John Conyers

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Well, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the gentlewoman on behalf of many of us on the committee for a very timely, appropriate, and very sensible provision in the light of what has come to become common knowledge to everyone in the country now.

Mr. CONYERS. Now that we do understand that this is revealed frequently in the court, even though the gentleman did not know it before, the courts make this matter public. The other thing is, and this is a question I am going to yield to you on. Are you aware that in section 1715 of this bill that there is the same provision that you are now offering as an amendment? I yield to the gentleman.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to introduce, along with Congressman Barr, the Health Care Improvement Act of 2002. This is the successor legislation to the Campbell/Conyers bill from last Congress, which passed the House by an overwhelming 276-136 vote. We have drafted a more narrow legislative response this Congress in the hope that the bill will be more likely to move in the Senate. The legislation responds to two alarming anti-consumer trends--the ever increasing level of concentration among health insurers and exclusionary contracting practices by health insurance companies. The last five years have seen a massive consolidation in the health insurance and managed care market as more than a dozen health insurance competitors have been eliminated through mergers and acquisitions. The dangers posed by this ever increasing market concentration are exacerbated by the practice of health insurers engaging in heavy-handed negotiating tactics and requiring exclusionary contractual commitments from health care providers. Such restrictive contractual terms are frequently proffered on a ``take it or leave it'' basis to health care providers, under the threat of the loss of the provider's patients or exclusion from their access to other patients. Our legislation responds to the problem by allowing physicians or other health care professional to collectively negotiate with a health plan over contractual terms or plan policies. Presently, joint negotiations with a health plan by physicians or other health care professionals who are not financially integrated are illegal per se under the federal antitrust laws if they involve fees or prices. Under this legislation, such activities would be subject to review based on a more liberal ``rule of reason'' analysis, which could take quality of health care into account. I have taken a particular interest in this legislation because of the unfairness of the current market situation on African American doctors. I am aware of a number of incidents in Detroit and around the country of minority physicians being threatened that they will lose all of their business unless they enter into one-sided service contracts. This bill gives physicians the ability to respond to these abuses on a collective basis. The legislation is strongly supported by a wide array of health care professional and trade organizations, including several speaking today.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to introduce the ``Restoration of Fairness in Immigration Law Act of 2000,'' a bipartisan bill that is supported by the leaders of the Congressional Hispanic, Black and Asian Pacific Caucuses as well as over 60 immigration advocacy groups. Since this nation's founding, more than 55 million immigrants from every continent have settled in the United States. Immigrants work hard to make ends meet and pay taxes every day. They have lived in this country for decades, married U.S. citizens, and raised their U.S.- citizen children. Laws that single these people out for no other reason than their status as immigrants violate their fundamental right to fair treatment. Yet, for too many years, Congress has witnessed a wave of anti- immigrant legislation, playing on our worst fears and prejudices. Since 1994, we have considered proposals to ban birthright citizenship, ban bilingual ballots, and slash family and employment based immigration, as well as to limit the number of asylees and refugees. In 1996 we passed laws denying legal residents the right to public benefits and denying immigrants a range of due process and fairness protections. Recently we have seen the tragedy of September 11th used as an excuse for even more assaults on the rights of immigrants. The Justice Department is now holding deportation hearings in secret and detaining immigrants even after they are ordered released. The Attorney General is reducing both the independence and number of judges that handle the appeals of immigration cases. We are fending off legislation almost daily intended to reduce if not eliminate immigration to this country. Those who urge us to restrict the due process rights of immigrants forget the reason these rights were established in the first place. We grant due process rights to citizens and non-citizens alike; not out of some soft-hearted sentimentality, but because we believe that these rights form an important cornerstone to maintaining civilized society. The ``Restoration of Fairness in Immigration Act of 2002'' furthers this proud legacy by restoring our nation's longstanding compassion for individuals seeking to build a better life and reunite with their families. The bill restores fairness to the immigration process by making sure that each person has a chance to have their case heard by a fair and impartial decision maker. No one here is looking to give immigrants a free ride, just a fair chance. Our work will not stop with the introduction of this legislation. While this bill lays the benchmark for future Congresses of what our immigration policy should be, I believe that many provisions of this bill can be passed into law, including the restoration of section 245(i), Congressman Frank's Family Reunification Act and Senator Kennedy's Immigrant Fairness Restoration Act. Justice and fairness, as well as our own economic interests, demand that we take these actions.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the rule for the reasons that my colleague, the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Cannon), has outlined, that if Buyer comes up first and prevails, Conyers-Cannon never sees the light of day. So that is why a lot of people are joining in a bipartisan way to vote down the rule, because we want to just get the vote out. That is all we are asking for is a vote. So the Bells, I will not say the Bells wired the Committee on Rules, because they do not do such a good job anyway, but this is not the way to proceed. There are a number of myths going on here. Number one, that there are between 1.3 million new jobs to be created under Tauzin-Dingell or 1.5 million as another leader states. New jobs, 1.5 million new jobs. By eliminating the CLECs, you will now get new jobs created. Not true. Not only will there be zero jobs created, we will lose jobs. Number two, the Tauzin-Dingell bill will speed up rural deployment of the high-speed Internet. Great. Except the experts say no, just the opposite. Number three, and I only wish my dear colleague and friend, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior), were here on the floor, but I am going to do this, anyway. Ask anybody in Detroit how great Ameritech's service is, and they will tell you, nine out of ten, that they keep raising the rates, the service is lousy, the CWA workers are picketing as I speak. It is all over television and the newspapers, I say to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Upton). The relations are horrible. And now people are telling us about how we love the Bells in Detroit. Wrong, big-time, very much in error. So, ladies and gentlemen, we are dealing with a bill that barely passed the Committee on Energy and Commerce, was voted out negatively in the Committee on the Judiciary. Now we ask for a simple vote on an amendment, and the Committee on Rules gives us, yes, if you can defeat another amendment before that, and if you do not, Conyers-Cannon, you do not even bring yours up, and they walk around saying, ``We got you an amendment in the Committee on Rules report.'' Thanks, Rules Committee, for all you have done to help further fair debate here. So here we are dealing with the Bells, who want to repeal the 1996 portion, the most important part of the act. I hope that we will vote the rule down and vote the Conyers amendment up and, if necessary, the whole bill down.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from California and commend her for this very important event in which we recollect our thoughts and thinking on the most sensitive question in our society, the question of race. I am delighted to engage in a little recollection of things that have been going on in my life recently. I was at the University of Michigan for a black history program in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a month ago; and I must say I was astounded by the department size, the fact that they had professors, they had fellows who were coming from all over the world. There was a young fellow that had just come from South Africa that day, who made the mistake of not bringing an overcoat to Michigan in January. It was a great program. And there was a genuine interest demonstrated by the university that I had not known about before. A talented professor, teacher, a member of my congressional district in Detroit, heads up this department at U of M, and she goes from Detroit to Ann Arbor 5 days a week and loves her work. There was a real enthusiasm there. And then 2 weeks ago I was approached by the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) to join him in a program in Traverse City in which they were celebrating the life of a soldier who had to pass for white in World War II to get into the Air Force, because it was before they created Tuskegee Institute, which Mayor Coleman Young, our first African American Mayor in the city of Detroit, went to this school. But this was before him. And so he had passed away. We gave his family nine or 10 medals, from the Purple Heart, up and down, that had been denied him. And thanks to my colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), and myself, we were able to get the Department of the Air Force to go over this incredibly valiant record. He had reenlisted several times, and on his last mission his plane was shot down and he was killed. Mr. Speaker, it was quite enlightening because there were very few people of color at the school. I was at a school, it is the first K-12 school I will ever recall being in in the North. Here it was in Traverse City. It was a very nice school, 300 young people, but still it went from K-12, which is quite a stretch in these days. In addition, I will be joining the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee) tomorrow in terms of a meeting that we will be having concerning Three Strikes and You're Out. I am looking forward to that because it is very, very important. I will be at the Wolverine Bar Association of Michigan's Annual Barristers' Ball this Saturday evening, a huge event, but it marks something more than just a wonderful social event. It marks the time not too far distant when African American lawyers could not practice law in the larger firms in Detroit. Wade McCree, Jr., who became a county judge, a Federal judge and appeals judge, was President Jimmy Carter's Solicitor General and was surely scheduled to go on the Supreme Court, went into workmen's compensation as a referee, although he was Harvard trained with all honors, because no law firm would accept him at that time. Our former colleague from Michigan, Congressman George Crockett, he, with Attorney Bill Goodman and others, they formed a firm called Goodman, Eden, Crockett, Robb, Philo & Millender, which was the first integrated firm in Detroit. This was in the 1940s. We are past that. We have broken into that. Our former mayor, Dennis Archer, is president- elect of the American Bar Association. A doctor and former health department head of Washington, D.C., is now a vice president of the American Medical Association. So we have started making these kinds of movements, but it is important for us to understand that, even as we do, so we will be meeting tomorrow, a meeting that I invite everyone to, where we will be dealing with the subject of people of African descent in Latin America who have been largely ignored, notwithstanding there are 150 million of them, and they are moving forward in a very important way. So this kind of refreshes our minds as to where we are, what the struggles are. Reparations is still more than a dozen years old in the Congress, but it is many, many more years old, and we are still struggling to get a fair hearing here. The criminal justice system speaks for itself. Racial profiling, even though outlawed, is still practiced widely; and with the terrorist activity, there are those that argue that we should relax racial profiling because Arab Americans should be subject to different criteria than other people, while law enforcement has repeatedly stated that racial profiling is a poor police technique. Mr. Speaker, we have a health system in which the discrepancy of health statistics between people of color and not of color are widely known, and the Congressional Black Caucus is working very hard on that. Our unemployment statistics are double everybody else's, have been and still are. I cannot help but raise the question: How long are we going to tolerate African American slums and ghettoes in the major cities of America? They could have been wiped out in one fell swoop generations ago, and yet they are allowed to persist with Band-Aid programs. The AIDS crisis is a question of color because many people of color have no way of getting any assistance whatsoever, or the prevention techniques are not made available. Haiti is a question, and I always am intrigued by Americans who say, why are you so interested in Haiti? Haiti is the place where African slaves were transported, the indigenous people were eliminated, and this is the closest black country on the Western Hemisphere, the only black country in the Western Hemisphere and is the nearest you can get to Africa without leaving the Western Hemisphere. We have the problem of the disparities in the treatment by our own State Department of the 48 States that compromise the continent of Africa, and that is even though we have an African American Secretary of State. We are struggling just as we always have. Affirmative action has been under constant legal threats, and I am not proud to say that in the Eastern District of Michigan we had a decision that came out so badly that it is almost unbelievable, and it is going to make its way up to the courts. These are some of the concerns that I have. I will be in Philadelphia celebrating Black History Month. I want to read other Members' remarks. I think they would make a very interesting paper, document or book, and I would volunteer to work with the gentlewoman on that kind of activity. I congratulate all of my colleagues who have chosen to participate this evening.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Cannon).

Mr. CONYERS. I do not choose to yield at this point, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes. Mr. Chairman, it is unusual in Michigan that we find the alliance of bipartisan that has grown around opposition to this measure. I do not believe anyone here has quoted Governor John Engler recently. I do not think I ever have. But now is an appropriate time, as his career comes to an end due to term limits. Here is what he said in the Wall Street Journal: ``We had a vision that we would have major players competing for our business, that there would be at least two choices for all of us,'' said Michigan Governor John Engler. ``That has not happened, and that is great frustration to me.'' That echoes the remarks of the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Rogers) on the floor just a little bit earlier. No, Rogers is not for Tauzin-Dingell. Rogers is opposed to this. He is very courageous in the committee to take this stand, but he is being clear and honest about it. Because, I say to my colleagues, not only was the Committee on Rules wired, but the Committee on Commerce itself was wired. Well, why? So was the Committee on the Judiciary, someone said. Mr. Chairman, H.R. 1542, which was turned down in the Committee on the Judiciary, negatively reported, would eliminate any meaningful opportunity for competitive carriers to gain access to use an incumbent's local loops to provide their own high-speed data. Now, while the bill's sponsors say that it preserved the FCC's current line-sharing rules, in fact, it preserves only the illusion of line-sharing. We have been wired twice, I say to my colleagues. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of our time to the distinguished gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler) from the Committee on the Judiciary.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I am delighted to be here to merely continue the discussion about some misunderstandings that seem to be the basis for advancing this very important legislation called Tauzin-Dingell. The first is that the Tauzin-Dingell bill will speed up rural deployment of high-speed Internet. Yet, we have letters and comments from the Nebraska Public Service Commission, the Florida Public Service Commission, the State of Iowa Utilities Board, the Tennessee Regulatory Authority, the New Mexico Public Regulatory Commission, the Montana Public Service Commission, the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission, and the Washington State Utilities and Transportation Commission which all say that to eliminate the line-sharing requirements in H.R. 1542 would, in effect, decrease the rate of deployment of competitive broadband services to resident consumers. Now, are the Bells a monopoly? Were the Bells a monopoly? Interesting. They are getting larger and larger, even as a result of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and they are growing. Many of them have doubled their broadband subscribers: Verizon up 122 percent, Quest up 74 percent, Bell South up 188 percent; and the largest one of them all, SBC, which includes Ameritech, the most complained-of service in the State of Michigan, as at least half the delegation will attest, which includes Southwest Bell, Pactel, and Ameritech, well, they are only up 70 percent. So the question is, why are we granting them an exemption from the requirement that was the heart of the Telecommunications Act of 1996? Well, it is because once you get bigger and larger and can influence more and more people, they figured out that why not eliminate sections 251 and 271, which require the local monopoly facilities to be open to competitors. So what the bill on the floor does is give the local Bell monopolies a license to exclude. Now, if that were not bad enough, we have an amendment, a modest amendment offered by myself and the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Cannon), which would correct that, but it is subject to a parliamentary process which my colleagues will find very interesting. The process is called king of the Hill without a vote. King of the Hill without a vote. That is, if one can get through Buyer-Towns, then we do not need to consider Cannon-Conyers. Then it is pointed out, that is the historical rules. What is the complaint about? We granted you an amendment. We forgot to tell you that you would also have to defeat another amendment which was drummed up to present this very same challenge. So I urge Members to, first of all, join with me in a close and critical examination of Buyer-Towns, and then we can move on to what I consider to be the heart of the discussion this day: the Cannon-Conyers amendment. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding, and I concur with his observation. Mr. Speaker, could I just make this point: Why can we not just have a straight up or down vote on Cannon-Conyers and on Buyer-Towns? That has been spoken about among our leadership. I think it would be agreeable to many of the principals here on this bill, and I think it would make things move a lot more quickly. We have already saved ourselves hours of time by foreclosing the debate. If we just have these two votes, we would be able to bring this very important piece of legislation to a conclusion.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I will not take my 5 minutes, but I will yield the balance of the time to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Clay). Mr. Speaker, the Conyers-Woolsey hate crimes bill is approaching that critical mass where we will soon have the 218 votes. This Special Order is generated to pick up the last dozen or so cosponsors that we would like to have to have the bill brought forward as quickly as possible. The Members will recall that there has been hate crimes legislation since 1968, and what we do is take away some of the restrictions which would prevent us from bringing in Federal jurisdiction to aid local law enforcement. This bill does not supplant the law enforcement at the local level. We assist them and work in a cooperative spirit with them. Particularly, we take away the existing Federal jurisdictional requirements that a Federal act is impeded upon as a result of the incident. For example, voting, interstate commerce, or some other Federal nexus is required to trigger the bill under its current legal status. What we do is to say for crimes of gender, sex, sexual orientation, we remove a Federal requirement because a hate crime is a hate crime whether there is a Federal nexus or not. Many States have hate crimes legislation, except for the fact that 21 of them are admittedly very weak. Five States have none at all. What we are doing is in the wake of September 11, what we are doing is saying that there has been a dramatic increase of hate crimes activity. The lawyers on the Committee on the Judiciary have discovered with the Council for Islamic Relations that there are nearly 1,500 reported cases, frequently of people who were mistaken to be of Arab descent and were not, but they were clearly crimes that would fall into this category that we find so offensive. So what we are saying is now is the time as we move forward in a democratic way under a semi-war circumstance that we make these final improvements to the bill, and we are hoping that it can be done as expeditiously as possible. My thanks to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey), for her indefatigable efforts in this; and I am very proud that she is working with us. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Clay).

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, may the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Clay) exercise the time now that he had under his own name in his own right?

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to speak to the issue of Black Land Loss, an epidemic which is causing African Americans to lose land at alarming rates. This problem has plagued Black Americans for over a century and a half. We cannot allow an issue as pervasive and insidious as black land loss to go unaddressed. Black land loss is attributable to many reasons: lynchings, mob attacks, lack of legal wills, slick and untrustworthy lawyers, and unscrupulous real estate traders. Sometimes black land owners were attacked by whites who wanted to seize their property. During the Reconstruction period, black were ostracized, terrorized and dispossessed of the one thing they had managed to earn in that desperate time, their land. By 1920, African Americans had amassed more land than they ever held since reconstruction, at least 15 million acres, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Agricultural Census. Black land ownership tapered off after World War I and plunged in the 1950's. Today, African-Americans own just 1.1 million acres of the more than 1 billion acres in productive land in the U.S. During the 20th Century Black Americans have lost their land holding at a rate two and a half (2\1/2\) times faster than whites. Blacks were forced out of the South and off their land by: The discriminatory lending practices employed by banks and the U.S. Department of Agriculture; the need to seek better economic opportunities in the North; racial oppression; and violence perpetrated by white supremacists groups and other terrorist organizations. In effect, black landowners were put under so much pressure to give up their land, that they became refugees in their own country. Families that pass down their land without wills or with vague wills are particularly vulnerable to losing their property through partitioning and other predatory legal practices. Historically blacks in the rural south seldom left wills. Experts say thousands of acres of black owned land that had been in African-American families for generations has been lost through these practices. In recent years separating African-Americans from their land has become big business. All to the detriment of African-American land owners. Ownership of land has meant more than just a family homestead, land represented wealth to a black family, when these homesteads were taken from black families they lost their ability to pass on wealth. As WEB DuBois stated, ``universal suffrage could not function without personal freedom, land and education.'' By preventing blacks from preserving their land, whites were more able to perpetuate the vestiges of slavery. Taking land from African- Americans went a long way in eliminating their ability to prosper; participate in the political process; and to effectively pass on wealth to future generations.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I commend Chairman Sensenbrenner for defending this committee's jurisdiction and for his bipartisanship. Congress has not authorized the Department of Justice in more than 20 years, instead leaving the responsibility to the appropriators to decide what DOJ programs should be authorized and their maximum funding level; this conference will express the views of the authorizing committees about how they should operate. For example, both the House and Senate bills recognize the importance of helping victims of violence and preserving congressional oversight of prosecutorial activities. They give the Violence Against Women Office more autonomy so that it may better serve female victims of violence. They also require the Department to report to Congress when they wiretap computers, agree to settlements, and make certain decisions about enforcing Federal statutes. These reports will make it easier for Congress to see how the laws we enact are being interpreted and how they should be changed, it at all. In the end, I hope this conference is a precursor to more active congressional involvement in the running of the Justice Department.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to remember Dean Anthony Sutin who was taken from us in a senseless act of violence at Appalachian Law School on January 16, 2002. Dean Sutin was a renowned legal scholar and public servant who was an invaluable partner to me on judiciary issues while he worked at the Department of Justice. I first met him while he was working on community policing in the Attorney General's office in 1994. I admired his dedication to his tireless work on a program that has impacted the lives of so many Americans. While I could not do justice to Anthony Sutin's memory by simply reciting all of his many accomplishments, a few highlights deserve notice. Dean Sutin graduated summa cum laude in 1981 from Brandeis University. He received his law degree in 1984 from Harvard, where he served as assistant editor for the Harvard Environmental Law Review and the Harvard Journal on Legislation. Before joining the Justice Department, he worked as a partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Hogan & Hartson, L.L.P. At the Department, he served as Deputy Director and General Counsel of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) from 1994 to 1997. As a testament to his outstanding leadership in this area, in its first year alone, COPS resulted in a three percent national decrease in violent crime. From January 1997 to April 1998 Dean Sutin served as Deputy Associate Attorney General and Chief of Staff to the Associate Attorney General. He was then appointed by Attorney General Reno to serve as Acting Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs where he worked until November 1998. It was during this historic period in which my staff and I interacted with Dean Sutin on a regular basis. During his tenure as the head of legislative affairs, Anthony Sutin provided invaluable legal insight to the Judiciary Committee on the historic impeachment debate. During this uncomfortable period in our Nation's history, he was a stabilizing force in communication between the Clinton Administration and Congress. It was also during this period in which he worked with Congress on a number of crime-related issues such as gun control, community policing and hate crimes legislation. Dean Sutin was lured away from Washington at the height of his career to pursue his dream of teaching law in a small community where he could closely interact with his students and other faculty. As dean of the growing Appalachian Law School, he cultivated ambition and hope in southwest Virginia's struggling coal-mining region. Even more noteworthy than his academic and professional accomplishments was Dean Sutin's reputation as a kind and compassionate man who dedicated his life to raising his family, teaching his students and serving the country. Shortly before his death, he and his wife Margaret Lawton visited China and adopted a 14-month-old girl. I would like Clara and her brother Henry to know that I was proud to know and work with a man that dedicated his career in public service to making America a safer place for them to grow up and live.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, today I am introducing of the ``Securities Fraud Prevention Act of 2002,'' legislation designed to crack down on securities fraud. I am joined by Minority Leader Gephardt along with Representatives Watt, Jackson-Lee, Waters, Markey and Sanders. The last several months have revealed widespread securities fraud at the very highest level of Enron and its advisers. Every day brings a new revelation of the dissemination of misinformation, shredding, obstruction of justice, and insider trading. As more and more companies filer bankruptcy, I am concerned that we may well learn of additional instances of fraud across corporate America. One step we can take to respond to this outbreak is to empower harmed American investors to obtain justice in these cases. Unfortunately, one of the very first items enacted by the Majority in 1995 as part of the ``Contract with American'' was legislation making it more difficult for ordinary Americans to bring Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) actions involving securities fraud. This legal loophole for securities fraud was enacted over President Clinton's veto as part of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA) of 1995. The PSLRA ended the use of the private civil RICO statue as a means of seeking treble damages and attorneys fees in securities fraud cases, unless preceded by a criminal conviction. In essence, the Congress wrote a special exemption preventing securities fraud cases from being brought under RICO. In the wake of the Enron debacle, I believe the time is now ripe to protect American investors once again. The Enron cases has established beyond a shadow of a doubt that white collar fraud can be incredibly damaging, in many cases wiping away life savings and costing innocent Americans billions of dollars of their hard earned money. There can be no conceivable justification for shielding corporate wrongdoers from RICO actions in this context. I am hopeful that Congress can move quickly to enact this worthwhile and timely legislation.

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, in this holiday season we are grateful for the familiar traditions of each of our faiths that comfort us and connect us with others. We are also thankful for the unprecedented unity of the Congress, the country, and the larger global community in its shared determination to aid the victims of September 11, and to defeat the forces of terrorism. To maintain and strengthen that unity for the work that lies ahead, we need to find new ways to solve conflict and to overcome the suspicions that arise from differences in culture, race, religion, economic condition and political ideology. Establishment of shared traditions that promote intercultural contact will help. On December 15, 2000, the 106th Congress unanimously approved a measure that calls for annual worldwide commemoration of the successful ``One Day in Peace January 1, 2000'' with shared meals, inter-cultural exchange, pledges of non-violence, and gifts to the hungry. One Day in Peace provides an unparalleled example of global cooperation that is both instructive and inspiring. On that first day of the new millennium several billion people and nearly every government in the world acted responsibly, cooperatively and with astonishing success to avert the combined threats of unruly crowds, terrorism and fears of Armageddon--as well as feared panic and hoarding related to expected computer failures. The ``OneDay'' movement, begun by children and eventually pledged by one hundred countries, 1000 organizations in 135 countries, 25 U.S. governors and hundreds of mayors worldwide surely helped. The result could be called the world's first deliberate day of peace. We believe this collective achievement by much of humankind is worth remembering and repeating each year. The United Nations General Assembly agrees. It recently adopted a resolution (56/2) inviting all Member States, and all people in the world to celebrate ``One Day in Peace 1 January 2002, and every year thereafter.'' At this season, as we enjoy the time-honored holiday traditions of our separate faiths, let us also celebrate a new tradition with a simple, world-wide all-faith holiday observance (comparable to our American Thanksgiving) that demonstrates our mutual resolve to create a future world of peace and sharing. The schoolchildren who brought the concept of the ``OneDay'' holiday to Capitol Hill (some of the youngest and most energetic lobbyists we've seen) urge all Americans to celebrate OneDay by pledging non- violence to one another on January first. They also ask us to seek out someone of another culture and share a meal together, then match or multiply the cost of that meal with a gift to the hungry at home or abroad, in tangible demonstration of our desire for increased friendship and sharing. We think these young peacemakers have a good idea. Happy holidays, both old and new!

Mr. CONYERS

Mr. CONYERS. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. CONYERS. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. CONYERS. Okay. That is much better, because that means, then, that we do not have to declare war on China's leaders, either. They are at war with us, not the people? Did I get that right? I continue to yield to the gentleman.

Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. Okay, so none of my premises have been right so far. It is like the Detroit Lions who broke their record last week. Maybe I can do something here. Okay. Now, am I right that we have substituted new language for this statement? I have them now. The original language was that Iraq's refusal to admit U.N. weapons inspectors pursuant to Security Resolution 687 ``. . . should be considered an act of aggression against the United States and its allies,'' and that language has been removed; and we have inserted new language. Does anyone challenge that in the body? Okay. All right. I got that in. And the new language says that 687 and 707 and other relevant resolutions ``present a mounting threat to the United States, its allies, and international peace and security.'' Does anyone have anything to help me understand that better? So, essentially, instead of an act of aggression, we have put in ``a mounting threat,'' and I notice there seems to be general agreement on that. So we have had hearings and we have had a markup. We modified the language for people who may be nervous about where this might be going. But I must confess, as I return to my seat, I am not sure if we should be expanding the war to Iraq.