Dana Rohrabacher

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, not only do we not condone it, I would applaud the gentleman from California [Mr. Miller] that we should, as a country, make sure that we take the steps necessary to stop that. But to condemn, basically to throw the baby out with the bath water and say this is part and parcel of this free-enterprise revolution that they have going on in the Northern Marianas is just an inaccurate picturing of what is going on in the lives of most people in the Northern Marianas. I met with a lot of the reformers there from the churches who have been active in trying to correct the problems that the gentleman from California [Mr. Miller] brought up, and they admitted to me that in the last 5 years things have gotten dramatically better because the decent people of the Northern Marianas, who, after all, in any area are decent people, have made a commitment to make those changes.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. On the Miller amendment, is all time passed when anyone can debate the subject matter of the amendment offered by the gentleman from California [Mr. Miller]?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I yield to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, no decent American or anyone else is going to turn the other way as young girls or any young person is exploited and a contract is not honored, or someone is being forced into a life style like the gentleman is suggesting. But what I am saying here is the reason the Northern Marianas have been targeted, unlike New York City, which we have heard about just from our last speaker before I got up, is because the Northern Marianas, unlike other island possessions, are taking a free enterprise approach to development. It is increasing the standard of living of their people. Even the guest workers are better off than if they had no job at all.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, is all the debate passed for the time period that will be available to discuss what the gentleman from California [Mr. Miller] had been proposing?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. At this point, before we move on to another subject, is it permissible for this gentleman to strike the last word?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I will not take the entire 5 minutes. Let me just note, there is a philosophical difference between some of the people who have been expressing what I would consider the worst possible picture, painting the worst possible picture of the Northern Marianas Islands, and those of us who look at the Northern Marianas Islands and compare them to other such areas of the world and see a totally different picture. Yes, if we painted a picture of the United States as a developing country 25 or let us say 50 to 75 years ago, people would say the United States is a horrible place as compared to the United States today. But the fact is that the United States as compared to other countries in the world 75 years ago was a pretty good place. The Northern Mariana Islands as compared to other areas of similar development, other islands, especially even island territories of the United States of America, is a pretty good place. They have had a great deal of reform, free enterprise reform, in the last 5 years that has totally turned around their economy. I realize that there are people on the other side of the aisle who believe that government should regulate economic activity to improve the standard of living of the people of a given area. I do not think that works. What has happened in the Northern Marianas, when they were counting on handouts from the Federal Government, when they were counting on the United States government here in Washington, D.C. to provide them subsidies, the standard of living of everyone in those islands was going downhill. Today, when they have developed a new strategy for the development of their little islands, the standard of living of their island people is going up. And of course, it is argued, my goodness, they have all of these guest workers who are working in terrible situations, they are getting less than the minimum wage in the United States, et cetera. However, even those individuals, by and large the vast majority of those individuals, perhaps 90 percent of those individuals are living better than they would if they would not have jobs. That is why they came to the Northern Marianas. My good friend, the gentleman from California [Mr. George Miller], I do not know if he would prefer to have these people unemployed in the Philippines or unemployed in the various countries they come from, or if he would rather have them working and going back after 2 years with several thousand dollars in their pockets. Mr. Chairman, I have as much objection as my good friend, the gentleman from California [Mr. Miller] does to people who break their contracts with guest workers. That was a problem in the Northern Marianas. That is no longer a major problem, because the people and the government of the Northern Marianas have committed themselves to solving that problem, and preventing the poorest of the poor people who come in as guest workers from being exploited to the point that their contracts are not being honored. I went there. I talked to many, many guest workers. I went to various factories. I talked also to the law enforcement agencies that are there, who said yes, there was a problem 5 years ago, but now we are forcing these employers to honor their contracts. Thus, these contract laborers are living better than they would if they were stuck in China or the Philippines. I will tell the Members, the people of the Northern Marianas, their standard of living is going up, not down. That is compared to all these other island possessions of the United States which are relying on handouts from the American people, and those island economies are on the way down. So the Northern Marianas has found something successful.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Smith]. Our Social Security System is Going Broke

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I am excited today to call the attention of my colleagues to an event of awesome importance that happened today at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It concerns an issue that is in the process of being decided by Congress that will determine our country's prosperity, our country's security, and will determine whether or not the American people can maintain their high standard of living, their high level of standard of living as compared to the rest of the world and our competitors in the world who would drag us down. The event at MIT was a forceful communication on the part of 26 American Nobel Prize winners. These renowned economists and scientists signed an open letter to the U.S. Congress. These are the ultimate source of expertise that could possibly be called upon to advise we neophytes in Congress in making the decisions that will determine the future of our country and the well-being of our people. Mr. Speaker, what did these 26 preeminent American scholars, these Nobel laureates want to tell us? What is such a threat that the likes of Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economists, one a liberal and one a conservative, would join forces to alert our country in? These 26 Nobel Prize winners are pleading with Congress to defeat the effort to dramatically change the patent law that has served our country well since the founding of our Republic. Most Americans are unaware that we have had the strongest patent protection system in the world since the founding of our country. It was written right into our Constitution. It was the commitment of Jefferson and Franklin and other heroes of freedom and the champions of the rights of the common man that made sure that this patent protection was written into our Constitution. Mr. Speaker, it has been this protection that ensured our country and ensured our country the prosperity and progress that we have enjoyed and ensured our people that we would be a country that would be the bastion of human progress and they would enjoy the fruits of that progress, and that our country would be the laboratory of free thought and entrepreneurialism and innovation that would foster the aspirations of people like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers and so many others. It is a powerful force, this protection of law for technology innovation in our country, that elevated the standard of living of our people and secured our Nation from war and aggression. Mr. Speaker, we were a different kind of country. That is what Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others foresaw. We would not be dragged into war and the common man would live with rights guaranteed by law that the common people all over the world were denied, that these freedoms and these protections would afford us a higher standard of living and afford us the ability to live in peace. Peace and progress. Mr. Speaker, we have had the strongest patent protection, as well as the other protection for all other rights, of any country in the world. Now we discover a quiet but determined effort to dramatically change it. This is what has caught the attention of our Nobel laureates. Mr. Speaker, not a minor change. It is a change in the fundamental laws that have protected us for over 200 years. We literally as Americans have taken this legal protection for granted. Perhaps one out of a thousand Americans fully understand that this has had something to do with the standard of living our people have enjoyed, and that their own happiness and their own success in their own life might be traced back to this legal protection of technological development in our country. What 26 of America's greatest thinkers are warning us about is a bill that is going through the Senate, S. 507, the so-called patent reform bill. According to the Nobel laureates this bill, quote, ``Could result in lasting harm to the United States and the world.'' They point out that it, ``will prove very damaging to American small inventors'' and that was by, I quote again, ``curtaining the protection they obtain by patents relative to large multinational corporations.'' Mr. Speaker, at the end of my special order I will submit for the Record a copy of that letter that these 26 Nobel laureates have sent to the Congress today and affixed their signatures at MIT today. Mr. Speaker, in their press conference today, the Nobel laureates spoke bluntly so their warning could not be misunderstood and could not be downplayed. I quote, ``It would create total chaos and it is conducive to fraud and deceit,'' says Harvard economist Dudley Herschbach, who won a 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry, a Harvard professor. ``It would facilitate the theft of an inventor's intellectual property rights,'' end of quote by Mr. Herschbach as well. America's greatest economic and scientific minds are pleading with us not to make the changes in our law that will diminish the patent protection of the average American. I have heard this pleading before, Mr. Speaker. As this legislation slid through the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, the owner of a small solar energy corporation was in my office. And when we looked at the provisions of this bill, his face turned white and then he clenched his fist and he pounded on my desk and he told me, ``Mr. Congressman, if they change the patent law in this way,'' and this is a man who owns a small company that is innovative and bringing about new changes in technology dealing with solar energy, something that will determine who will be able to be in a dominant position for providing energy on this planet 100 years from now or maybe even 50 years from now. This man was pounding on my desk: Congressman, if they change the laws in this way, it will mean that my Japanese adversaries will be able to steal all of my research and use it against me, and they will put me out of business. They will use the profit from my own technological developments to put me out of business. That is what he told me. Mr. Speaker, he was pleading with me to please inform my colleagues of the threat that this held to our economy. Then a few months ago, an entrepreneur in California who was aware of the debate then going on in Congress about this bill called me. This is a man who also runs a small company. This company specializes in the killing of bugs in an environmentally safe way. His company is now developing a whole new system of killing termites and bugs that eat up the food of mankind and eat up our houses and destroy property. He has developed a whole new method of doing this without the use of chemicals that would be totally environmentally safe. Mr. Speaker, this man told me that he was frightened because his patent had not been issued and if this bill passed, he was afraid that again his adversaries would have the information available from research that he had financed and that they would put him out of business using his own technology against him, that they would be able to capitalize with stolen information; that he would not be able to capitalize until the patent was issued, and he had that in his hand to go to give people to invest in his company. Then, more recently, I spoke with a constituent who wanted to know what I was doing in Congress. Mr. Speaker, I told him about the patent fight. He told me that he had been waiting for over 2 years for a patent and he described to me a unique way, and I cannot go into detail, of course, but a unique way of protecting the public against tainted meat. He told me that if the patent reform, the changes that they were trying to put through in the Senate and they put forward in a bill here on the House floor, would go into law, that it would bankrupt him and that obviously people overseas and elsewhere would be copying his idea and he would never be able to compete with the big guys, because they would have all of his information before he was in production. It was a heart rending thing for me to hear this, because what we have is we have just these three examples. Someone who is developing new solar technologies to try to make the world better. This man who has solar technology, it is a company in Ohio, claims that his changes will revolutionize energy production in the United States and throughout the world. But this could make it totally environmentally safe to produce electricity. Yet, he knows that that will be taken from him if the changes that are being suggested in our patent law would go into effect. Mr. Speaker, we have someone who basically is trying to change the way that we kill bugs so that we do not have to poison our soil, which eventually becomes part of our body as we eat the food from the food chain, or to put poisons and chemicals into our homes so that our elderly and our little babies have such adverse effects from the chemicals we need just to kill the bugs in our own houses. He has a new way of doing that, but he knows if we change the patent law he is going to be left out. Then we have, here on the heels of the E. coli catastrophe in which people lost their lives, a man who has a new way so that every housewife, every person who runs a restaurant will know whether or not, in a very cheap way, whether or not meat they are eating is tainted. Mr. Speaker, these people will not continue to make these innovations that have changed our lives in the past. These individuals I am discussing right now, they will not continue to come forward with their new ideas if we make them vulnerable to their foreign and domestic predators who would take away from them everything that they have earned with their creativity, in their investment of their time, and their skill and their energy. The spring of human progress will run dry if we take it for granted and if we change our laws so that people like this, the innovators of our society, can be robbed. Mr. Speaker, now, what are these changes that I am talking about? The American people who have not heard about these proposals will be shocked to find out, because it must be pretty bad since we have 26 Nobel laureates who are pleading with us. We have had entrepreneurs pleading with us not to do this, and yet there is huge support in the Congress for this because there is an army of lobbyists representing special interests trying to get these changes put into law and the changes made in the fundamental law that have protected our citizens. What are these changes? Who will win and who will lose by this legislative maneuver that is going on as we speak? Well, it was 3 years ago when I discovered that Bruce Lehman, the head of our U.S. Patent Office, had quietly gone to Japan and signed an agreement to harmonize America's patent law with that of Japan. Let me make that clear. Bruce Lehman, the head of our Patent Office, signed an agreement, we have a copy of that agreement, it has been in the Congressional Record several times, that would harmonize, commit us to harmonize America's patent law with that of Japan's. The very existence of this agreement that had basically been kept from the public was frightening enough. The details of this giveaway of American legal protections was beyond anything that I could ever have predicted could ever even exist until I saw it for myself. I saw this agreement. I said, no, this is a Pearl Harbor in slow motion. This is a person signing away the rights of the American people and getting almost nothing in return. And I discounted it until I actually found evidence that there were already legislative maneuvers taking place to implement this hushed agreement with Japan. Of course, during the debate on the patent issue, over and over and over again, I have stated about the agreement with Japan as being the primary motivating force for the changes that are being proposed in our patent law. Never did the opponents, my opponents on this issue, ever address that issue until we forced it on the floor. Then finally they admitted, well, if you are trying to fulfill international agreements, that is a good enough motive, and then let it slide very quickly. I do not consider that a good answer. I do not consider making an agreement with Japan to change our laws and make our laws like theirs to be something that should be taken lightly. First and foremost, the agreement made with Japan, yes, would change our patent system, which was the strongest in the world. It is not going to change their system; it is going to change ours. They want change that would make our system, the strongest in the world, so it will mirror the Japanese system which is the weakest in the world. Thus we have a situation where a fundamental protection for the American people, written into our Constitution, is changed. And people are acting as if that will not change reality, that it will not change the way we live, that it will not change our standard of living, that it will not weaken the middle class or make us less prosperous or make us less secure. I hate to tell people who are that optimistic, but that is irrational optimism. The fact is, the prosperity we enjoy, the opportunity of the average person in this country, the peace that we have had comes from the fact that we have been technologically superior to our adversaries, both our economic adversaries and our political adversaries and, yes, our military adversaries. We have been superior to them because we have had the strongest patent protection in the world. And now there is an agreement with the Japanese to make our system exactly like theirs, which is the weakest system in the world. What happens? What happens in Japan? In Japan they do not invent anything. Twenty-six Nobel laureates have signed this letter pleading with us not to make these changes in our patent law. Japan does not even have 26 Nobel laureates. They do not have that many Nobel laureates to sign a letter because they have a system that pushes the individual down, that makes sure that you have powerful economic shoguns that beat the little guy down and steal from him, and they have learned in Japan to be submissive. Well, that is not what America is all about. I am not going to sit by and neither are many of my colleagues, when they have found out about this, and watch these changes be put into place blithely, as if they will not affect the well-being of the American people. They will affect it in a terrible way. Again, I call this nothing more than a Pearl Harbor in slow motion because if these changes are made and these people are successful, 20 years from now we will have lost our edge and the American people will never know what hit them. What is the essence that made ours such a strong patent system and provided these benefits? Well, from the very founding of our country, if you applied for a patent and it took you a long time to get that patent, you did not worry about it. Thomas Edison and the rest of them did not worry about it because they knew that no matter how long it took them to be issued that patent, they would have a guaranteed patent term, once it was issued, of 17 years. They knew they would have that guaranteed patent term. The Wright Brothers knew that. Thomas Edison knew that. Cyrus McCormick knew that. The inventor of the sewing machine, Mr. Singer, knew that. This was something that was guaranteed. It was a guaranteed right of Americans to a patent term of 17 years. Then we had a right of confidentiality. Everybody knows about that. You have heard of industrial espionage. What we are really talking about is the right of someone who has produced some new technology to own that and that when a patent has been applied for, that American has always had the right from the very beginning of our country to confidentiality. That confidentiality, by the way, has meant up until now that if someone in the Patent Office or someone else got ahold of the information of that patent application and released it to the public or stole it away or gave it to an adversary, that person could be charged criminally. That was a criminal charge to disclose information at the Patent Office. So until the patent was issued, the person, the inventor, the innovator would know that, be comfortable that that information was not going to get to his enemies. Third, there was an integrity to the patent once it was issued. In our system, once that patent is issued, it is a property right that is respected and has all the protections of almost every other property right. It was a solid piece of legal protection. The Japanese system was different in each and every one of these ways. There was no guaranteed patent term. The minute someone applies for a patent under the Japanese system, the clock is ticking, not against the bureaucracy or the adversaries, but it is ticking against the inventor. And 20 years later, even if the patent has never been issued, that patent applicant loses all rights, all rights to any rewards from his invention and his new patent application. Second, under the Japanese system, unlike our system, there is no right of confidentiality. After 18 months in Japan, an inventor applies for a patent and, after 18 months, it is published so that all the big guys can see what that guy is doing. They can come down and surround that little guy, and they can force him, through legal actions, both above the board and under the board, to give up that new innovation so that they can take the benefits for themselves. Again, people in Japan never invent anything; of course, they do not. Just like if we let people steal the crops from our farmers and that would have been the way we lived, that the farmers always had all their crops stolen, pretty soon there would not be many farmers trying to grow crops anymore. Why should they? Of course, in Japan, once a patent is issued, that patent is only worth about a half or a fourth as much as patents over here because there is what is called reexamination, which is basically saying that their patents lack integrity. Needless to say, I was shocked when I learned that there was already an effort to implement the secret agreement to make our system like Japan's, because I could not believe it. No one is going to permit this to happen. Sure, not only is it going to happen, they are trying to make it happen as we speak. This sellout of American patent rights to the Japanese and other American economic adversaries is going on right now. I first discovered the maneuver when I found a small provision snuck into the GATT implementation legislation. You may remember that. GATT, a few years ago, GATT was brought to this body under fast track. I voted for fast track. I would not do it again. I would not do it again. But I voted for fast track because here is the understanding: The administration can negotiate an important trade deal with the knowledge that when they come here to the House that we will not be able to add or detract little provisions of it, but we have to vote it up or down. We cannot amend it. And in agreement for that, the administration agrees not to put in the implementation legislation anything that is not required by the treaty itself and give us ample time to look at the provisions. The administration, this administration betrayed the Congress, betrayed me personally, because I voted for fast track. But I found that they had put into the GATT implementation legislation a provision that was not required by GATT. But what it was required by was this secret, little hushed-up agreement that they made with the Japanese to make our law exactly like the Japanese patent law. It had nothing to do with GATT. It had everything to do with that agreement with the Japanese. In fact, I asked several times whether that provision would be in the GATT implementation legislation. Several times I was told it was none of my business. Is that not really nice for Members who are elected by the people of the United States to hear from an unelected official, that it is none of our business whether or not something will be included in a major piece of legislation? That provision in the GATT implementation legislation ended the 17-year guaranteed patent term that had been a right of Americans for over 160 years. Was it a coincidence? Was this a coincidence? No. It was not a coincidence. In fact, you might think this just sort of got in there by mistake. It might be, well, that is not a plan, it is not some sort of maneuver. Well, darn, if you just take a look at the other things that we have found since GATT passed, you will find that it is not a coincidence at all. In fact, lo and behold, another bill, another bill was passed through this body, and it was another bill that contained the other provisions that were part of the agreement that Bruce Lehman made with the Japanese years ago. What a coincidence. In the GATT bill, there is the first provision of ending the guaranteed patent term. By the way, every American who hears my voice tonight or reads this in the Congressional Record or my colleagues should understand that 5 years ago, Americans had a right, a right to a guaranteed patent term. And they had that right since the founding of our country, and that now has been taken away and people do not even know what that is all about. They have already had one of their rights taken away, and it is like they do not understand it. But they knew that Members of Congress, of course, would watch out for them and, if that right was important, that we would not have let it go. No, it was put into the GATT implementation legislation, and we had no choice but either vote for that bill, including that provision, or vote against the entire world trading system. It was a betrayal of those of us who voted for fast track. Then we find that the skids are greased for another piece of legislation that finishes the job of fulfilling the commitments made by Mr. Lehman to the Japanese. It was part of the Patent Publication Act which last session was put into the hopper, the Patent Publication Act. But we stopped it in the last session. One of the reasons we were able to stop the Patent Publication Act last session was because it was too blatant. No one thought that anybody would pay attention to Dana Rohrabacher or anybody else talking about the patent issue. And the very title of the bill demonstrated what that bill did. What did it do? It demanded, like in Japanese law, after 18 months, if someone applies for a patent after 18 months, whether or not the patent has been issued, that it is going to be published for the entire world to see. This is what the entrepreneurs that I was talking about were pleading with us to save them from. They knew that if all of their innovation and their technological development was made public before their patent was issued, it was an invitation for every thief in the world to come here and steal our technology and use it against us, not only economically but on the battlefield as well. So this session, this last session of Congress, we were able to stop that. It did not go through. So this session of Congress, it was reintroduced. It was reintroduced in a different name. The new name of the Patent Publication Act, which lets you know exactly what it is all about, they are going to publish all of our secret information, the new name of this bill is now the 21st Century Patent Reform Act. Oh, my goodness, the Patent Reform Act has replaced the Patent Publication Act. I do not think this fools anybody. I think it is pretty crass for them to change the name of the legislation like this in order to cover up the basic purpose of the legislation. What was in that bill? Well, what was in the bill this session was the same thing as last session. No. 1, after 18 months, whether the patent has been issued or not, it was going to be published for every thief in the world to come and take our technology and use it against us. No. 2, in the bill was a provision, again mirroring some of the things in the Japanese system. A system of reexamination, that is what they call it. What reexamination is, is it means that once an individual is issued a patent, these powerful interest groups, whether they are in Japan or in the United States or in China, or wherever they are, they can come in and challenge the patents that have already been issued to Americans. So we are not only talking about new innovations that are being threatened by this patent bill, we are talking about challenges to our patent holders so that instead of paying the royalties to our inventors, foreign corporations and, yes, our own big corporations will just find legal ways to attack the legitimacy of the patent that has already been issued. This will be a catastrophe. It will be a disaster for the guys who do not have the money to buy a stable of lawyers. Third, this bill, and I know this is going to sound funny, but it actually obliterates the Patent Office as part of the U.S. Government. It really does. That bill, the bill I am talking about, the 21st Century Patent Reform Act, would take the Patent Office, which has never had a scandal in our country's history, because the patent examiners, God bless those hard-working people, they have never had a scandal in the sense that our patent examiners have been found guilty of passing on information or taking bribes. They have always done their job without fanfare. But they want to take that organization now and turn it into a quasi- private, quasi-government corporation like the Post Office, opening these patent examiners up to influences and forces that they have never had to deal with before. The patent examiners work hard. They make decisions that will tell us who owns what properties that are worth billions of dollars, and now we are going to just for no reason, without looking at this, turn it into a Post Office, like private corporations, like where huge corporations can have their people on the board of directors and it can accept gifts. This makes no sense at all. It is like taking our courts and opening them up to outside influence. It is crazy, but that is what is part of the bill. There has been an army of lobbyists in this town spending millions of dollars, and these lobbyists are not just from huge American corporations; they are from corporate interests from throughout the world trying to influence this Congress, this House and the U.S. Senate to pass this legislation, and they are trying to keep it as quiet as possible. Tonight, they are so upset because these 26 Nobel Laureates are calling attention, calling to the attention of the American people this horrible, horrible change that they are trying to make in our legal protections. Well, if it were not for democracy on the air, talk radio, because the mainstream media has never paid attention to this, and hopefully, the mainstream media will pay some attention to these Nobel Laureates, but throughout this entire battle, for 3 years, the mainstream media would not pay attention to this battle. So I went to the talk shows and other people went to the talk shows and democracy on the air mobilized the American people. And when that bill went through this House, we were able to get out of it about 60 percent of the bad stuff. Then it went over to the Senate. However, in the Senate, Senator Hatch is trying to push a piece of legislation, S.507, that is just as bad as the worst piece of legislation that was introduced here in the House. What is going to happen? Action will take place in the Senate. People will have to call their U.S. Senators and their Congressmen, because once it takes place in the Senate, it will come back to the House in a conference committee, and behind closed doors, the decision will be made as to what the patent system will look like, and behind closed doors is where these lobbyists from these multinational corporations, from these huge predator corporations will have their most influence unless we can kill it in the Senate, unless the Senate votes it down and refuses to let it through the Senate. It will be decided by the close of this session of Congress. If we are able to mobilize the American people and let them know that a decision is being made that changes the fundamental protections we have had as Americans, we can win this. But every American has to participate. Every Member of Congress has to participate. And let me note that I had lost my battle to offer a substitute to the patent bill when it came to the floor. I lost my battle. And it was the gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. Kaptur], a Democrat, and this is a totally bipartisan effort, but the gentlewoman from Ohio introduced a piece of legislation, an amendment to that same patent bill, that gave us the victory that we had. We won that because of that amendment, and we took out 60 percent of the bad stuff of that patent bill. We have had broad-based bipartisan support because people, once we get their attention, once they listen to the Nobel Laureates pleading and saying something must be wrong here, what is going on, they understand that we are making a change that will hurt the American people, that will ensure that our children have a lower standard of living because they will not have the technological edge against our adversaries. The entrepreneurs, the small businessmen, the individual inventors, the professors, and now the Nobel Laureates are pleading with us to pay attention. Please, please look and see what is happening here. How can anyone vote for a piece of legislation that will disclose all of America's economic and technological secrets to our worst adversaries to use against us? How is that possible? Please get involved. Do what Americans have to do to keep this a free country, and that is, participate in the decisionmaking process from the community back to Washington, DC. We are not meant to be a country that is ruled from a central capital. That brings me to the final point I would like to make. Yes, this patent battle is symbolic. It is important in and of itself, but it is also symbolic. It is symbolic of something else that is happening in this post-cold war world that worries me tremendously. What worries me is, I see the centralization of power, this sort of momentum that is taking place, that will leave Americans vulnerable to the predators of the world and will leave the American people on a desolate island that lacks freedom and lacks prosperity in the years ahead because we have given away our authority and given away our constitutional protections to multinational organizations, whether it is the World Trade Organization, the World Environmental Organization, the United Nations, or the continued squandering of our defense dollars in order to defend Europe or Africa or other places. The fact is, European security is not worth the tens of billions of dollars we spend by stationing troops there. Let them defend themselves. We should be a strong military power, but we should make the decisions ourselves. We should not be submitting our troops to the United Nations. We should not be submitting our economic decisions to global organizations who are run by unelected officials, who someday will make decisions detrimental to our people, and we will have no recourse through the ballot box to change those decisions. We will find ourselves vulnerable because we have given authority to foreigners who are not elected to make the fundamental decisions for our country or for the security of our troops. This change in the patent law, trying to harmonize us with another country like Japan, which will prove, I believe, to be catastrophic, is just one of many moves to create a global marketplace, a global economy. I believe in free trade, but that is free trade between free individuals. That is not a world-regulated trading system with an unelected bureaucracy making decisions for us. Our multinational corporations seem to want to invest in dictatorships so they can make a 15-percent profit off slave labor, rather than a 5-percent profit over here using free Americans who are proud and have rights protected by the Constitution. No, they would rather go overseas and invest in Communist China. These things are elite. America's political and economic elite seem to have lost faith with the fundamental vision our Founding Fathers had of a country of free and prosperous people where even the common man had opportunities and guaranteed rights that were undreamed of in the whole history of mankind. If we lose that vision, we will lose our freedom and our children will not live decent lives, and this bothers me. This patent fight is only one indication of that attitude. Let us fight this battle together. Let us pick up the torch that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin talked about. Mr. Speaker, as I yield back the balance of my time, I submit for the Record the letter I referred to earlier in my remarks. An Open Letter To the U.S. Senate: We urge the Senate to oppose the passage of the pending U.S. Senate Bill S. 507. We hold that Congress, before embarking on a revision of our time tested patent system, should hold extensive hearings on whether there are serious flaws in the present system that need to be addressed and if so, how best to deal with them. This is especially important considering that a delicate structure such as the patent system, with all its ramifications, should not be subject to frequent modifications. We believe that S. 507 could result in lasting harm to the United States and the world. First, it will prove very damaging to American small inventors and thereby discourage the flow of new inventions that have contributed so much to America's superior performance in the advancement of Science and technology. It will do so by curtailing the protection they obtain through patents relative to the large multi-national corporations. Second, the principle of prior user rights saps the very spirit of that wonderful institution that is represented by the American patent system established in the Constitution in 1787, which is based on the principle that the inventor is given complete protection but for a limited length of time, after which the patent, fully disclosed in the application and published at the time of issue, becomes in the public domain, and can be used by anyone, under competitive conditions for the benefit of all final users. It will do so by giving further protection to trade secrets which can be kept secret forever, while reducing the incentive to rely on limited life patents. Nobel Laureates in support of the letter to congress, re: Senate Bill 507 Franco Modigliani, (1985, Economics) MIT. Robert Solow, (1987, Economics) MIT. Mario Molina, (1995, Chemistry) MIT. Ronald Hoffman, (1981, Chemistry) Cornell. Milton Friedman, (1976, Economics) University of Chicago. Richard Smalley, (1996, Chemistry) Rice. Clifford Shull, (1994, Physics) MIT. Herbert A. Simon, (1978, Economics) Carnegie-Mellon. Douglass North, (1993, Economics) Washington University. Dudley Herschbach, (1986, Chemistry) Harvard. Herbert C. Brown, (1979, Chemistry) Purdue. David M. Lee, (1996, Physics) Cornell. Daniel Nathans, (1978, Medicine) Johns Hopkins. Doug Osheroff, (1996, Physics) Stanford. Har Gobind Khorana, (1968, Medicine) MIT. Herbert Hauptman, (1985, Chemistry) Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute. John C. Harsanyi, (1994, Economics) UC Berkeley. Paul Berg, (1980, Chemistry) Stanford. Henry Kendall, (1990, Physics) MIT. Paul Samuelson, (1970, Economics) MIT. James Tobin, (1981, Economics) Yale. Jerome Friedman, (1990, Physics) MIT.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

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

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, I do not believe that I referred critically to any individual Senator. I think I have just outlined the positions of Senators. I do not think I used any pejorative descriptions of any U.S. Senator. It just happens that this legislation that I am describing has someone who is very opposite in opinion, on the other side of this particular issue. Madam Speaker, let me talk a little bit. Now that I have an extra half hour, I would like to discuss a little bit about this whole concept that I was ending up with when I thought I just had 30 minutes. That is the idea that we are going to be facing more and more challenges to our freedom and to our prosperity as Americans from those who are trying to foist off on us the necessity of transferring authority and power to world organizations and to multinational organizations. In the area of our national defense, there are those people who, for example, are trying to expand NATO. And these are many of my friends. Many of my colleagues, Republican colleagues, have been pushing for the expansion of NATO. I am sorry to say today that I think that is a bad idea. I am sorry to say that, because many of my colleagues I know honestly believe that it is a good idea for the United States now to stay in NATO. It is not time for us to become part of world organizations and put our people under U.N. command or NATO command. It is not time for us to be involved in multinational approaches. But instead, the United States should, no, not be going it alone, but we should instead be trying to be as effective as we can be individually, and on a bilateral level, with other countries of the world. NATO is a good example. NATO's purpose was what? NATO's purpose was to prevent the Soviet Union from rolling across Europe at the height of the cold war. NATO worked. I am very grateful that our forefathers had the courage and the commitment to build an organization like NATO that thwarted the aggressive tendencies of the Soviet Union during the cold war. The cold war is over, and like any other organization that is established on a multinational level, the organization does not want to disappear once its purpose has ended. Instead of spending tens of billions of dollars stationing troops in Europe, we should be spending those billions of dollars in developing the technologies in the United States, whether it is SDI or whether it is building a new aircraft carrier or whether it is building a new fighter or whatever type of technology is necessary for the protection of the people of the United States. That is what we should be developing, rather than wasting tens of billions of dollars in an alliance that has already, already served its purpose. NATO is meant now, supposedly, we hear, for the stability of Europe. Well, when my colleagues visit Europe, they will realize that Europe and the European Community have a gross national product higher than that of the United States. Let them defend themselves. Let them pay for their own stability. The United States should play an active part in the role, and I am not advocating isolationism in the least. But giving our powers up to NATO, or up to the United Nations, is a mistake. We should not be giving up our military power, and our ability to make decisions that are necessary, up to multinational organizations now that the cold war is over. That grand alliance was designed to defeat Soviet communism. Soviet communism has been defeated. This is nothing more than yet another example. There are also calls for us to join another world organization. In fact, I will be giving another 1-hour presentation in the near future on the global warming treaty, the climate change treaty that some people are trying to stampede this Congress into signing. That treaty is based on the idea that mankind is using so much energy, that we are altering our environment to the point that the world is getting warmer. It is called global warming. Having been the chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment in the Committee on Science, and having gone through hearing after hearing on this, I can tell my colleagues that I have heard experts on both sides of this issue, and I have come to the conclusion that global warming at best is unproven and at worst it is a bunch of liberal claptrap. Even the most strong advocates of global warming, once you get them in a question-and-answer situation, will admit that they are not sure. But they are willing, however, to try to push America into policies that will drain billions of dollars from our economy, drain billions of dollars from our economy, and that money will be gone forever. People do not understand the meaning of these tens of billions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars. That means the amount of money that is spent for education. That means the amount of money that is spent for true environmental programs. These are things that will be defunded in the case of a United States commitment to a treaty that is designed to solve a problem that does not exist. In one of the most interesting aspects of the global warming treaty that I found so far in examining the proposal that we are looking at, is that a provision has been added, a strange provision has been added to the global warming treaty. What is that provision? Guess what? Somebody has added to this global warming treaty, and they are discussing, a provision that says we should harmonize all patent law. Well, is not that a coincidence? Somebody suggested that this is going to be part of a global warming treaty, meaning a harmonization of the patent law which I have just spoken on and demonstrated the disastrous effects that it will have on the economy of the United States of America and the disastrous effects it will have on the level of protection that American citizens are afforded; protection that they have been afforded since the time of our Constitution. This is amazing. Well, it really is not so amazing, because the same people who are pushing for all of these commitments by the United States of America to multinational organizations, and giving away our authority from our own elected officials to unelected foreigners, are the same ones who are pushing the diminishing of our American patent rights. Now, who are these people? Well, many of them are Americans, interestingly enough, and many of them are Americans who work and control huge multinational corporations. I am afraid that people who run multinational corporations today, whether they are American citizens or not, are not the ones that we can trust to make the decisions about our future. Because these individuals may be very efficient at running their multinational corporations, but they do not seem to care one iota about the American people. They do not seem to care one iota whether or not they have succeeded, based on the protection of their rights that the American people have given them over these last 50 years and, yes, over the 200-year life span of our Republic. The multinational corporations now have allegiance to the new world order or the global economy, not to the American people. And these multinational corporations, these huge corporate entities are pushing to change the patent law, and pushing to change other laws that I am talking about, because they can influence these distant decision-makers in the new world that they are creating. But the little guy, the American people, will never be able to influence, not at the ballot box and not in the marketplace. Madam Speaker, these big multinational corporations, many of them in our Fortune 500, have made an enormous effort on this patent bill and in other things. For example, as we all know, the United States has been in an unfair trading relationship with the mainland of China for two decades. And the cold war is over. During the cold war there was an excuse for us to be in a relationship with Communist China. It is the same excuse that we had when we were in a relationship with Stalinist Russia during World War II in order to defeat Hitler. That excuse is that we needed to make sure that our potential enemies were divided and that they were not united against us. With the Soviet Union having collapsed, there is no longer an excuse for us to put up with an unfair trading relationship like we have with the Communist Chinese mainland, the mainland of China. Most Americans do not know when they hear our huge corporations talking about how important it is for them to be able to sell their goods in China that they are not really talking about selling American goods in China. What they are talking about is their right as multinational corporations to set up factories in China, factories that will take our technology and put it at the disposal of the Chinese and then will be used to out-compete the United States of America and put our own people, our own people out of work. Most people do not understand that the things that are produced in China enter the United States with a 3 or 4 percent tariff. But when we want to export manufactured goods to China, they have a 30 to 40 percent tariff on our manufactured goods. Who would want to give even a democratic country that kind of an edge over the people of the United States of America, much less a Communist dictatorship that threatens the security of the world and the prosperity of our people? But we have continued to give them Most Favored Nation status. Why do these multinational corporations who put pressure on all of our colleagues to vote for Most Favored Nation status, the same ones who are pushing to change the patent law and the same ones who are pushing for all of these different global arrangements, why is it that they want Most Favored Nation status with China? First of all, they have no allegiance with the American people. They are going to put them out of work. It is even worse. They want Most Favored Nation status so they can receive Government guarantees for their investments in China. Madam Speaker, the Export-Import Bank, the World Bank, other institutions that get our tax dollars from the working people of the United States, those tax dollars are being used to guarantee the investments of our businessmen in China in factories that will be used to put Americans out of work. This is the worst kind of hypocrisy. This is the worst blow, the worst insult to the American people. Not only are we permitting an unfair trade relationship to go on, which is draining billions of dollars of worth out of our system and giving it to the Chinese, even as they commit genocide in Tibet and genocide against the Muslim people in Xinjiang Province, in East Turkestan, and as they butcher their own dissidents and repress the Christians. No, we still have to have Most Favored Nation status and the tax dollars of the American people are being used to guarantee investments against our own people. This is a sin against our own people. But it is also a sin that these same interests are trying to change American law to diminish the rights of the American people and the American people do not even know that that is what is going on. The American people ought to say, well, if IBM and Kodak and all of these big companies are in favor of changing that patent law, it must help us in our technological struggle with our adversaries. No, no, because those companies are just as interested in taking the ideas of our inventors and using them for their benefit without paying royalties, as are the big Japanese companies, as are the big Chinese companies and all the rest of the economic thieves throughout the world. It all ties in. It all ties in. But let me tell my colleagues tonight that they have forgotten one fundamental aspect that has made this world a decent place to live in. They have forgotten the role of the United States of America. Our Founding Fathers who wrote into our Constitution patent protection, our Founding Fathers who wrote in individual freedoms into our Constitution and into our Bill of Rights, the people who led our country throughout these years of our independence and during the time period as we developed as a Nation. These people understood that if there was to be freedom anywhere in the world, it would depend on a strong United States of America. If there is to be decency and honor and integrity anywhere in the world, it will be because the United States of America has set the standard. It will be because those standards are protected by law in the United States of America. Without the people of the United States of America and their commitment to freedom, there would be no freedom on this planet. The Nazis would have won. The Communists would have won, the isms and the tyrannical forces that have been at play for this last 100 years would have overwhelmed the west. But it has been the strength of purpose found in the souls of the people of the United States of America that has preserved all of those forces of good and decency on this planet. If our business elite, now with their multinational corporations, have given up on the American people, because in order to run a plant here and maintain our standard of living, they will only make a 5 percent profit, but if they go to a Communist dictatorship they can earn a 15 or 20 percent profit with, of course, the taxpayers guaranteeing their investment, pretty soon the American people's standard of living will decline and the American people will feel justifiably betrayed. We cannot let that happen. The battle over the patent is only one of the fights that we will be having in the next few years. But we have to make sure that the American people maintain their standard of living, that decent, high tech jobs are available here, that our wealth is not drained from our society to give frivolously to others, that our technology is not taken from us to be used against us in competition, economically and militarily. Because if we lose the battle here in the United States of America and the American people lose faith in those principles that our Founding Fathers established 250 years ago, well, then the future of freedom on this planet will be short-lived indeed. The future of decency and honor, the future of things that have made this a planet not dominated by the likes of Mao Tse Tung or some petty dictator that now occupies his seat in Beijing, but instead reflect the value of our people which created a White House that does not look like, I looked in the oval office. I used to work in the White House. I remember walking into the oval office with my friend 10 years ago and just looking at the oval office. And what I saw looked like some sort of a library or some sort of a sitting room in somebody's home. I said, does this not look like someone's living room here? We both agreed that in every other country in the world, the offices of the chief executive looked like a palace of power. It looked like a place where boots could be worn or heels clicked and salutes given. Instead, where the first executive of the United States sat at a desk, it looked more like someone's living room, like someplace with a family. These are the values of decency that come with human freedom. We would not put up with some gestapo Communist dictatorship in this country because our people believe in freedom. But if the freedom that we have permitted our multinational corporations is used to destroy the prosperity of our people and if we think that now we have an allegiance to free trade so that people can use guarantees by the American taxpayers to build up the economy in dictatorships, the American people will lose their faith. If we are going to win this battle, the American people have to be a part of it. One of the reasons we were able to defeat this drastic change that they were trying to make in the patent bill, as it went through the House, one of the reasons why the Kaptur amendment passed, the Kaptur amendment which gave us 60 percent of what we wanted passed in a vote, was that the American people called their representatives and said, for goodness sake, do not vote for that patent bill, the Steal American Technologies Act that Congressman Rohrabacher is talking about. Vote to kill it. That is what people have to do to the Members of the House and the Members of the Senate, because it is still alive in the Senate and that means it probably will come back to the House. The American people have got to remain alert to this and the other threats that we face, because there are some very powerful forces at play in this world. There are some very powerful forces at play in this city. The only thing that turned the tide in this last battle on the floor of the House were the thousands upon thousands of phone calls that came from all over America to the House of Representatives and said, defeat this attempt to give away American technology. The American people have every right to be proud of themselves. So tonight we stand on the threshold of finishing that fight, because it is still going on in the Senate. It may come back here to the House if they succeed. Tomorrow, as I said, Capitol Hill will be invaded by some of these multinational corporations and some very hifalutin sounding people. But small businessmen throughout this country, university professors, people who are engaged in research and development of new ideas understand how important patent protection is, and they have tried their best here, even though we have not had very many resources behind us. I would just close by asking my colleagues to be alert as the patent bill comes back from the Senate and, if there is any influence they can exert on the Senators on this piece of legislation, to please talk to the Senator from their State to ensure that they know just how dramatic the effect of diminishing our patent rights will be and that that indeed is the purpose of the legislation that is now being pushed in the Senate.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Madam Speaker, over the last 3 years, I have been involved in organizing support behind the right of the American people to maintain the legal level of protection that had been their right as American citizens since the founding of our country over 200 years ago. In this particular case, what is being diminished is the American people's rights to own their own creations. What is being diminished is the patent protection that Americans have had since the writing of our Constitution. Three years ago I did not know anything about this issue. I knew absolutely nothing about patent rights. It was brought to my attention that in the GATT implementation legislation that was being brought before Congress there was a provision that would dramatically change patent law in the United States of America. I could not believe this was happening, because changes in our patent law were not required by the GATT implementation legislation. We had been promised by the administration that the only thing that would be put into the GATT implementation legislation that went before Congress to implement the GATT agreement would be those items that were specifically required by the GATT negotiations. But when I called the administration repeatedly to find out if there would be provisions in the GATT implementation legislation that changed our patent law, I was told time and time again that it was none of my business and that they were not going to tell me, or they did not know, or that that decision may be made and it might not be made; but, most of all, it was their decision to make and not mine as a Member of Congress, and, thus, I was not going to be privy to the knowledge until it was actually presented to Congress. This is what they said to the elected Representative of 600,000 Americans, who represents a high-tech area in California. The people who were telling me this were unelected, appointed, officials. This should tell you something about the changes that are coming about in our country and the changes that are symbolized by that provision, which they did eventually sneak into the GATT implementation legislation. What was put in that bill, which was not required by GATT and which we were presented as either you accept everything in this bill or you have to vote against the entire World Trade Organization, the entire apparatus of world trade throughout the world and leave America on the outside, what provision was put in was a change in the patent law which stated that Americans have a right to a guaranteed patent term. This is 3 years later, and most Americans do not understand that from the time of the founding of our country until 3 years ago, they had a right to a guaranteed patent term of 17 years, and they no longer have that right. Their rights have been diminished. It is a very hard law to understand if you do not have an invention, so most Americans let it drift by. What replaced this guaranteed 17-year term, to describe it, was traditionally that no matter how long it took you to clear your patent application through the bureaucracy, no matter how long it took the Government to issue your patent after you applied for it, at the end you would still have 17 years of a guaranteed patent term. That was replaced by a provision that said that you have 22 years of protection, but the clock is ticking against you the minute that you apply for a patent. So with breakthrough patents and breakthrough technologies that guarantee those patents, what we have is a situation where the process could take 10 years, and the inventor might be left with, instead of 17 years, or 22 years, might be left with 12 years. Or, in some cases, where it has taken two decades for major pieces of technology to clear the Patent Office, the inventor would have nothing to show, much less 17 years of protection. The laser, for example, took many, many, many years, I think perhaps over a decade and a half, to receive a patent. The inventor of that laser would have been left out. Also, the microprocessor. Of course, what happened recently was the inventor of the MRI was tied up in court for 20 years with a major corporation that was trying basically to steal his right to the invention that he invented, the MRI, that has changed the lives of people throughout the world, bettered our health care so you do not have to have so much cutting surgery. That inventor would have been out all of the money, because the major corporation would have tied him up long enough for his patent to be worthless in terms of the time that was left for him to enjoy the fruits of his creation. So that was changed. That raised my antenna, and I began to investigate why this happened, and how was it so that Americans were seeing their fundamental rights that were guaranteed by law diminished in front of their eyes without so much as a whimper from the people because they did not see what was happening, and that the elected Representatives of the people here in the Congress did not even know what they were voting on when they voted on this provision. There was no debate, there were no hearings. Instead, it was snuck into the GATT implementation legislation. What I found out when I investigated was that there had been an agreement that was signed between Bruce Lehman, the head of our Patent Office, the head of the Patent Office of the United States. When he was appointed by President Clinton, he went to Japan, and one of his first acts, maybe not one of his first acts, but he went to Japan very shortly after being appointed and made an agreement, signed an agreement with his Japanese counterpart, to harmonize American patent law with Japan's. This is an unelected official going to Japan and signing an agreement that he, representing the administration, will do what he can to harmonize American law to Japanese law. This was not a case where America had weak protection and the Japanese had strong protection. In fact, the Japanese had one of the weakest protections for their inventors of any country in the world and America had the strongest protection of any country in the world. Our representative, the person hired by the President of the United States to watch out for our interests, went to Japan and agreed to lower our standards to theirs. Now, I would agree that harmonization is a good idea. But if we are going to be harmonizing laws with other countries, we should be bringing those countries up to our standards, instead of us bringing our standards down to theirs. Now, in Japan they do not invent very many things. In fact, in Japan they are known for copying things and improving some new technologies, but just improving them, not inventing new technologies. That is because in Japan, the big guys have run rough-shod over the little guys, and every time there is a new invention, someone comes up with a new idea, if it is a small guy who is out of the clique, he is surrounded and beaten into submission by the powers that be, by the economic shoguns of Japan. They want to change our law, our patent law, so that the American inventors, the people of the United States who are inventing things, the average person who has this option in order to improve their lives by coming up with something that will improve the lives of everyone, they want to make those little guys vulnerable to the big guys, just like they are in Japan. When all is said and done, if we do harmonize our law with Japan, what we will have is our little guys will be susceptible to the same kind of bullying as the little people, as the regular people in Japan; not only bullying by our own huge multinational corporations, but by Japanese corporations, and Chinese corporations, and the People's Liberation Army, and anybody else who wants to come in here and brutalize Americans who are no longer protected with the legal protections that they have been afforded since the founding of our country, because those protections have been stripped away. That is the agreement that was made with the Japanese. It has always been part of our law that if someone applies for a patent, that, number one, he would have a guaranteed patent term; number two, whatever information he has in his patent application, he or she, that it is totally confidential. In Japan, the system is once you apply for a patent, after 18 months that information is made public, so the big guys will know exactly what is being created by the small entrepreneurs and the little guys throughout the society, and they can take action to steal it. But our people have had the right of confidentiality. In fact, releasing information from a patent application before the patent is actually granted has been a criminal offense. In Japan, it is the other way around. They give out all the information. In Japan, once the patent is issued, they can attack it from all directions. There is reexamination in Japan. So what do we have? We have an agreement where this administration, with Bruce Lehman, who heads our Patent Office, to change our patent law to that of Japan. And that, what I saw in the GATT implementation legislation 3 years ago, was only step one in accomplishing this goal. We found out what step two was a little bit later, in the last session of Congress, in a bill. It was called the Patent Publication Act, and they found out, oh, my gosh, that is too explanatory. The purpose of the bill is to publish everybody's patent, and nobody wanted to do that. Everybody understood that if you publish a patent application, you are asking for everybody in the world to steal it. So they changed the name of that this session of Congress to the 21st Century Patent Reform Act and they brought that up. But the people of this Congress and the people of the United States were not fooled. I brought to the attention of the people of the United States in forums like this, and speech after speech after speech, and going out to talk radio shows and to the news media and any audience that would listen to me, I spread the word, and the American people expressed their opinion to their elected Representatives. And even though the Fortune 500 companies and this administration and the powers that be came down like a sledgehammer on my colleagues, when it came to a vote on the floor, we managed to defeat some of the essential ingredients of that 21st Century Patent Act. We defeated especially the provision that would have required that any American who applied for a patent, after 18 months, whether the patent had been issued or not, it was going to be published, so that every thief in the world would have been able to steal our most valuable technology. We managed to get that out of the bill. We managed to get out of the bill the provision that would have required the change of the rules that would have permitted companies to come in and attack the patents that were already issued by our Patent Office, the reexamination provisions. Thus, we were able to take out most of the bad parts of that bill in an amendment introduced by my colleague, the gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. Kaptur]. There were still some pretty bad things in the bill. The bill would privatize the Patent Office. It would turn our Patent Office, which has never had a scandal, they have never had a scandal in the 200 years it has been around, they were going to turn that into a quasi-private, quasi-government corporation, like the post office, in which the poor patent examiners, who are now shielded from outside influence, would have been opened up to all kinds of influences. That privatization still stayed in the bill. That type of restructuring still was in the legislation that passed Congress. That legislation, after it passed here, and as I say, we were 60 percent successful, but 40 percent of the bad stuff is still in that bill, it went to the Senate. But tonight I am here to alert my colleagues and the people of the United States who are listening and reading the Congressional Record that Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah is continuing his attempts to get this bill, in its worst possible form, in the form that would expose all the information of our inventions to the enemies of the U.S. and to our economic adversaries, and to the big multinational corporations here. He is trying to get that bill in its worst form passed through the United States Senate. He is trying to attach it to other pieces of legislation. The American people have to be aware that if he succeeds, it will be coming back to the House of Representatives. In fact, tomorrow 60 CEO's will be hitting Capitol Hill of major corporations to have their will and to try to talk to Congressmen, Members of the House, Members of the Senate. The American people have to know that the enemy has not given up. Why has the enemy not given up? They have not given up because a long time ago they realized that America's greatest asset was what? It was the creative genius of our people; the creative genius of the American people was our secret weapon in our economic struggle. Our adversaries figured it out. They said, how come America is always out front? How come they control the economic scene? How come? Our people work just as hard as Americans; how come they are the ones who are always ahead and control the economy of the world? How come their people have such a high standard of living and our people do not? The answer is easy. The American people have at their disposal the best technology that is available anywhere in the world because Americans have been the inventors and the creators and the genius behind technological change. Our enemies saw that and our enemies set out to change the fundamental law that made that a reality, that made it exist, that gave us that technological genius, because the American people are not more creative, they do not have any more genius than anybody else; after all, we come from every culture. But what we have had since the founding of our country are the legal protections for our technological development that ensured that the average person knew that he could use his creative genius to make things better and that he or she would benefit from it. Thus, we had the major inventors in our country. This is where the Alexander Graham Bells and the Samuel Morses and you name it, the Wright Brothers, the Thomas Edisons, these are the people who benefited by the legal protection, and thus were able to use their genius to keep America a step ahead of all the competition and ensure the American people good jobs, because their jobs were involved with the best technology. We were able to outcompete our adversaries. Now they want to change all of that. They tried to change it in the most underhanded way that I have ever seen. A piece of legislation came through this body. First, they put it into the GATT implementation legislation when it was not required by GATT. That in itself was a betrayal of the rest of us, when we were told, if you give fast track to us, we will only put in the legislation that which is required by the treaty. Then they tried to sneak the bill through, with very little fanfare, just slid right on through the committees, changing the name of the bill from the Patent Publication Act, which was too explanatory, after all, now we are exposing the fact that we want to publish everybody's patent, no, they changed the name to the 21st Century Patent Reform Act. That is not the way we need to make law, and when we want to change law and diminish the protections our law affords the American people, we must step up to the plate and discuss it with them, rather than take part in this type of underhanded maneuvering. The patent law in our country has been unique because we have had a higher level of protection from the time of our Constitution. The Japanese, when they figured it out, have decided, we have to change that. The Chinese, we have to change that. We have had an army of lobbyists in this city; millions of dollars have been spent to influence Members of the House and now Members of the Senate, in order to convince them to change the patent law, and changing the patent law to ``harmonize'' our law with other laws, harmonize, to bring down the level of protection. I want to share with the Members a story about a friend of mine who has a new invention. He told me about it this weekend. This friend of mine, an average person, has a small company out in California. He came up with an idea of how to protect meat, how to protect the consumer of meat from consuming bad meat. It is an ingenious idea, and I cannot explain it on the floor of the House because his patent has not been granted yet. But if his patent had been granted and this was on the market, all I can say is the American people, every housewife in this country, every restaurant in this country, would be confident that the meat they were consuming was untainted meat at a very low cost, almost no cost. It is a new idea. It is a great idea. For 2 years this patent has not been issued, which means that if the new laws that Senator Hatch has tried to push through the Senate right now, and which some of our colleagues have tried to push through this House were in effect, after 18 months his idea would have been exposed to everybody in the world, and the Japanese and the Chinese and people all over the world would already be copying his idea, putting it into production, and his patent has not even been issued. They would be using the money they made from his invention to drive him out of business. That is what is going to happen across the board in our economy if we permit this catastrophe to happen, this abomination of American freedom. But my friend has confidence we are going to beat it back. He has invested his time and effort to try to get this patent. If he succeeds and we do not disclose this information, so that he can benefit, we will have other such inventions in the future from people like my friend that will change our lives, that will save the lives of little children who are eating that meat. How about my other colleague in California, another friend of mine, who came to me when he heard about the fight over patents and he said, Dana, I have a new system of killing bugs, bugs, termites and the rest, without the use of chemicals. This is a man who is going to save the soil at our homes from being poisoned with chemicals. But he says, Dana, I am afraid because my patent is still pending, and if they disclose this information, it is going to be all over the place before I have a chance to capitalize. I cannot raise the money until I have my patent in hand, but these other people will get the money and they will be in business before I do. How long do Members think it is going to be before the inventors of this new system to check tainted meat or the new system to make sure that we do not have chemicals being spread in our soil to kill the bugs, or in our homes to kill bugs, how long will these inventors keep coming up with their ideas? They will not come up with their ideas, and we will be stuck; we will be like the Japanese, run by a group of economic elitists who hold the little guy down because the little guy has no economic protections and there are no inventions. The standard of living not only of our country, but of the entire world, will go down if we lose this battle. As I say, Senator Hatch is still trying to get this through in its very worst form, through the U.S. Senate. This has been a very tough battle, because it has been the battle of the little guy versus the big guy. It has been part of an overall effort to change American law. First of all, let me explain the last point that I made. Ever since the end of the cold war, we have been hearing time and time again phrases that are kind of scary. The first phrase we heard was ``the new world order.'' That came from a Republican. That came from George Bush. I do not know how other people felt about it, but when I heard our President talk about a new world order, I said to myself, something is wrong here. I am not working for a new world order. I am working for the people of the United States who elected me. There is something wrong here. The new world order? It sounds like we are giving up authority to a higher authority than the Constitution of the United States of America. The new world order? Since that concept went down in flames, along with the presidency of George Bush, we have heard time and time again of the global economy, the global economy. In it, we have all kinds of powerful interest groups pushing to create a global economy. What does that mean, a global economy? That means that decisions that were made locally not only have been turned over to State government, who then turn it over to the Federal Government, but now we are thinking about turning decisions that are made by people who have been elected to office in the United States over to some unelected bureaucracy somewhere in the United Nations or in the World Trade Organization or the world labor organization or the world environmental organization, or whatever organization it is that has been set up in order to watch out for the global environment or the global economy, you name it; and these people will be making decisions, and this type of world will be people who have never faced the electorate. If Americans will blink their eyes, some day they will find that their rights have been diminished and that power has been granted to some unelected official who may or may not be an American, but who the average person here has absolutely no recourse against if a decision is made in the wrong way. This concept of a global economy, the idea of free trade between peoples of the world, is a good idea. The idea of creating a global economic system which will be controlled and regulated is a bad idea. It is not a good idea, as well, by the way, I might add, for us to be trading in a free trade relationship with a mammoth dictatorship like China. But then again, the world economic trade regulators, once we have established this global economic system, may think entirely differently. They may think a transfer of wealth from the rich United States to the poor countries is a good idea. Madam Speaker, this change in the patent law is only one step toward harmonization of law. It is a step in the wrong direction. This concept of diminishing the rights of Americans in order to create a new world order is a threat to the rights, the freedom and the prosperity of each and every one of us. The patent fight is the first fight, because it has been the first one we have been able to identify where actual legal protections enjoyed by Americans are being diminished in order to have a harmonization of law overseas. That in itself would be wrong. But the side effects of giving huge multinational corporations and foreign corporations the power over Americans to steal their new ideas, which will undermine our economy, not even to mention what it does to the lives of these poor inventors who spent their whole lives trying to develop something, this shows that it is a bad idea on a number of levels. As I say, this will be just the first fight. This is just the first fight in our battle to maintain the rights and freedoms of the American people and the prosperity of our country. Announcement by the Speaker pro tempore

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Before I get into my own remarks, I would like to say that we have heard speaker after speaker opposing the Burton amendment and only one, the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Burton] himself, was able to rise up on this point to defend the Burton amendment, and I would just like to express my disappointment that when so many people have spoken against the Burton amendment and Mr. Burton asked for 2 additional minutes in a unanimous consent that he was not paid the courtesy that we almost always pay our colleagues to permit them just 2 extra minutes.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, there is not any indication that the situation is getting better in India because those people who have studied the situation, we realize the one conflict, the one flame that is igniting the conflict on the subcontinent, is the decision by India not to permit a plebescite in the Kashmir so those people can determine, as it was mandated by the United Nations, whether they are going to be part of India or they want to be part of Pakistan. India has refused to have that election. If they would have that, these acts of terrorism they complain about, and this massive military buildup and occupation they have to finance in the Kashmir, would disappear because the democratic process would have worked its will. But they refuse to do that. This is what is causing the problem. This is what is causing the human rights abuses. As an incentive to the Government of India to abide by policies guided by respect for human rights and civil liberties, we need to send a strong message, and that is exactly what the Burton amendment will do. We do not need to send a message that they can continue doing what they want, that after 50 years we are going to subsidize them in their development of weapons and their oppression. For us to provide $135 million in aid, which is the total amount, while it is wasting its own resources on the modernization of its weapons systems and military and its own oppression, it is ridiculous for us to do this. To spend $135 million in taxpayer dollars to subsidize one of our own competitors, with the economy emerging as a competitor to the United States, which allows them to spend their own money on weapons, even nuclear weapons, is crazy. I believe in the Burton amendment; I support the Burton amendment. Let us not subsidize India's expenditure on weapons and the military and oppression. Let us let them make their own decisions. If they are not going to improve their human rights, let us say they are not going to get any foreign aid from the United States.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I have always given my colleagues the courtesy and never stepped forward in unanimous consent and not given them an extra minute. Anyway, with that said, I support the Burton amendment. I am happy to be the second person in today's debate to step forward supporting a reduction in the taxpayers' dollars that we are sending to India, and of course I agree with my colleague on the China question, but we should be reducing the amount of money asked by the Clinton administration that we would be giving the Government of India for two reasons: No. 1, they do not need it; and, No. 2, we should not be giving this money to a government with such an appalling human rights record. As to No. 1, the Indian Government maintains a huge military. They have developed nuclear weapons. They have been spending their limited resources on weapons and a huge military, much more than what they need, and after finally rejecting socialism their economy is on an upsurge. So, No. 1, if they are spending money on nuclear weapons and a big army, why should we be giving them aid when they can then spend their own money on weapons? And No. 2, we are giving someone who is in competition with us, we are providing them aid. Now that is ridiculous for the United States of America to provide aid and assistance to a country that is going to compete and put our own people out of work. So, as to the second point, there are a half million Indian troops occupying the Punjab and another half a million Indian troops occupying Kashmir, which is considered the most densely occupied territory on this planet. Now, if they have got those numbers of troops up there that are putting money, more and more money, into it, why should we subsidize this effort by giving money to India? In both of these regions, Punjab and Kashmir, the military forces are recognized by international human rights organizations as routinely committing appalling human rights abuses, murdering civilians, gang raping women, torturing prisoners with impunity. According to our own State Department, Indian forces in Punjab have received over 41,000 cash bounties for the murder of civilians between 1991 and 1993. Last year, the Indian police reportedly planted explosives in the car of a U.S. citizen, Mr. Babir Dhillon, and he was held up on trumped-up charges for 9 months, and he was tortured, and it was only after the intervention of the U.S. Congress that he was released last January, and these charges were dropped. The Indian Supreme Court eventually got up to there, and there is a rule of law in India, but what happened was they basically said that Indian police were committing acts that were, quote, worse than genocide, and yes, if Rodney King was just an example, one example even, we would ignore, we would say we are fixing that. But if Rodney King went on and on and on and on and every day we had Rodney King beatings, we would be concerned about it. We would say California has got to clean up its act before we extend aid to California, to its State government. And just like in New York where this poor man was brutalized the other day, if the police over and over and over were brutalizing people like this.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Reclaiming my time, the people listening to yesterday's debate, perhaps most of the people listening today, did not hear yesterday or the debate before on this, and the fact is that we had a lively debate here, but was only one-sided. Mr. Burton asked for 2 additional minutes.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I yield to the gentlewoman from California.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, the scientific community lost one of its brightest stars this month when astronomer Gene Shoemaker was killed in an auto accident. His wife Carolyn was also injured and hospitalized. We should all say a prayer for her speedy recovery. Dr. Shoemaker dedicated his life to advancing the frontiers of human knowledge and experience. He was slated to be one of the first scientists to visit the moon during the Apollo program until a minor physical impairment cost Gene his flight status. But that didn't stop his commitment to science or his passion for understanding our universe. Dr. Shoemaker pressed onward and upwards as a leader of the Lunar Ranger and Surveyor Programs over three decades ago. When the Apollo program came to an end, Gene focused on asteroids and meteors. But Gene didn't give up his passion for Earth's natural satellite. Over two decades after leading America's first lunar science missions, he joined the science team for the Clementine mission, which discovered evidence of ice on the Moon, making global headlines. Gene's years of studying asteroids and meteors convinced him that the evolution of the planets in our solar system has been changed by large asteroid and meteor impacts. Like many of the science community's best minds, Gene initially had to struggle against scientific orthodoxy for his theories to be considered. He persisted and his passion for the truth, for science, and for discovery won out. In 1994, we witnessed the most dramatic proof validating Gene's work. That year, the Shoemaker-Levy comet, which Gene, Carolyn, and their colleague David Levy discovered, crashed into Jupiter in the astronomical equivalent of the Fourth of July. Who could not be impressed or awed with reality's demonstration of Gene's vision? No matter what he was working on, Dr. Shoemaker always managed to make some of the most exciting discoveries in space science while exciting young minds about the possibilities for the future. I have little doubt that Gene and Carolyn shared the excitement of countless millions following the progress of the Pathfinder mission and its little rover Sojourner across the Martian soil. As successful and important as Dr. Shoemaker's professional life was, his personal life stands as a monument to the better angels of our nature. With a twinkle in his eye, a gentleness in his voice, and calmness in his expressions, Gene Shoemaker proved every day that nice guys finish first. As a scientist, an outdoorsman, an individualist, and a teacher, Dr. Shoemaker's life made the world a better place. We will, of course, miss him and cannot help feeling the loss that his passing brings. Still, after reflecting on his professional accomplishments and the manner in which Gene lived his life, we cannot help but catch the infectious job with which he pursued new discoveries. That spirit lives on in the lives of those who crossed his path. It will carry us into a future that begins to realize the possibilities of Gene's vision.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I do plan to offer my amendment when given the opportunity. It is very similar to that of the gentleman from Nebraska [Mr. Bereuter], but it goes a little further. I am supporting the amendment offered by the gentleman from Nebraska, but I will be offering mine as well.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I do have an amendment that I will be offering after we hopefully get done with the amendment offered by the gentleman from Nebraska [Mr. Bereuter]. I certainly appreciate the sincerity of the attempt of the gentleman from Nebraska. I sometimes am known as somebody who tries to push things a little bit further, and I think that my amendment, while better, while pushing things a little bit further, should be adopted, but that does not mean that I am opposing the amendment offered by the gentleman from Nebraska [Mr. Bereuter]. I, in fact, support the amendment, but I would say it needs to be strengthened, because in the gentleman's amendment we have a situation where the amendment states that funds, it says, ``None of the funds appropriated in this act shall be made available directly to the Government of Cambodia.'' That use of the word ``directly'' weakens the bill considerably as compared to what I would do. When we are sending a message to the Government of Cambodia, we want to make sure they know that even if they are trying to get money through the back door, we are not supportive of money going through the back door to this murderous regime. Also it has been argued by the gentleman from Nebraska [Mr. Bereuter] that my bill would affect the money or would not affect the money, although we are attempting to, that will be going to Cambodia through the International Development Association and the IMF and the Asian Development Bank, and other lending and financial institutions that are supported by American taxpayers. We may not be able to mandate that money, but we are making our case as the elected representatives of the United States Government to those agencies through this legislation. We are making a statement to those individuals who are making those decisions in these financial institutions that they should not be using that money to provide loans or guarantees for loans to this murderous regime in Cambodia. So I would ask my fellow colleagues to support the Bereuter amendment, but I would also ask them to support my amendment, which makes that statement, we do not want people investing in Cambodia until democracy is restored. We certainly do not want to guarantee the loans of American businesses doing that.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I yield to the gentlewoman from California.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, the amendment that I am offering is a second amendment we have had tonight on Cambodia. It is a bit tougher than the last amendment. Although I appreciate the efforts of the gentleman from Nebraska [Mr. Bereuter] in the last amendment. The reason why my amendment is a bit tougher than the last one is that it puts the United States Congress on record as supporting the denial of any funds that are appropriated by this act for international lending institutions, such as International Monetary Fund and Asian Development Bank. This measure is essential. Because, while direct United States foreign aid is a small portion of the Cambodian regimes, and we are now talking about a rogue Cambodian regime, international donations account for half of that government's revenues. It is essential that the dictator, the strongman there, Hun Sen, realize that American representatives to these lending institutions are being directed by Congress to press for withholding of these funds. Even if the prohibition of these funds is not immediately possible, at least our people will be making the case. And if abuses in Cambodia continues, the U.S. position will be strengthened. Thus, I would ask my colleagues to join me in supporting this amendment, which, as I say, is a bit tougher and sends a message that we are not going to permit aid to come through the back door to this gangster that shot his way into power and who has brutally murdered his opposition. We are taking a tough stand on Cambodia, and that is exactly what we should do, to send a message that we want a return to democracy and we are not going to be supportive of that regime until the regime goes back on track toward a Democratic election in May.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, this idea that OPIC is creating jobs in the United States is so much nonsense I can hardly contain myself. We are talking about taxing the hardworking people of the United States in order to provide loan guarantees and subsidies for people who, not that they want to sell products overseas, but so that they can build manufacturing units overseas. For people that want to know what that means, that means we are building companies that will compete with Americans and put Americans out of work and we are taxing the American people to do it. This is absurd. This is a sin against average American working people. Furthermore, what kind of countries are we talking about? These are not struggling democracies we are trying to encourage investment in. These are dictatorships. These are bloody gangster regimes that cannot get private sector financing because it is too risky. Now, of course, by getting the American taxpayers to pony up the money, to take all the risk, are we encouraging those gangster regimes to liberalize? Not only are we putting our people out of work, we are telling the gangsters to go ahead and suppress their unions, go ahead and suppress freedom of speech, go ahead and suppress competition, let our businessmen in, because we are going to subsidize them. This is horrendous. We are taking away the incentive for dictatorships to liberalize and become free. We are taking jobs away from our people. The only thing wrong with the Royce amendment is that it does not go far enough, it does not eliminate this abomination from the budget altogether, this attack on the well-being of the American people. I am with the gentleman from California [Mr. Royce]. Let us cut it down if not eliminate it.