the Congressional Record.

On Friday, legislation is scheduled to come to the floor of the House that will have a huge impact on the American people, yet it is receiving little attention. What is it? It is a proposal to dramatically diminish a constitutionally protected right by fundamentally altering America's patent system.

If H.R. 1908, the bill in question, passes, there will be tremendous long-term negative consequences for our country.

Patent law is thought to be so complicated and esoteric that most people tune out once they realize that's what the subject is. Yet our technological genius and the laws protecting and promoting that genius have been at the heart of America's success as a Nation. America's technological edge has permitted the American people to have the highest standard of living in the world and permitted our country to sail safely through troubled waters, the troubled waters of world wars and international threats.

American technology has made all the difference. And it is the American patent law that has determined what technology, what level of technology development that America has had. Protecting individual rights, even of the little guy, has been the hallmark of our country. Patent rights, the right to own one's creation, are one of those rights that are written into the United States Constitution. In fact, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and others, all our Founding Fathers were not only people that believed in freedom, but they also believed in technology and the potential of American genius. Visit Monticello and see what Thomas Jefferson did with the time after he penned the words of the Declaration of Independence and after he served as President of the United States. He went back to Monticello and he spent his time inventing things, inventing pieces of equipment and technologies that would lift the burden from the shoulders of labor.

And then there was Benjamin Franklin, again, a man who participated in the Declaration of Independence as well as the Constitution. He was the inventor of the bifocal. He was the inventor of the stove that kept people warm. Until then people only had fireplaces. He had many other inventions to his name. Yet he was also a man, one of our cherished Founding Fathers, who helped us create this free Nation. He believed in freedom and technology and believed that with freedom and technology we could increase the standard of living of our people, not just the elite, but of all the American people.

We have had the strongest protection system in terms of patents in the world; and that is why, in the history of humankind, there has never been a more innovative or creative people. It didn't just happen. It happened because in our Constitution, our Founding Fathers saw to it that the laws protecting one's intellectual creations, both technology and written communications, that those creative people would own their creations. No, it's not just the diversity of our society that has created the wondrous standard of living that we have all bragged about. This is not simply the diversity of our people and some notion that we have by coming from all over the world that has created the idea that all people should have opportunity and provided our people with opportunity. No, the innovation and progress and opportunity that we've enjoyed in America can be traced to our law, the law that protected the property rights of our people, just as we protected the political, just as we've protected the personal rights of our citizens.

Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. But he also invented interchangeable parts for manufacturing. How did that

change America? How did that change the world? It uplifted us so people could have different sets of clothing that they could wear. The common person was helped by the fact of America's creative genius. Eli Whitney was a product of the American Constitution.

Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper. Before that people had to carry heavy pieces of equipment, scythes and reapers that were based on human strength and not strength of technology. With the invention of the reaper, people had more food, people had full stomachs.

Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, and from it came, of course, the telephone. And then there was Thomas Edison who invented the light bulb and so many of the other inventions. These were not just accidents. These were created because these people were able to flourish because they had constitutional protections for their rights of their invention.

One segment of our population, black Americans, were prolific inventors. Even at times when their rights were not being recognized, even when they faced major discrimination in our country, and at that time, even then, the issue of patent protection for our black citizens was recognized and because of that, many black Americans excelled in the area of inventions, men like Jan Matzeliger, who invented a machine that was used in shoe manufacturing. And before Matzeliger, and he was a former black slave, before he invented this shoe manufacturing machine, people in this country and all over the world usually wore one or two pairs of shoes for their entire life. And it was he that brought down dramatically, brought down the cost of shoes for the entire population. One of our product American black inventors.

George Washington Carver, a world respected scientist and inventor, and so many more in the black community. Why? Because in that era, when blacks were discriminated against, as I say, we actually respected the rights of ownership of black inventors and thus they excelled when their rights were protected.

We are proud of our history of technology, because we know, as Americans, we have, as we have always known throughout our country's history, that these inventions that we're talking about, made by Americans of every background, helped elevate the standard of living of all Americans. It created more wealth, wealth that was created with less labor and less burden on our people. It increased the standard of living of working people in this country so that not only the elite prospered, but all of the people had a full belly and clothes for their children.

The opportunity of all people who are part of the American brotherhood and sisterhood, the well-being of those people can be traced, not just to our diversity, which is something we celebrate, but also to the constitutional protection of our rights. And one of those rights which is so often overlooked is the right of people, the creators of new ideas, to own those ideas, whether we're talking about the written word or whether we're talking about technological advances.

And then of course, when we're talking about this, how can anyone forget the Wright brothers. The Wright brothers. We remember the Wright brothers. They were two guys who worked in a bicycle shop. They ended up inventing something just less than 100 years ago, or just about 100 years ago actually, just a few more years than 100 years ago, and they were told, 110 years ago that it was impossible for them to make this invention. Yet, they went ahead. The elites were telling them it was impossible. They went ahead and they spent their own money, their own time. They saved up. They had very little capital. They were the ultimate little guys, and they moved ahead and they did finally receive a patent because they changed the future of humankind, because they were the ones, of course, who took us from our feet planted on the ground to taking us off the ground and putting us on the road to the heavens. Just two ordinary Americans.

We Americans are proud that with our opportunity all people have a chance and all people can help pull the rest of us up into the heavens like the Wright brothers.

It was not only the raw muscle of every American. And so often people mistakenly think that human progress is a result of whether people work hard or not. That is not why people have higher standards of living. There are many people all over the world who work hard. They work strenuously hard. They work 15 hours a day. Their jobs are grueling. But no matter how hard they work, their society doesn't progress. Their families don't live any better.

No, hard work is not the only thing. Yes, hard work is part of it, but ingenuity and creativity, the intellectual part of the equation is vitally important to the success of any nation. And, yes, the legal system is also a vital part of that formula that will lead to uplifting all of humankind and can be seen in the example of the United States. So, yes, Americans work hard, just as others have. But Americans had their rights protected under law. And that's what permitted the innovators and the creators and the technologists to thrive in this country and what pulled the standard of living of all of our people up. What was established was a system in our Constitution and with our laws and our patent system that would protect ingenuity and creativity.

We treated intellectual property, the creation of new technologies, as we treated property, as we treated personal, and as we've treated political, rights. And that is what America is all about.

Every person has rights. Now, we didn't always live up to that dream; and, yes, there was discrimination, terrible discrimination against black citizens and we always have to recognize that. And against Indian Americans and others. But we have tried our best, and we are moving forward trying to perfect our system.

But every American, every American has benefited by the fact that our technologies have been protected under constitutional law; and thus our creators, our creative population has managed to bring about a higher standard of living and opportunities for all Americans.

Today we face a great historical challenge. And this challenge comes at exactly a time when our country is threatened from abroad economically, as never before. We must prevail over our economic competitors and adversaries, or the American people will suffer.

There are people who think of themselves at war with us. We know that radical Islam thinks they're at war with us. But we also have people who think they're at war with us economically. They're at war with the well-being of the American people. They see us and the well-being of our people as their target. We must win this war, this economic competition that we are entering, this economic competition based not on hard work but on technology and creative genius; and if we do not win this war, our people will lose. Our people will lose especially if we permit the technology and creative genius of our people to be stolen by people who are our economic adversaries and to be used to outcompete our own people. If we lose this battle, our people will suffer. Future generations will see their standard of living decline, as well as the safety and strength of our country. If we do not remain technologically superior, we will find that in the future the livelihood of our people and the safety of our country will be in jeopardy.

Our economic adversaries, and their allies within the American business community, and let us note that, that our economic adversaries have allies in multinational corporations, many of them who are, what, part of the American business community. But these economic adversaries are engaged in a systematic attack on our well-being, and thus they have noticed one of the strongest and most important elements of America's success has been the patent protection that we have offered the American people.

Today, multinational corporations, some based here in the United States, run by an elite whose allegiance is to no country, these people have tremendous influence near the Nation's Capitol. You can see it when it comes to China policy. You can see it when it comes to trade policy. And, now, in their attempt to undermine patent protections, you can see that in this effort to undermine the constitutional patent protections that our people have enjoyed for over 200 years.

There is a corporate elite at play who don't give it a second thought to move their manufacturing operations to China. Now, here you've got Americans supposedly, American businessmen. They're moving their manufacturing to a country run by a Marxist dictatorship. This corporate elite betrays American values and betrays the American working people themselves. What? Why do they do this?

Well, they would rather exploit Chinese slave labor with the full cooperation of a dictatorial Chinese regime, than they would pay the market rate for the American working person and as well, which is part of the price, of course, of having a free society in which they are protected here at home. Yet, they would go to China and make a deal with the world's worst human rights abuser to set up a manufacturing unit there. And this very same elite will do that and betray the American worker in order to make a 25 percent profit rather than a 10 percent or a 5 percent profit at home, while at the same time the American working people will get their share of the benefit because they're working in that company. No, the American corporate elite that goes to China would rather do that. Many of them, by the way, are part of the electronics industry, as we know. The electronics industry has moved in a big way to China. They've even, in fact, claimed that, oh, well if we just have more interaction economically with China, that, what will happen? Well, China will evolve into a democratic society.

Yet, these same corporate leaders, supposedly Americans, help the Chinese Government set up a computer system that will aid them in tracking down democratic opponents of the dictatorship. We know now that the Falun Gong in China is suffering immense repression, as are other believers in God. Yet, we have a business elite that doesn't blink an eye at that and goes there and invests their technology and their capital in creating manufacturing there.

Well, people who will do that won't think twice about stealing a small inventor's or a little guy's invention so that they won't have to pay royalties to that American inventor. Why should they? If they are willing to deal with the tyrants and the gangsters in China and betray the American workers, why would they care about giving royalties to some inventor? And what are they doing? They are helping steal the American inventors' products without giving the royalties, and, worse, they are taking it to China to use in manufacturing facilities over there that will even put more Americans out of work here.

How could any American do that? Well, they aren't Americans. What they are, if you get right down to it, they are globalists. Yes, people have to understand that here we are, our country has evolved into now this new dichotomy of globalists versus patriots.

Well, put me on the side of the patriots. We are supposed to be watching out for the interests of the American people. We are not supposed to be watching out for the American business elite any more than we are supposed to be watching out for the American worker. They are supposed to have equal rights. And one of those rights has been the protection of intellectual property. But the business and corporate elites that want to move to China, the same ones who are behind this legislation, H.R. 1908, the electronics industry, want to steal the technology being developed by the little guy in America so they won't have to pay royalties. That is what it comes down to. And these same people who are building the factories in China, the same people who are giving technology to China, the same people now who want to take the ideas of American inventors and take them to China and elsewhere without having to pay royalties, these are the people behind 1908.

The justification for this attack on the patent system, guess what, it is called harmonization of our laws with the rest of the world. If you ask those people why do we have to make these fundamental changes to our patent law? Our patent law has been there for 200 years. They will tell you that we have to harmonize our law with the rest of the world and our laws are totally different.

We cannot permit corporate elitists who consider themselves globalists to mold our policies, especially if it means diminishing the legal protections for our American citizens, especially those inventors and creative people who are coming up with the technologies that Americans are going to need to have if our country is to be prosperous and secure in the future.

If the globalists are successful, 20 years from now our citizens will wonder what hit them. Pearl Harbor happened in a moment. Our people woke up to the threat and they mobilized. Today it is happening slowly, and the attack is less evident. But rights are being eroded by the changes in our law that will cause a decreasing standard of living to our people and damage our way of life, and that damage will be devastating to the American people in years ahead, and they will never know what hit them. This attack is being conducted not by bombers in Pearl Harbor and Hawaii, but it is being done by lobbyists in the Nation's capital who are out to pillage our wealth and transfer that wealth and power overseas. You see it everywhere.

Who is watching out for the interests of the American people? We will let the public determine that. But first we have to get the public's attention. And these moves on this patent bill have been so quiet. The vote is going to be Friday, H.R. 1908. They are going to try to slip this by. One of the steps necessary for them to transfer the wealth and to cut down this dominance that the American people have over the global economy, one of the things they have to do to achieve that goal so we are harmonized with the rest of the world is to destroy our patent system and make it like the patent system from other countries.

Lobbyists have been hired by well-heeled multinational corporations and by companies who no longer have any desire to pay for the use of technology that has been developed by other American citizens, little guys. They, of course, are not saying we are out to destroy the patent system. They will be aghast when they hear that I am suggesting they want to destroy the patent system. They know that is what it is, but they will act like they are aghast.

Now, there are lots of flaws in our patent system. We hear about a widespread problem, and there are some problems. But we know that many of the problems are just being exaggerated. For example, we hear horror stories concerning companies that are tied up for years in court and eventually have to relent to trial lawyers in terms about delays in the system. We hear about that. We hear about examiners who are overworked, which is true. Our patent examiners are heavily overworked. They aren't getting the training they need, and they are not getting the pay they deserve. So we have got some problems in our patent system that we need to take care of. But that has nothing to do with H.R. 1908.

In reality, of course, some of these problems aren't real. Patent lawsuits are not a major problem, as people are claiming they are. Between 1993 and 2005, the number of patent lawsuits versus the number of patents granted has been steady at around 1.5 percent. In fact, in 2006 only 102 patent cases actually went to trial. So when they say we have got to do this to correct the lawsuit problem, there isn't a major lawsuit problem.

But there are real problems that need to be solved. Our patent examiners, as I said, are overworked and they are underpaid. They need to be trained. More money that comes from people buying patents, we need to keep that right at the patent office and train those patent examiners and give them the money they need so we can hire the top quality people.

Unfortunately, the legislation making its way through the system does not correct the problems. The problems are being used as an excuse, but the proposed changes that we are talking about here are not dealing with the problems. So there must be some other goal of this legislation.

So let's understand we need patent legislation that speeds up the patent process, provides training and compensation for the patent examiners, and helps us protect our inventors against theft. Yes, we need to help our inventors protect themselves against foreign threat and, yes, even domestic

threat. And we need to put some work into patent reform which will protect our inventors. Well, the bill that we are talking about has nothing to do with that. A bill that handled those goals would be justified and welcomed.

Unfortunately, what we are witnessing is a replay of the illegal immigration strategy. The American people are crying out for protection against a virtual invasion of illegal immigrants into our country. The special interests who benefited by this flood of illegals tried to push an immigration bill through the Congress that would have made the situation worse. That's right. They had a bill in the name of illegal immigration reform that would have made it worse. To confuse the public, they kept calling it a ``comprehensive'' bill as if it was designed to fix the problem. Instead, it was designed for one thing and one thing only. The comprehensive bill for illegal immigration was designed to give amnesty to all those illegals who came here illegally, which would have attracted, had we given them that amnesty, tens of millions of more illegals into our country. So it would have made it worse. But with a straight face, those who were advocating illegal immigration reform kept calling it a ``comprehensive'' plan even though they knew that implied they were reforming the system to make it better when, in fact, they were going the opposite direction of what the vast majority of people knew was the problem. And the problem was what? A huge influx of illegal immigrants into our country, and giving amnesty would have made it worse.

Well, the same strategy is seemingly being used by those who are behind the effort to destroy the American patent system. So you will never hear them say they want to destroy the American patent system the same way that the advocates of comprehensive immigration would never admit what they were doing was amnesty. No, they are out to destroy the patent system as it has worked since the founding of our country. Instead of arguing their case, they are simply calling it a ``comprehensive'' bill. Does that sound familiar? A ``comprehensive patent bill,'' that makes it sound like you are going to make it better. No, you are out to destroy the patent system. A ``comprehensive immigration bill,'' that sounds like you want to end this immigration influx into our country. No, it is going to make it worse. Well, that is why the American people are a little bit confused.

Who is watching out for the American people? The American people have got to pay attention to this.

This bill, H.R. 1809, is similar to the one that we barely beat back 10 years ago. I called that the ``Steal American Technologies Act,'' and that was back 10 years ago. And, believe me, we were up against the most powerful corporations. We were just a ragtag group of people. Marcy Kaptur on that side of the aisle and Steny Hoyer helped us out as well, Don Manzullo and myself and just a couple others. We fought these special interests, and no one thought we had a chance. But we won. And we won because the American people got wind of what was happening, and we won. We beat it back, and that was in 1997. But here we go again with a bill that looks almost exactly like that bill in so many ways. So I will just call H.R. 1809 the ``Steal American Technologies Act, Part Two.''

First and foremost, we have to, of course, look at what does H.R. 1908 do? First and foremost, it is designed to weaken the patent protection of the American inventor. So let's just note that right off. The purpose of the bill is to weaken the patent protection, the constitutional rights that the American inventor has had since the founding of our country.

I support real reform, as do the others who oppose this bill, but the proposed changes in H.R. 1908 will cause the collapse of the American patent system, the system that has sustained America for 200 years, and that is the real purpose behind this bill. Make no mistake about it.

For the Record I would submit a list of those major people and organizations who are opposed to the bill, Mr. Speaker.

At this point in my remarks, I submit that list for the Record.

Organizations and Companies With Objections to Berman Patent

Legislation (H.R. 1908)

3M, Abbott Accelerated Technologies, Inc., Acorn

Cardiovascular Inc., Adams Capital Management, Adroit Medical

Systems, Inc., AdvaMed, Advanced Diamond Technologies, Inc.,

Advanced Medical Optics, Inc., Advanced Neuromodulation

Systems, Inc., Aero-Marine Company, AFL-CIO, African American

Republican Leadership Council, AIPLA--American Intellectual

Property Law Association.

Air Liquide, Air Products, ALD NanoSolutions, Inc., ALIO

Industries, Allergan, Inc., Almyra, Inc., AmberWave Systems

Corporation, American Conservative Union (The), American

Intellectual property Law, Association (AIPLA), American Seed

Trade, Americans for Sovereignty.

Americans for the Preservation of Liberty, Amylin

Pharmaceuticals, AngioDynamics, Inc., Applied Medical,

Applied Nanotech, Inc., Argentis Pharmaceuticals, LLC,

Arizona Biolndustry Association, ARYx Therapeutics, Ascenta

Therapeutics, Inc., Association of University Technology

Managers (AUTM).

Asthmatx, Inc., AstraZeneca, Aware, Inc., Baxa

Corporation, Baxter Healthcare Corporation, BayBio, Beckman

Coulter, BIO--Biotechnology Industry Organization, BioCardia,

Inc., BIOCOM, Biogen Idec, Biomedical Association, BioOhio,

Bioscience Institute, Biotechnology Council of New Jersey.

Blacks for Economic Security Trust Fund, BlazeTech

Corporation, Boston Scientific Corporation, Bridgestone

Americas Holding, Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb, BuzzLogic,

California Healthcare Institute, California Healthcare

Institute (The), Canopy Ventures, Carbide Derivative

Technologies, Cardiac Concepts, Inc., CardioDynamics,

Cargill, Inc., Cassie-Shipherd Group (The), Caterpillar,

Celgene Corporation, Cell Genesys, Inc., Center 7, Inc.,

Center for Small Business and the Environment (The), Centre

for Security Policy, Cephalon, CheckFree, Christian Coalition

of America.

Cincinnati Sub-Zero Products, Coalition for 21st Century

Patent Reform (The), Coalitions for America, CogniTek

Management Systems, Inc., Colorado Bioscience Association,

Conceptus, Inc., CONNECT, Connecticut United for Research

Excellence, Cornell University, Corning Incorporated, Coronis

Medical Ventures, Council for America, CropLife America,

Cryptography Research, Cummins-Allison Corporation.

Cummins Inc., CVRx Inc., Dais Analytic Corporation,

Dartmouth Regional Technology Center, Inc., Declaration

Alliance, Deltanoid Pharmaceuticals, Digimarc Corporation,

DirectPointe, Dow Chemical Company, Dupont, Dura-Line

Corporation, Dynatronics Co., Eagle Forum, Eastman Chemical

Company, Economic Development Center, Edwards Lifesciences,

Elan Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Electronics for Imaging, Eli

Lilly and Company, Ellman Innovations LLC, Enterprise

Partners Venture Capital, Evalve, Inc.

Exxon Mobile Corporation, Fallbrook Technologies Inc.,

FarSounder, Inc. Footnote.com.

Gambro BCT, General Electric, Genomic Health, Inc., Gen-

Probe Incorporated, Genzyme, Georgia Biomedical Partnership,

Glacier Cross, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline, Glenview State Bank,

Hawaii Science & Technology Council, HealthCare Institute of

New Jersey, HeartWare, Inc., Helius, Inc., Henkel

Corporation, Hoffman-LaRoche, Inc.

iBIO, Imago Scientific Instruments, Impulse Dynamics (USA),

Inc., Indiana Health Industry Forum, Indiana University,

Innovation Alliance, Institute of Electrical and Electronics

Engineers (IEEE)-USA, InterDigital Communications

Corporation, Intermolecular, Inc., International Association

of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), Invitrogen

Corporation, Iowa Biotechnology Association, ISTA

Pharmaceuticals, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Johnson &

Johnson, Leadership Institute (The), Let Freedom Ring, Life

Science Alley, LITMUS, LLC.

LSI Corporation, Lux Capital Management, Luxul Corporation,

Maryland Taxpayers' Association.

Masimo Corporation, Massachusetts Biotechnology Council,

MassMEDIC, Maxygen Inc., MDMA--Medical Device Manufacturer's

Association, Medical College of Wisconsin, MedImmune, Inc.,

Medtronic, Merck, Metabasis Therapeutics, Inc., Metabolex,

Inc., Metabolix, Inc., Metacure (USA), Inc., MGI Pharma Inc.,

MichBio, Michigan Small Tech Association, Michigan State

University, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Milliken &

Company, Mohr, Davidow Ventures, Monsanto Company, Motorola.

NAM--National Association of Manufacturers,

NanoBioMagnetics, Inc. (NBMI), NanoBusiness Alliance (The),

NanoInk, Inc., NanoIntegris, Inc., Nanomix, Inc., Nanophase

Technologies, NanoProducts Corporation, Nanosys, Inc.,

Nantero, Inc., National Center for Public Policy Research,

Nektar Therapeutics, Neoconix, Inc., Neuro Resource Group

(NRG), Neuronetics, Inc., NeuroPace, New England Innovation

Alliance, New Hampshire Biotechnology Council, New Hampshire

Department of Economic Development, New Mexico Biotechnical

and Biomedical Association, New York Biotechnology

Association.

Norseman Group (The), North Carolina Biosciences

Organization, North Carolina State University, North Dakota

State University, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Northwestern

University, Novartis Corporation, Novasys Medical Inc.,

NovoNordisk, NUCRYST Pharmaceuticals, Inc. NuVasive,

Inc., Nuvelo, Inc., Ohio State University, OpenCEL, LLC,

Palmetto Biotechnology Alliance, Patent Cafe.com, Inc.,

Patent Office Professional Association, Pennsylvania Bio,

Pennsylvania State University, PepsiCo, Inc., Pfizer, PhRMA--

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America,

Physical Sciences Inc., PointeCast Corporation, Power

Innovations International, PowerMetal Technologies, Inc.,

Preformed Line Products, Procter & Gamble, Professional

Inventors' Alliance, ProRhythm, Inc., Purdue University, Pure

Plushy Inc., QUALCOMM Inc.

QuantumSphere, Inc., QuesTek Innovations LLC, Radiant

Medical, Inc., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Research

Triangle Park, NC, Retractable Technologies, Inc.,

RightMarch.com, S & C Electric Company, Salix

Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Sangamo Biosciences, Inc., ScanDisk

Corporation, Semprius, Inc., Small Business Association of

Michigan--Economic Development Center, Small Business

Exporters, Association of the United States (The).

Small Business Technology Council (The), Smart Bomb

Interactive, Smile Reminder, SmoothShapes, Inc., Solera

Networks, South Dakota Biotech Association, Southern

California Biomedical Council, Spiration, Inc., St. Louis

University, Standup Bed Company (The), State of New Hampshire

Department of Resources and Economic Development, Stella

Group, Ltd. (The), StemCells, SurgiQuest, Inc.

Symyx Technologies, Inc., Tech Council of Maryland/MdBio,

Technology Patents & Licensing, Tennessee Biotechnology

Association, Tessera, Inc., Texas A&M, Texas Healthcare,

Texas Instruments, Three Arch Partners.

United Technologies, University of California System,

University of Illinois, University of Iowa, University of

Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota,

University of New Hampshire, University of North Carolina

System, University of Rochester, University of Utah,

University of Wisconsin-Madison, US Business and Industry

Council, US Council for International Business.

USGI Medical, USW--United Steelworkers, Vanderbilt

University and Medical Center, Virent Energy Systems, Inc.,

Virginia Biotechnology Association, Visidyne, Inc.,

VisionCare Opthamalogic Technologies, Inc., Washington

Biotechnology & Biomedical Association, Washington

University, WaveRx, Inc.

Wayne State University, Wescor, Inc., Weyerhaeuser, Wilson

Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Wisconsin Alumni Research

Foundation (WARF), Wisconsin Biotechnology and Medical Device

Association, Wyeth.

That list includes some large companies. It includes biotech companies, for example, who are putting out so much of the technology that we will need for the future. It includes pharmaceuticals who know that there are companies around the world who are waiting to steal the product after they have spent hundreds of millions of American dollars into developing new pharmaceuticals. Almost all of our major universities are against this patent bill because they themselves are developing new technologies and they know that the new patent bill will undermine, undermine, their efforts to create these new technologies and to benefit from the technologies, as they should because they are the creators. The patent examiners are against this legislation. Labor unions are against this. The AFL-CIO is against this legislation. That is why we have another bipartisan coalition with Ms. Kaptur and Judge Hastings and others who are on our side in this battle. It is a bipartisan Republican-Democrat coalition. It is the patriots versus the globalists.

So why are so many opposed to it? Perhaps it's easiest to understand the issue, because if you talk about what this bill does in terms of disclosure, and what does that mean, in this bill it's called publication.

From the founding of our country until recent years, it has been mandated that every patent application be held confidential until the patent was issued. So if you're an inventor and you've got an idea and you've developed it, you filed the application; but you know that that's going to be held secret. In fact, patent examiners could be put in jail for felonies if they release that information.

Well, this, of course, is dramatically different than the rest of the world. In the rest of the world, after 18 months, in Japan and Europe, if you file for a patent, even if you don't get the patent, they're going to publish it for everybody to see. And the inventor is so vulnerable, they have to give up usually almost all the rights to the things they've invented. That's why you don't see the Japanese inventing many things; they perfect things, but they don't invent them.

In short, this bill, H.R. 1908, the Steal American Technologies Act, the sequel, now get into this, this is really important and it's easy to understand. This bill would eliminate the right of confidentiality to American inventors. What does that mean? H.R. 1908 would mandate the publication of all patent applications 18 months after the patent is applied for whether or not the patent has been granted.

Does everybody understand what we're talking about here? We're talking about American inventors up until now have known, if they so chose to do this, they would not have to reveal their secrets until the patent was given to them. Thus they had some legal protection. This bill will take that right away from the American inventors so that if they apply for a patent on very sophisticated technological breakthroughs, the Chinese, the Indians, the Japanese, the Koreans, they will have all have the information and be in manufacturing before our small inventors even get their patent.

With the Steal American Technologies Act, does that sound like that's what I'm describing? That's exactly what we're describing. We are inviting the foreign thieves to come in and take our most precious technological advances and use those technologies against us to put our people out of work. That's why the labor unions are against this bill. That's why the Democratic Party should be against this bill and the Republican Party should be against it. That's why patriots should be against it. It is easy for everyone to understand that.

Those pushing H.R. 1908 want China, Japan, Korea, India and others to have every detail of developing technologies and of our creative ideas even before the patents have been issued. This legislation will facilitate China, India, and other countries in their efforts to steal our creative genius. First they will say, oh, well the inventor then could come back and sue these companies overseas who are using their creation that they've gotten by taking it from the information that was published. Oh, give me a break. Does anyone really believe that an American inventor can go to China or India and can sue after they've been in production for years? They can't even get the information of how much has been produced over there at that time. So, yes, this is the Steal American Technologies Act, and we have got to stop them.

Secondly, this bill changes the fundamental concept of the American patent system, another fundamental concept which this will end up with very dramatic and confusing consequences, although it is a little hard to understand. Traditionally, ownership rights go to those inventors who were the first ones to invent the technology in question. That does not necessarily mean that they were the first one to actually file some type of patent application that dealt with that particular issue or that particular type of technology. No. If someone actually had an invention of a machine, their patent, if they actually invented it and they could prove that, it wasn't the first to file that counts, it was the person who actually invented something. That was a principle in our system. And basically what it did is it prevented businesses and individuals from having to, for every time they made a little bit of progress, to go out and try to apply for another patent.

Because with this system, what this bill will do, it will make sure that businesses now will be flooding the Patent Office every time they make one little step forward towards an eventual goal, rather than waiting for the goal to be achieved and have a complete new system that can be justified to have a patent.

So the people of the Patent Office believe that this change, which seems innocuous, from something that has worked well for the United States for 200 years, has worked well for us, and now they want to change it so that we can be like the rest of the world supposedly, while the rest of the world, the only people who can operate at this level are these big multinational corporations, the very elite rich guys. No. We want our regular Americans to be able to operate under this system. And making it first-to-file makes it so much more expensive because you have to apply for so many more patents, the little guy gets frozen out. Of course those people that are pushing this harmonization know that very well. They

just don't care about the little guy because they are Goliath, and the little guy is just a little David down there.

I am very happy that the history of the United States Government is the history of us being for the little guy over the big guy, that we protect the rights of the little guy. That's why our patent law is different than the patent law in Japan, where economic shoguns control their economy.

The third, H.R. 1908 fundamentally changes the legal criteria in which patents can be challenged. It provides numerous ways in which large companies, foreigners, and other infringers can attack and add costs to the inventors. So we've added all sorts of new ways for those guys to come in and attack that small inventor. We have opened up the system to the point where the inventor can be attacked before the patent has been granted, and also, the inventor can then, also with this legislation, be attacked after the patent has been granted. And this again changes those rules by offering new avenues to attack the small guy. Of course the big guys don't care; they've got lots of lawyers working for them. What this will mean is the big guys can beat down the little guys just like they do in Japan. Don't we want to harmonize with Japan? Don't we want to have a society like Japan where ordinary citizens never dream about increasing their standard of living and rising up and having their children live better? No.

This bill is a catastrophe for the little inventor, and that's why we have so many people who have opposed this bill, but yet it keeps moving forward. It keeps moving forward because there are special interests who will make huge sums of money by not having to may royalties, especially in the electronics industry, which is different. Remember, they are different, the electronics industry than pharmaceuticals and biotech and the universities and the others and the smaller inventor. Why are they different? Because what they do is they put together a product with many different components, all of which you have to pay a royalty in order to use them. They don't want to pay those royalties. They want to steal it from the little guy. Well, I'm sorry, the electronics industry has to pay for what they use. They're not going to set up a system that undermines the protection that the little guys, that we've had for 200 years in this country.

This bill complicates efforts to establish willfulness on the part of an infringer. So what happens is you have undermined some of the legal criteria used in the case if a small inventor or someone does go after an infringer. This bill changes some of the actual criteria that are being used. It creates a re-examined practice for facilitating attacks by infringers on legitimate patent holders. In short, this bill allows large companies to swallow costs and risks so that it can beat down the rightful owners of technology.

Now, it seems like a horror story to America's inventors, but we are told what is really going on here, of course, as I keep saying, it's an effort to harmonize our laws. Now, doesn't that sound nice? And doesn't comprehensive reform sound nice? Just like comprehensive reform sounded good for the immigration bill. We knew what that was now, don't we? Comprehensive reform was a way to give amnesty and destroy our protections against illegal immigration without having to ever confront the argument.

This comprehensive reform of the patent system is the same strategy. Yes, they are going to harmonize the law with the rest of the world. That's harmony. That sounds like a wonderful word. And ``comprehensive,'' that also sounds great.

Well, we have had the strongest patent protection of any country on this planet, just as we had the same and the strongest protection for the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and other rights that we hold sacred. What would happen if in order to harmonize the freedom of religion and freedom of speech for the rest of the world, we were told that the protection of our freedoms that we now enjoy need to be diminished so that they could be harmonized with the rest of the world?

Let's say we could be like the people of Singapore or some other country that is not necessarily democratic, but is not a dictatorship either. What would happen if the American people were told that? What would happen, I would tell you, there would be a revolution through the United States of America. You are not going to diminish the rights of the American people in order to harmonize the law internationally. Forget it. I don't care if it's personal rights, political rights, property rights or technology and creative rights like we're talking about tonight. The patriots in this country are not going to see their rights diminished in order to create a new world order where we can all live in harmony with the elite telling us what to do.

However, the move to harmonize patent law, of course, is going smoothly right now, unlike it would if we tried to say we're going to bring down and diminish all those other rights, because there would be a revolution right now. But with patent law it's going a lot more smoothly.

In fact, it's coming up to a vote Friday and most people have no idea it's coming to the floor, or most Americans and most people even in this body have no idea of the significance of H.R. 1908. Why? Because it's being kept very low key. There's no fanfare. Not many people can even understand it. As I say, they tune out as soon as they hear the word ``patent law.'' All of this, of course, while the freedom and well-being of future generations is being frittered away.

We are on the edge. If this bill passes, it will have dramatic impact on the well-being of average Americans. The fact is we have had the strongest patent rights protection, and that is why we have had more innovation and a higher standard of living than any other people in the world. The common man here has the opportunity that common people in other parts of the world do not have because America has had technological superiority, and we've had a system based on protecting individual rights, the individual rights of the little guy, not just the big guys.

If our rights to patent protection are diminished, which is what H.R. 1908 will do, if we do that, if we diminish the rights of our patent protection in order to harmonize with the rest of the world, we will end up with the same type of opportunity and the same type of rights that they have in Third World countries.

Is that what we want? Do we want our people to have harmonized rights, new world order so we can all live like they live in Third World countries? Perhaps if someone is a corporate elitist who lives in a gated community, that might sound good. Hey, we can have all kinds of peons just walking around who will do my bidding and I can send my kids to private school. We live behind a gated community, I can actually have a driver and my kids can have nannies and we could have people cleaning up the yard and I can have my manufacturing facility in China, where they don't care if they're polluting the air or not. Boy, I'll tell you, that doesn't hurt those guys because they don't identify, when you say Third World country, they don't say, gee, I would be living worse off, they think it's the other guy, the little guy. And they're right, it's the little guys. Yeah. These people don't even want to pay royalties.

The electronics industry, what this is based on, does not want to pay royalties to the little guys. If you want to see anything more about this, you want to know the historic background of it, go down to the Nation's Capitol and you will find a statue to Philo Farnsworth. Philo Farnsworth was the guy who invented the picture tube. RCA, Mr. Sarnoff, the president of RCA, tried to steal that technology from Mr. Farnsworth because he was just a little guy. And for 20 years they fought it out, the biggest, most powerful corporation. Instead of just paying Mr. Farnsworth a royalty and giving him some credit, they had to steal it from him, to beat him down in the ground and smash him like a bug. But luckily we live in the United States of America. That case went all the way to the Supreme Court; and God bless America, the Supreme Court sided with Farnsworth instead of this RCA that tried to dominate this man who gave them the genius that they needed to make the picture tube work. We wouldn't have had it. They were going in the exactly the wrong direction, but they couldn't even give him the credit.

That's what the corporate elite thinks about us little guys. That's the way they do it. That's why they want to change constitutional protections,

make it a new world order. That's why we have all of this talk about globalism and all these international bodies that we're going to give power to because our corporate elite doesn't feel threatened by that, but each and every American should because none of those people overseas are going to watch out for us.

H.R. 1908 is coming up on Friday. It's a major attack on a constitutional right that's been part of the American system, part of the American system since the founding of your country. It's written into our Constitution.

We cannot make those changes and expect things are going to stay the same. But we beat this before. Marcy Kaptur, Dana Rohrabacher, Don Manzullo and a few others, we beat back this attempt. But we did it because the American people called their congressmen and said, ``Don't vote for the H.R. 1908 Steal American Technologies Act.'' That is what they did before, and we won. We contacted our congressmen.

That is how we beat comprehensive immigration reform. We can beat this bill, too, just like that. We can watch out for America if the PATRIOT Act and we watch out for the little guy together, if all of us come together and watch out for the little guy, all of our rights will be protected. That is what America is all about.

I beg my fellow Members to pay attention to this vote. I beg the American people to pay attention to this vote. There will be dramatic changes in our life and the opportunity our children will face and the safety of our country if we change this fundamental of our law.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

The motion was agreed to; accordingly (at 11 o'clock and 46 minutes p.m.), the House adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, September 5, 2007, at 10 a.m.

Mr. Speaker, today, I rise to correct the record concerning a great economist and a friend, the late Bernard Siegan, a distinguished professor of law at the University of San Diego. It will be remembered that in 1988 Dr. Siegan was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Court of Appeals. He promptly came under attack, one of the worst from Professor Lawrence Tribe of Harvard University.

Tribe wrote in a public letter on May 28, 1987, to Senator Biden attacking the academic views of Dr. Siegan as being outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence.

In a widely quoted section of his letter, Professor Tribe assailed Dr. Siegan's assertion that the Brown v. Board of Education ruling was ``a component of the right to travel, a right long secured by the Federal courts.''

At this time Professor Tribe claimed that this legal view was ``tortured'' and part of ``Mr. Siegan's radical revisionism . . . so bizarre and strained . . . as to bring into question both Mr. Siegan's competence as a constitutional lawyer and his sincerity as a scholar.'' This type of assault was typical of the attacks that preceded the defeat of Dr. Siegan's nomination.

That was 1987, and much has changed since then.

Dr. Bernard Siegan died in March 2006. His many books, speeches and articles made him one of the most prolific and respected legal and constitutional scholars on the political right.

Recently, in sorting through the files of her last husband, Mrs. Shelley Siegan came upon a series of written exchanges between her husband and Professor Lawrence Tribe. Tribe wrote on September 6, 1991, ``I have reconsidered my description of your analysis of Brown v. Board of Education. I agree with your general approach that Brown can be justified by arguing from the `liberty' component of the 14th amendment.''

Tribe further wrote Dr. Siegan, ``although I do not reach the same conclusions you do, the issues you raise are important enough to be worthy of scholarly discussion.''

Unfortunately for Dr. Siegan's reputation, Professor Tribe's reevaluation was never publicly documented. However, in a letter to Mrs. Siegan on September 21, 2006, he wrote, ``Please permit me to apologize to you here for the unnecessary and ad hominem character of what I wrote to Senator Biden in May 1987.

``I am sorry to have caused him, or you, any distress, and I am grateful for the opportunity your letter affords me to set the letter straight as best I could do at this late date.''

All this tells us much about the ugly period of personal attack this country experienced during the judicial nominations of the 1980s.

I hope this review of the above-cited letters makes it clear that Professor Bernard Siegan was a distinguished and respected scholar, a champion of personal liberty and private property. And contrary to the assertions made during his nomination hearings in 1987, Professor Bernard Siegan would have been made an excellent addition to the 9th District Circuit Court of Appeals.

And now the record is set straight.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this resolution.

Let me note, I have all along argued, and I think the people on our side of the aisle have argued, that we are not in Iraq in order to have permanent bases or any other such thing. American efforts in Iraq have been totally based on benevolent and noble motives, and I would hope that this is well-understood and appreciated by the people of Iraq themselves.

The fact is that there is some confusion because, during the public debate on what American foreign policy should be, far too often we have heard in the hype of emotions the charges, even from people in this body, that America is being imperialistic. I mean, that word ``imperialism'' has actually sprung up in several hearings that I've been at as a Member of Congress. That is an insult to American military personnel. We can honestly disagree about what's going on in Iraq without having to debase the people of the United States of America by claiming we're imperialists like the former empires in Russia and Germany, et cetera.

No, I think we've been benevolent from the beginning. Our people wanted to come in, to liberate Iraq from a bloody tyrant who slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his own people. We came there to help the people of Iraq and hopefully establish a democratic government. Now, whether or not we succeed or not, I'm not sure. I would hope the majority of people in Iraq appreciate that, and today, we are reaffirming to them we are not there to have any permanent presence.

I, in fact, will be proposing legislation this coming week which suggests, as a sense of the House, and I would ask the Speaker of the House to be aware of this, that we need to have a sense of the House resolution calling on the Iraqi Government to have a referendum of whether they want the American troops that are there today to begin an immediate withdrawal or whether they would like American troops to stay there until order has been restored and order has been brought to the people of Iraq. I think that if the Iraqi people vote that we should have an immediate withdrawal, we should go. We should go. But if the people of Iraq decide they appreciate and want us to be there to help them fight off radical Islamists and others who would impose their brand of dictatorship on the people of Iraq, well, then, perhaps we should take into consideration that the Iraqi people want us there.

So I will be proposing legislation later on in the week calling for this referendum, and in the meantime, let us reaffirm with this legislation that it had never been the intent of the United

States of America to use Iraq as a permanent base for America's military presence in that region.

I thank you very much for your leadership, Madam Speaker. Thank you for your leadership in this, and I appreciate you are an activist. Since I've been in this Congress, you have always been an activist, and we have been on the same side in that activism.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment, which would prohibit any funds made available in this act to be used to prevent implementation of legally passed State laws in those 12 States that have authorized the use of marijuana for medical purposes.

The Founding Fathers wanted criminal law to be the domain of local and State governments. Sick and infirm people who live in the 12 States that have been granted by the voters in these States the legal right to use marijuana to alleviate their suffering if a doctor agrees, we should not make them targets of prosecution. If the voters in a State have so voted, and a doctor agrees, it is a travesty for the Federal Government to waste scarce Federal resources to harass sick people, elderly cancer patients and frail, multiple sclerosis sufferers and prevent them from getting the relief their personal doctors have recommended.

We have heard here hysterical talk about how voting for this amendment will somehow prevent the Federal Government from being able to go after narcotics traffickers. That is nonsense. The DEA would still have the power to arrest anyone selling marijuana for recreational use, as well as anyone selling cocaine or any other drugs. After all, although related to opium, yes, and even heroin, morphine is already used legally in hospitals throughout the United States. That does not mean that we are going to open up the whole country to heroin because we allow hospitals to use morphine.

Whether morphine or marijuana, the fact is that Federal resources could be better used and shouldn't be wasted on arresting sick people or their doctors. Those Federal resources, if this amendment passes, can be redirected away from these people, but to major drug traffickers or crime syndicates. That makes a lot more sense than trying to stop somebody or arrest somebody who has a doctor's prescription because they are suffering from cancer treatment. It makes more sense to focus on the drug dealers, for Pete's sake.

Here in the House there is a wide coalition of Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, and this number has grown year by year, who want to promote State autonomy on this issue. This is what the Founding Fathers wanted. Criminal matters should be left up to the States.

A vote ``yes'' on Hinchey-Rohrabacher is a vote to respect the intent of our Founding Fathers and respect the rights of our people at the State level to make the criminal law under which they and their families will live. It reinforces rules surrounding the patient-doctor relationship, and it is in contrast to emotional posturing and Federal power grabs and bureaucratic arrogance, which is really at the heart of the opposition.

This is a vote for good government. This is a good vote for honest compassion. The legal, humanitarian and practical thing to do is to vote ``yes'' on this amendment.

Let me just note this. I have had personal experiences on this, and I certainly respect Dr. Weldon and his opinion. And I have asked him for his opinion many times for problems of my own. But I lost my mother, and I recently lost my brother, to cancer. I will tell you in both cases there was a loss of appetite and just a pessimism that came over my mother and my brother both. If marijuana would have helped them, and if a doctor would have prescribed it for them, it would have been a horrible thing to think that Federal agents would come in and try to interfere with that so they would not be able to get marijuana, if that is what their doctor felt would have helped them.

That is what we are deciding today: Is that a right use of resources, number one, to go in and interfere with this doctor-patient relationship? They already use morphine in hospitals. That doesn't interfere with people trying to get control of the sale of heroin on our streets. No, this will not interfere with that. But what this will do is prevent a terrible waste of Federal resources.

And let us note again, if people are sick, and a doctor says yes, this would be a good treatment, I don't think our Founding Fathers, who wanted the State governments to make these criminal laws, but I don't even think that they would have wanted the State governments to interfere in such a relationship.

Our Founding Fathers believed in individual freedom, and they believed in limited government. Where else but in the doctor-patient relationship should we have a limit on the government coming in and making things criminal matters? I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on the Hinchey-Rohrabacher amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. Chairman, the Ramos and Compean prosecution has been the greatest miscarriage of justice in my 30 years in Washington, DC, and, believe me, I have seen a lot.

Ramos and Compean were veteran Border Patrol agents. They had unblemished records. They had both served in the military. Ramos and Compean were veterans of the Border Patrol, 5 and 10 years, respectively. Both had been in the military. In fact, Mr. Ramos, I believe, had been a 10-year veteran. He was a naval officer in the Navy Reserve for 10 years. Ramos had been nominated the year before as Border Patrol Agent of the Year.

Yet these two agents, their lives have been destroyed, and they have been vilified by Department of Justice officials and this administration. One day 2 years ago, they interdicted a drug dealer. After a scuffle ensued, the drug dealer ran toward the border, shots were fired, the drug dealer was shot in the buttocks. At the end of this incident that took place in just a few minutes, where a split- second decision was made to shoot their weapons, they decided that he had gotten away. They didn't know that the drug dealer had been hit.

There is where they made their mistake. They decided to not go through the 8 hours of arduous drudgery of filling out all of the reports that are necessary, the paperwork that is necessary when there is a shooting incident. So they and their supervisors, I might add, helped collect the little shell casings and determined, well, the guy didn't get hit, we will just forget it.

Well, that was a violation of procedure, yes. For that they might have deserved a suspension. Instead, this administration chose to throw the book at these men and turn what should have been just a violation of procedure, perhaps just a paperwork mistake, which sometimes happens even here in this body, they turned that into a felony.

They have destroyed the lives of these two defenders of our country who have spent 5 and 10 years of their lives willing to take bullets for us on the border. But our administration, this administration, decided to throw the book at them and give a free pass to the drug dealer, to the man who is bringing in $1 million worth of narcotics into our country.

That decision is so indefensible that I believe that the administration has been trying to cover up for that mistaken decision since that moment. What we have had, for those of us who have been looking into this, is we have been completely stonewalled by this administration, by the Department of Justice, by U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton in trying to get the information about the drug dealer and the free passes, the free passes that he had to transit into our country unescorted after this incident.

The fact of the matter is that the jury was told that the drug dealer involved was a one-timer who was trying to raise money so he could buy medicine for his mother, his sick mother. That was a lie that was presented to the jury, a lie.

Let me repeat that. It was not true, and the prosecutors understood they were given something not true. In fact, we were told by the U.S. attorney, Johnny Sutton, well, the fact that the information that the drug dealer had been picked up a second time before that trial was kept from the jury, but that the judge was the one who decided that.

That too is a lie. A lawyer may believe that, but the fact is we know the prosecutors were the ones who demanded the judge. It was their motion to keep that from the jury.

So why do we have an administration that feels so intent on destroying the lives of these two Border Patrol agents that they vilified them, that they keep information from the jury? This whole thing stinks to high heaven and the smell seems to be emanating from the White House.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are two people, two men, two brave heroes who were defending our country every bit as much as those men and women who are overseas right now defending our country. They were willing to risk their lives for us. We should not sit aside and let them languish in prison as their families go down into abject poverty without any health care, without any source of income. Their retirement benefits are destroyed. This is

the most mean-spirited, nasty attack on some of the defenders of our country that I have ever seen in my lifetime. We cannot let it sit. If we are patriotic Americans, it doesn't go to just posture ourselves with the defenders of this country and then let these two men languish in prison.

Mr. Chairman, I would ask my colleagues to search their hearts. We can do something about this.

You know, first of all, it has been a dismay to me to see how we have treated each other in this body. I don't know why, but people are looking to bring down each other because people disagree. We can understand that with philosophical differences, but how can we ever justify someone who has gone out of their way, our representatives in the Department of Justice going out of their way to bring down two defenders, turning a paperwork mistake, a procedural error, into a felony which has destroyed these men's lives.

If we stand up for Ramos and Compean, we stand up for the people of the United States. They know that; they are watching us. They know if we really care about the little guy, and that is what this is all about. We care about the little guy because that is what America is all about.

I support the amendment and ask my colleagues to join me in doing so.

Mr. Speaker, today I rise to correct the record concerning a great economist and friend, the late Dr. Bernard Siegan, a distinguished professor of law at the University of San Diego. In 1988 Dr. Siegan was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Court of Appeals. He promptly came under personal attack, most notably from Professor Lawrence Tribe of Harvard University.

Tribe wrote a public letter on May 28, 1987, to Senator Joseph Biden belittling Dr. Siegan as being outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence. Tribe further asserted that Dr. Siegan ``reveals himself to be not a judicial conservative but an ideologue of the right, one who would deploy the Constitution in service of a conservative economic philosophy.''

In a widely quoted section of his letter, Professor Tribe assailed Dr. Siegan's support of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling as ``a component of the right to travel, a right long secured by the Federal courts,'' which was, of course, Dr. Siegan's reason for supporting Brown v. Board of Education.

At the time Professor Tribe claimed that this legal view was ``tortured'' and part of ``Mr. Siegan's radical revisionism.'' At the conclusion of the letter, Professor Tribe wrote, ``The notion that it is a black child's freedom to `travel' onto the school grounds that segregation laws infringed is so bizarre and strained . . . as to bring into question both Mr. Siegan's competence as a constitutional lawyer and his sincerity as a scholar.'' This type of assault was typical of the attacks which preceded the defeat of Dr. Siegan's nomination. That was back in 1987. And much has changed since then.

By the time that Dr. Siegan died in March of 2006, he had many books and speeches and articles that made him one of the most prolific and respected legal and constitutional scholars on the political right. He is today credited with being a father of the recurrent rejuvenation of property rights theory in law.

In response to Dr. Siegan's defense of his views regarding Brown v. Board of Education, Tribe replied in a letter to Dr. Siegan's wife, and this was September 6, 1991: ``I have reconsidered my description of your analysis of Brown v. Board of Education in footnote 10 on page 1379 of the second edition of American Constitutional Law. I agree with your general approach that Brown can be justified by arguing from the `liberty' component of the 14th amendment . . . ''

Now, that was a letter sent to Siegan years later by Dr. Tribe and when Dr. Tribe and Dr. Siegan were corresponding. These letters were found by his wife, Shelley. Tribe in that same letter writes: ``Although I do not reach the same conclusions you do, the issues you raise are important enough to be worthy of scholarly discussion. I am now in the process of drafting a rather substantial supplement to my treatise summarizing recent developments in constitutional law. In my discussion of the equal protection clause, I will include a citation to your book that I am sure will please you more than the citation did in the last book.''

Unfortunately for the public reputation of Dr. Siegan, Professor Tribe never did complete the supplement to his treatise, and Dr. Siegan, of course, passed away after that exchange of letters.

Mrs. Siegan wrote to Professor Tribe after discovering these letters and asked Dr. Tribe for information on the planned, but not completed, supplement. She also asked the following question: ``In the 19 years since you penned your letter to Joe Biden, I wonder if you have reconsidered your comment regarding Bernie's competence as a constitutional lawyer and a serious scholar?'' Tribe replied to Mrs. Siegan on September 21, 2006. ``Please permit me,'' he wrote, ``to apologize to you here for the unnecessarily ad hominem character of what I wrote to Senator Biden in May of 1987. To help correct the record, if only posthumously, I am sending a copy of this letter to Senator Biden. Despite the differences in our perspectives,'' he said, ``I came to think of Bernie, just as you write that he thought of me, as a colleague in the profession we both truly love and consider to be one of the noblest.''

I would submit the rest of this statement for the Record and note that Lawrence Tribe has set the Record straight, and now the Record is straight on the great person and great scholar that Dr. Bernard Siegan was.

I am sorry to have caused him, or you, any distress, and am grateful for the opportunity your letter afforded me to set the record straight as best I could at this late date.

Mr. Speaker, the correspondence between Professors Bernard Siegan and Lawrence Tribe and the subsequent correspondence between Shelly Siegan and Professor Tribe tell us much about the ugly period of personal attack this country experienced during the judicial nomination hearings of the 1980s.

A review of the above cited letters makes it clear that Professor Bernard Siegan was a distinguished and respected scholar and champion of personal liberty and private property. Contrary to assertions made during his nomination hearings in 1987, Professor Bernard Siegan would have made an excellent addition to the Ninth District Circuit Court of Appeals. And now the record is set straight.