Dana Rohrabacher

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. It would be very difficult because it did not come on the floor or was available to us until just a few hours ago.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. So the gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. Kaptur], another Democrat, would have to come forward for that time to be yielded to. I am told the gentlewoman is on the way, by the way.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, that is why this is not about submarine patents, because the Congressional Research Service has found that my bill, as well as the bill we are talking about, H.R. 400, deals with submarine patents. What we are talking about is a subterranean agreement with Japan, which I have held up, put in the Congressional Record, no one wants to comment on it, to harmonize our law with Japan's; Japan, where economic shoguns beat their people into submission because all of the secrets of the average person are made vulnerable to the big guys coming in and stealing it legally. It does not make me feel any better that you have given the rights to the American people, after exposing them to theft, to sue Mitsubishi Corp. or the People's Liberation Army if they come over here and start stealing from our people. This is about exposing the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Roscoe Bartlett] and every other inventor in this country, and the five Nobel laureates who support my substitute bill, to grand theft and the lowering of the American standard of living because we have lost our technological edge, because we have given it away. We have exposed it to theft, and if we pass this bill, a bill that opens up all of our secrets for our enemies to steal, we deserve it.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York [Mr. Forbes].

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Reserving my right to object, Mr. Chairman, is his unanimous consent request saying that there would be 2 hours of debate for my substitute?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Chairman, but not for my substitute coupled with all the other amendments?

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, yesterday was the birthday of Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, is a revered Founding Father of our Nation, the man who stood more than any of our other Founding Fathers for liberty and independence, the author of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, I might add, did not stand just for liberty and freedom and democracy, he also stood for technology. Many times, people have forgotten this aspect of Thomas Jefferson, but Thomas Jefferson's commitment, his dedication to the concept of America being a new kind of society where people would be free to grow and to expand and to live decent lives and to have opportunity that was unknown throughout the world at the time of Thomas Jefferson, his dedication has been imprinted onto American law in ways that most Americans do not even remember or reflect upon as we enjoy this freedom and this great standard of living that we have as Americans. Thomas Jefferson was a technologist as well as a democrat, small-D democrat. Thomas Jefferson, when he retired from his political life, went home to invent gadgets and devices and machines around Monticello, which can be seen even today as visitors visit Monticello. So today it is fitting that we begin this week, the Thomas Jefferson week in the House of Representatives, recognizing that on Thursday of this week, there will be a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives, this body, that will make the difference as to whether America remains the technological leader of the world or whether we will gut our patent system and open up this country to the greatest theft of its genius and creativity that the world has ever seen. Yes, on Thursday, there will be a vote that will make the difference in the standard of living of future generations of Americans and not only our economic well-being but the security of our country as well. What is fascinating is that most Americans have no idea that this issue is coming to a vote. In fact, half or more of the Members of Congress do not know the issue will be coming to a vote. Yet it will come to a vote, the skids have been greased, the legislation is coming forward, and it will be voted on on Thursday whether or not the Members are fully aware of how their constituents believe. But what they will be aware of is the lobbyists for multinational corporations who are knocking on their door telling them how important it is to pass said legislation on America's patent system. How fitting for Jefferson's week that we will be at a turning point because, if we vote the wrong way, if we permit the gutting of our patent system, America's technological lead will evaporate in the next 20 years; and Americans 20 years hence, the children of today, will never know what happened to their standard of living. I call it Pearl Harbor in slow motion. What will happen is that foreigners who have long looked at America's technological genius with envious eyes will at last have the legal opportunity to steal American technology and to use it against us because we are changing the patent system that has protected Americans for over 200 years in a way that guts the protection of the little guy, the little guys like Thomas Edison, like Alexander Graham Bell, like the Wright Brothers. The word has not gotten out because there is a blackout in the mainstream media that this bill will be coming forward. In fact, there was one article in the New York Times, and that is all I have seen among the networks and among the major newspapers of this country, one small article and no articles leading up to this great momentous decision that will be made. Someone does not want the public to know the decision that will be made here on Thursday. The American people would be left totally in the dark if it was not for talk show radio hosts like Michael Reagan and others who have been spreading the word and warning the people, like modern-day Paul Reveres, telling the American people to wake up or they will lose their freedom. We will be making this decision on Thursday. If the American people remain in the dark, a decision will be made that will harm their children. As I say, their children will think, did we not used to have the technological lead? Were we not always the leaders? Did we not put a man on the moon? Were we not the ones, why was it that our fathers and grandfathers could outcompete all these countries with cheap labor and now we cannot do it anymore? They will never know. It will never be traced back to a vote here on the floor of the House of Representatives on the week that we celebrate Thomas Jefferson's birthday in the year 1997. They will not even think about it because patent law and many of the laws that protect our rights and have been responsible for this great land of liberty and opportunity that we enjoy today, many of those laws are taken for granted. Freedom, people have said, is like the air; you take it for granted until it is denied. The moment you are denied the right to breathe air, you will realize that breathing air is the most important thing in your life because everything else disappears without it. But yet we take it for granted because it is abundant and all around us. So, too, with America's freedom, so, too, with the legal protections that have permitted the people of the United States by and large, millions of us, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of us to live lives of dignity and opportunity, lives that are the dream of people throughout the planet and over the ages. Yet that will be threatened because the legal basis that protected America's rights is being eroded, the legal basis is being eroded. It is being eroded bit by bit by people who have good motives. They say that we live in a world that is far different than the world of Thomas Jefferson, far different than the world of Teddy Roosevelt, far different than the world of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. They say now we live in a world where we have to accommodate the changes by creating a global economy. These individuals, who are very well-intended, believe that by creating a global economy that we can perfect the planet, or at least near perfect the planet. I say to my fellow Americans today and my colleagues in the House of Representatives, ``Lord, protect us from those who would perfect mankind.'' Because, in the end, they always threaten the rights and freedoms of the American people. I do not care if they were Communists, I do not care if they were Fascists, I do not care who they are or what they are, if they will superimpose an ideal world upon the American people with no reflection on our constitutional rights, we will see a diminishing of our rights and we will see a decline in our standard of living. Mr. Speaker, the vote that is coming up on Thursday will be a vote on H.R. 400, which has already passed committee, both the subcommittee and the committee. Yet the American people have no idea that this great gutting of our patent system is on the way to the floor and what repercussions it will have on the standard of living of the American people, of their children and their children's children. I have a piece of legislation that will be granted the right to be offered as a substitute to H.R. 400. I call H.R. 400 the Steal American Technology Act. My bill, H.R. 811, and its companion bill, 812, will be offered as a substitute to H.R. 400. The issues are clear and simple. However, the American people have been denied the right to hear those issues. They have been denied the right to a public debate by a media elite that has put a blanket over this issue. Perhaps the media believes that patriotism and loyalty to one's country and fellow countrymen is old-fashioned. Perhaps they believe that it will hinder the development of a global economy, which will benefit all the people in the world. I do not know what the motive is, but I will say this much; that this is a crucial vote in our history, and unless the American people become part of the process and contact their Representative in Washington, DC, this vote will be lost and the American people will never know what hit them. Here are the central issues. When we ask our colleagues why they support H.R. 400, they will say that there are numerous reasons they support H.R. 400. H.R. 400 officially is called the 21st Century Patent Reform Act. The 21st Century Patent Reform Act. That is what they will say; that there are lots of reforms. It is like a bouquet of flowers that is being handed to the American people: Look at all of these reforms. And I will have to admit when I look at the flowers in the bouquet I am very supportive. In fact, my alternative substitute for H.R. 400 will contain all the flowers that are in H.R. 400. We have taken from the bill all of the good points of that bill, and that is all the authors want to talk about. That was not the original title of H.R. 400. I call H.R. 400 the Steal American Technologies Act, but that is my title. The title they are going by now officially is the 21st Century Patent Reform Act. What was the original title of H.R. 400 when it was introduced over a year ago in the House of Representatives? The title then was the Patent Publication Act. Well, why have they changed the name? Why has the name changed? The name has changed because in those flowers that I talked about in the bouquet are poisonous snakes. Poisonous snakes. If we only look at the flowers and we take the bouquet home, the snakes will bite our family and children and will destroy us. And the worst of all of the snakes is a snake called publication, which is the central purpose of the bill. That is why H.R. 400 was called formerly the Patent Publication Act, because the purpose of the bill is to establish a rule about publication. For those who have not heard what this rule is, it is dramatic, it is revulsive, it is something that will shock one's sensitivities, because no one will believe that serious people are proposing that this become the law of the land in the United States of America. What I am talking about is the main provision of H.R. 400, the provision that mandates that every American inventor who applies for a patent, that after 18 months that patent application will be published for the entire world to see whether or not the patent has been issued. To tell my colleagues how different this is, from the founding of our country and the Constitution of the United States, from the moment that was affirmed and made the law of the land until today, Americans have had a right of confidentiality. An American inventor who applied for a patent would know that until that patent was issued no one else could know about what his application dealt with. No one would be given the details. He and his investors, he or she and their investors would be protected from their competition and from thieves. H.R. 400 dramatically changes the fundamental law of the land to permit every thief in the world, every copycat, every individual and organization that despises the United States of America to have possession of every one of our intellectual and technological secrets so that they may use those secrets and that technology against the interests of the people of the United States of America. There are all kinds of reasons that we will hear from the proponents of this bill as to why it is so important for our big businesses, our big businesses, to have knowledge of what is being investigated and researched by different inventors and that will give them a heads-up on what our inventors are up to. Yes, that will give our own businessmen a heads-up, and then those huge corporations can steal from the little guy as well, just like multinational corporations. More importantly, it will permit multinational and foreign corporations to have that same information to go into production and to use the profits from producing their stolen technology to defeat and destroy American technologists in the court, using our own resources against us. Now, why are people doing this? Again, they will say they have some sort of motive that makes sense, and sometimes it is hard to understand, but let me show everyone the real reason. What we have here, my fellow colleagues, people of the United States, and I will put this into the Record for another time, this is a copy of an agreement that was signed on January 20, 1994. The signatories are the head of the United States Patent Office, Bruce Lehman, and his Japanese counterpart. This is an agreement by the head of our Patent Office to harmonize American law with that of Japan's. That is the real purpose behind this legislation. Why do we want to change our patent law so that it discloses all of this secret information, all of our technological secrets to our adversaries? Because we have an agreement to harmonize our law. Did anyone ever pass on that agreement? Did someone acknowledge this agreement on the floor of the House or the U.S. Senate? Absolutely not. But then we turn around and we have people trying to put this into law without telling us what it is really all about. Bruce Lehman had no power to make this agreement, but we can be tricked into fulfilling the obligations set out by this unelected official from the United States. To put things into perspective, harmonization of law with Japan may be a good thing, if they are bringing their standards up to ours. But Bruce Lehman, as is clear by this document, has set out, along with his supporters in the administration and in the corporate community, to bring down the protections of American law to the level of Japan. That is harmonization. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a formula for catastrophe and disaster for the people of the United States of America. That is a formula that will permit the economic shoguns and the tyrants who rule the Japanese economy and brutally suppress anyone who threatens their interests, it will permit those power elites in Japan, who have beaten down their own people, to come to the United States and beat down our people because now we have changed our legal protections to harmonize with Japan's. Why should they not come here and steal our technology? Why should they not try to beat us down and destroy the standard of living of the American people in order to put cash in their own pockets? Why should they not when the American Congress is willing to change the law to permit them to do it? It is not shame on the Japanese. The Japanese Government is simply watching out for the interests of Japanese people and the special interests who hold power in Japan. It is not shame on Japan. It is shame on those people who would decrease the legal protection of the people of the United States in order to harmonize our law; those people who would risk our standard of living and the technological advances that have kept us the envy of the world, who now have a global picture in mind and think that having the American people, a people guaranteed certain rights and freedoms and opportunities that do not exist in other parts of the planet, that that has become some sort of passe goal for American leaders. If it was not for the United States of America, there would be no freedom and no hope anywhere in the world. Yes, I think it is nice that we should try to help others and we should try to help establish situations where trade and commerce flourish. I believe in free trade. But I believe in free trade between free people. I believe first and foremost, when our negotiators sit down at the table they should not be thinking about some idealistic goal that is a dream goal of a unitary planet where commerce is flowing freely and that everyone is benefitted, but when they sit down at the table they should be representing the interests of the people of the United States. There is nothing wrong with that. We should make no apologies for that. The American people have borne the burden of war and borne the burden of aid to other countries. We have been the most generous people in the world, but we should not be generous with our technology and permit others to steal it in order to use it against us. Yes, there will be a price to pay. Not only our economic adversaries will be stealing this technology, but so will potential foreign policy and military adversaries. The Americans won the cold war not because we matched the potential Communist enemy man-for-man. It was when Ronald Reagan expanded the technological capabilities of our military that broke the will of the Communist bosses in Moscow and led to a more peaceful world. Today we have a great opportunity to lead mankind into a more peaceful world, but we will not do it by lowering the protections that have afforded Americans the highest standard of living and the rights of opportunity and freedom that were unknown in other parts. Yes, the Chinese, not just the Japanese, and other American competitors are ready and waiting with their Xerox machines and their fax machines for this Congress to pass this rule that will mandate every one of our technological secrets to become public information even before the patent is issued. We are told, well, we are giving the right of people to sue some corporate entity if the corporate entity steals their patent after it has been published after 18 months. To put this in perspective, often it takes years for a patent of significance to issue, sometimes 5 and 10 years. Thus, we are saying to our people we are going to expose all of your secret information, all the work that you have done to your adversaries, who can then use it, and then once the patent is issued, let us say 5 or 10 years later, after they have been in production of your idea, of your technology, we are giving you the right to sue them. This is asking smaller American companies or even individual Americans to sue huge U.S., huge foreign, and multinational corporations. Talk about a fantasy. This is an absolute fantasy that that means anything. That has absolutely no relevance. It is setting up a situation where there will be theft and no recourse because the Americans will not have the money to go out and file these suits against huge foreign corporations, especially if those huge corporations happen to be the People's Liberation Army of China, which is currently stealing much of our intellectual property. Let us put this in perspective as well. The Wright brothers, people who we are so proud of. We are proud of the Wright brothers. Go down to Kitty Hawk, NC, and see where two Americans, with little education, who worked at a bicycle shop, had a dream, had a dream of inventing a machine that would permit mankind to soar through the air. And people all over the world who had tried before them failed, yet they persevered, and they tried and they failed and they came back to try again. And there on the windy slopes on the coastline of Kitty Hawk, NC, in 1903, less than 100 years ago, mankind ascended into the sky with powered flight for the first time, and the lives of the American people and the people of the world were changed forever, because they had discovered the secret of the shape of the wing and the aerodynamics of an airplane. And under the new system that is being decided on Thursday, if it passes, the Wright brothers' secret would be made public for everyone in the world to know the secret before the patent was issued, and you can bet that Mitsubishi Corp. in Japan, which made airplanes during World War II to shoot down Americans and destroy Americans, that that corporation would have used the Wright brothers' patent information to build aircraft, and today the American people would say, well, I wonder why Japan is always ahead of us. How come they are always ahead of us? Like for example, how come we have to buy all of our jet airplanes from Japan? They would never know that if it was not for this type of legislation that America would have a strong aerospace industry, that we would have hundreds of thousands of jobs, high-paying, good jobs, manufacturing jet aircraft, except for the fact that we changed the law and the Japanese were able to steal the technology and go into production. Yes, that is how much difference it will make in the future for America, but they will never know what hit them. This law, H.R. 400, is the worst piece of legislation that I have seen as a Member of Congress. It is also perhaps the piece of legislation that has been attempted to be passed through this body in the most insidious manner that I have seen during my time in Congress. This agreement with the Japanese in 1994 has two main provisions. One we are talking, is the publication, and the other one happens to be the changing of another fundamental in our patent system called the guaranteed patent term. Americans do not even know this. But right now they have already lost that right. Up until 3 years ago, until from the time of the founding of our country, that any inventor in the United States had a right to a guaranteed patent term. That patent term would be the same no matter how long it took the patent to be issued from the bureaucracy, from the Patent Office. Well, that was what our Founding Fathers had in mind, because no matter how long it took that patent to issue after someone applied for a patent, he had, or she had, 17 years of guaranteed protection. That is called the guaranteed patent term. You would have a guaranteed term of 17 years. Again to model the Japanese system, that was replaced 3 years ago. The American people do not even know they have lost that right and it has been replaced by a system that is the Japanese system. The Japanese system, by the way, is when someone applies for a patent, the clock starts ticking, but it is ticking against the inventor and 20 years later you have no more patent rights. And during that 20 years, if the bureaucracy is slow or you have powerful interests trying to slow up the issuance of your patent, you are losing every second. That is why in Japan they never invent anything, because in reality the inventors do not have a guaranteed patent term. They have something that is uncertain and people do not invest in new technology, they invest in stealing other people's ideas. We have already changed that. That change was made not by an up-and- down vote here on the floor of the House, that change was made when some bright person, and I do not know who that person was, decided to get around the democratic process in the United States, meaning let us not let the elected representatives of the people of the United States vote on this fundamental change in our patent law. Instead, this provision was stuck into the GATT implementation legislation. GATT was an agreement on trade and tariffs between a multitude of countries around the world. We gave our President fast-track authority which permitted him to make the agreement and then when he brought it back to the House floor, that we would have 50 days to look at it but only those things that were required by GATT were supposed to be in that legislation. This was not required by GATT. This change in our patent law was not required by GATT. Yet it was put into the GATT implementation legislation. Why was that? Because some bright person, I do not know who it was, decided that bypassing the democratic process where we would get an up-and-down vote on this did not make any difference. So Members of Congress were faced with voting against the entire world trading system or accepting this change in the patent law, and what was the purpose of that, what I consider to be an underhanded maneuver? It was to fulfill our agreement, an agreement made between two unelected officials, but especially the official representing us was unelected, in Japan. If we let unelected officials go to Japan and let them bargain away our rights as Americans and then come back here and sneak the provisions of those agreements into other pieces of legislation, our standard of living and our freedom are in jeopardy. That is why I am making such a big deal about this vote that is coming up on Thursday. It is a threat to our national security. It is a threat to the well-being of average Americans. There has never been a vote in this body that I have seen in my 8 years as a Member of the House that is more of a little guy versus big guy vote. In fact, there is bipartisan support of H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, but there is also bipartisan support for my substitute, the Rohrabacher substitute, H.R. 811 and 812. David Bonior, Marcy Kaptur, Cynthia McKinney, you name it, we have got some very strong, active, liberal Democrats and we have got some conservative, active Republicans, but it all comes down to the little guy versus the big guy. Our corporate interests in the United States of America, the big corporations, have decided that they would be cutting deals with their multinational brothers and sisters, and the foreign corporations have decided it is time to end America's patent system as it has been since the founding of our country, and we are in the process of seeing that go down if H.R. 400 passes. I have told you the main aspect of H.R. 400 has been publication. But there are other aspects of H.R. 400 which I call other poisonous snakes in the bouquet. And when you ask someone about H.R. 400 and they say they are in favor of H.R. 400 and then want to talk about the little flowers, tell them you do not want to talk about the flowers, you want to talk about the poisonous snakes. Everybody is in favor of the flowers. And the first poisonous snake is the publication, mandatory publication. Is someone in favor of publishing for the world all of our secrets? That is No. 1. But the second item, the second poisonous snake, it is called reexamination. When our patents are issued to Americans, those patents are your property. You then own a piece of property for a given period of time. It is like someone giving you a deed. There has only been one way to challenge that deed, and that is if someone can prove that that person actually invented the invention first and that the Patent Office was wrong, that they invented it first. But H.R. 400, on the other hand, does what? H.R. 400 opens up for reexamination America's current patents, so not only are they putting in jeopardy all of our future technology, they are also putting at risk all of our current technology that is patented. William Banner, former U.S. Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, calls attention to the fact in this bill in terms of publishing patent applications, and it will permit those applications to be subject to reexamination prior to any patent issuance as well as after the issuance. So what we have got here is the experts now are telling us, this bill permits reexamination of current patents and examination of those patents that are in the process, reexamination within the process. What we have got is a lawyers heaven. We have opened up for litigation. All of our patent rights are now on the legal block. You can bet that when a foreign company decides that they want to use American technology, and it has been patented already, that company is going to say, well, should we sue this American company and tie them up or should we just pay them royalties? They are not going to go for the royalties. They are going to say, let us tie them up, let us put them through the grinder and if this company does not have the money or if this small group of American inventors do not have the money to basically protect themselves in court, then the foreign corporation will win. That is on current patents. That is currently the patents that exist. This bill, H.R. 400, is an invitation to every thief in the world, every powerful interest in the world to come and take on the American people and to steal our technology. People say, well, how can anybody support this? Well, this same gentleman who signed this agreement is still the head of our Patent Office, Bruce Lehman. Last year he proposed, guess what? Mr. Lehman proposed last year that we give the entire data base of our Patent Office, that we put it on disks, on these computer disks, the entire data base for our Patent Office and give it to the Red Chinese. I know there are some people right now just falling out of their seats and they cannot believe that anyone would ever do that. When he was asked, why would we ever want to do that, his answer was, ``Well, we've got to tell them what not to steal, and we can give a little message, here's what not to steal.'' Well, that is very close to sending the world's worst crime syndicates the combinations of every safe in the United States of America and say, By the way, we would hope that you don't steal and use these combinations to the safes in the United States of America to steal American money. We are sending you this so you will know what not to do. Give me a break. What is going on here? Something is going on here. It is called the harmonization of law that has nothing to do with the best interests of the people of the United States. Something else, another poisonous snake in H.R. 400, the bill that will be voted here on Thursday, celebrating Jefferson's birthday, the birthday week of Thomas Jefferson, we will vote, and a poisonous snake in the bouquet of H.R. 400, another one, is that the Patent Office that is written into our Constitution, in our Constitution is written a provision that establishes a Patent Office. We can thank Tom Jefferson, we can thank Ben Franklin, we can thank our forefathers and mothers who saw well beyond the years of 1789 and knew that this would be important to our country, that we would actually establish in our Government a means of protecting the new genius of our people and that people would come from all over the world to participate in this, the American dream. But do you know what H.R. 400 does to the Patent Office? It obliterates the Patent Office. It eliminates the Patent Office as part of the U.S. Government. It corporatizes the Patent Office. Corporatizes. What does that mean? Well, I am not sure exactly what it means. It turns the Patent Office, which has been part of our Government, into sort of a quasi-private, quasi-government corporation that is sort of like the Post Office. To put it in perspective, our Patent Office has functioned for over 200 years and there has never been a scandal in which the patent examiners, the men and women who make the decision as to who owns these technologies, decisions that are worth billions of dollars, decisions that will mean whether or not we will have a high standard of living, whether or not the flow of wealth will come in the direction of the United States, or will pour out of the United States into other countries and into the coffers and bank accounts of other interests in the world, these patent examiners have never, ever had a scandal in which their veracity and their integrity was called and that they had failed us as Americans. They have always worked hard and diligently, and it is a tough job. Now these people who have been protected as civil servants from outside influences because they were part of the U.S. Government, these civil servants, who we can thank for doing a good job, are now going to be put under a new structure that will not be part of the U.S. Government officially, but instead will be a corporatized entity, a corporatized entity. Now what kind of influences will be put on people who work for a new corporatized entity? Will they be protected from the outside? Well, for one thing, the patent bill suggests that this new corporate entity, this H.R. 400, says that it may, if you want to listen to this, that H.R. 400 says that this new corporate entity ``may accept monetary gifts or donations of services or of real personal and mixed property in order to carry out the function of the office.'' In other words, this new corporate entity will be able to receive gifts from big foreign corporations or special interests from here and abroad. Do you think that would have some impact on the way we do business, in the way that people make decisions as to who owns what property and what patents are issued? Well, it might, it might not, but we are opening the door. This is not a door that we want to open to poisonous snakes. And then, of course, the opposition says, well, Government agencies, Government agencies, can already accept gifts. Well, that is true. That is true, and you will hear that rebuttal from the proponents from most people who are supporting H.R. 400. My colleagues, when you hear that rebuttal, keep in mind that that is half the story. The other half of the story, when you can accept gifts, is that what can you do with those gifts? Currently anybody who gives a gift to a Government agency or department, well, those gifts now basically have to go through the Federal property and administrative services, and they basically, what you have got to do, other people, other Government agencies who are set up to handle these gifts, determine what happens to the gifts, and they basically go, and they become Federal property for the overall Federal Government. What we are doing with this legislation is exempting this new corporatized Patent Office from that requirement. Thus, they will be able to accept gifts and use it for the Patent Office as determined by the directors of the Patent Office. Do you think that will influence anybody? So anybody who says do not worry about it, every Government agency has this same type of right to accept gifts, remember that person is trying to deceive you because they know darn well that currently those gifts and the gifts of other agencies are well controlled by the Federal Government, and their insurance is to make sure that does not influence those decision makers in those departments and agencies and that this new corporate entity is exempt, exempt from that type of safeguard. Also, I might add that the new corporate entity has a right to borrow money on the U.S. taxpayers. That is correct. This new corporation, this new corporation that will come into existence, the patent corporation, who will be deciding on our future rights as Americans, have a right to borrow money and to issue bonds. H.R. 400 transforms an agency now fully funded by user fees to one that can borrow and incur debt. Last year Patent Commissioner Bruce Lehman stated that he would seek--now get this--Bruce Lehman has already stated for the record that he would seek to borrow $2 billion, citing priorities like a new headquarters for the corporate structure; $2 billion added to our national debt. That debt is our debt. That debt, if this new corporation does not pay it back, becomes the responsibility of the American taxpayers. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Can you imagine? We have got a corporate entity out there, somewhat independent, who now can borrow against, and we are responsible to pay it back. We got somebody who believes they are going to build, they are going to spend billions of dollars on new offices, and you can bet when this Mr. Lehman buys his office that he is going to want it to be pretty plush, and I have not seen the plan, but I bet you there will be more marble in this new patent building, especially on his floor that he has for his offices, than one can ever imagine, and I am sure there will be lots of gold trim, too, because why not? They are going to borrow from the taxpayers, and we have got a limited right to step in and make sure that we have oversight, they have limited oversight, as compared to today where we have just the same oversight as any other Government agency. So, we have this decision coming up on Thursday. We have all of these poisonous snakes about to be unleashed on the American people. The seed corn of American prosperity is about to be given away because that is the seed corn of America's crops in the future, that is our ideas in this era of ideas, and we have got the mainstream media with a total blackout, almost a total blackout on this issue, we have got talk show hosts all over the country talking about it because they have been informed, and they are running with it and going directly to the American people. How will the vote turn out? How will the vote turn out? It could go in either direction. Something as important to the future of our country, to the well-being of our children, something that goes to the heart of our system, is going to be decided, and it can go either way, and you have got people here who delightfully will say the biggest employer in my district wants me to support this bill and that is what I am going to do, and that is what a lot of Congressmen are basing their opinion on, the largest employer in their district. So let us talk about the dynamics of why we have ads being placed in the Roll Call magazine by America's largest corporations trying to foist off on the American people this gutting of America's patent system. Why is that? What are the dynamics involved? Well, first and foremost I believe that our own multinational and domestic corporations who sometimes have interlocking directorates with other corporations from other countries, I might add, first and foremost they do not want to pay royalties to inventors either. So they would just as soon wipe out what they consider an antiquated protection of American technologies because it is just too much. Of course, these same corporations would invest in Adolf Hitler's Germany in order to make a 20-percent profit, just like they are investing all of the money now in Communist China in order to make a 20-percent profit rather than creating jobs in the United States of America for American workers because they would rather do that even though it is a dictatorship than to invest over here because over here their return of their investment is maybe 10 percent a year, and over there it might be 20 or 25 percent. Well, that is one reason. They want to make more money, they do not want to pay royalties, and they do not care about the people of the United States, and they especially do not care about these little nerd inventors, which is what they think of inventors. Well, another reason huge corporations get together and put ads in Roll Call, and I might add huge corporations, foreign and domestic, hire lobbyists, an army of lobbyists, to knock on the doors of each and every Member of Congress to try to get them to vote in this way is because they like the status quo, they like the status quo, and there is nothing that distorts the status quo as much as someone coming up with a new technological innovation. And they want to control, they want to control growth and progress in the United States, so that their investment in all of this new equipment and all of their corporate structures that are based on current technology, they do not want to put that technology at risk. They would rather us stay exactly the way we are because then their capital investment does not have to be remade. But these small inventors who come up--you know some guy who comes up; by the way, I have got an invention that can do that very same thing and will only cost a dollar as compared to $200 that you are charging for what you do currently. Do you think a corporate leader wants to hear that? They do not want to hear that. They want that guy to go away. They do not want the American people to have a cheaper widget. They do not have a cheaper refrigeration system. They do not want to have something that develops that makes our life better, but we do not have to pay as much money to some big corporation for making it for us. The fact is that the corporate leaders today are not the innovators of the world, they are not the people, the Alexander Graham Bells; they are not the Thomas Edisons. They are people who got educations in corporate management at big elitist schools, and they do not care about the people of the United States, and they do not want their elite position challenged. They want to control what happens in our country for their benefit, and they do not want new innovations coming out that could so stir up things that it makes their current investments meaningless. That is a big motive for what is going on right now with H.R. 400. That is one of the reasons that we have H.R. 400 before us today, because there are powerful interests who do not--do not respect the will, nor do they consider themselves to be Americans and watching out for the interest of Americans. They are watching out for their bank account. And what effect will this have if we let those people, those elitists move forward? How will it impact us? How will it impact the average American? I have had calls from all over the United States, all over the United States from inventors and from small companies, small businesses who are trying to develop new things. Just last night I was talking to a person who owns a small company in my own congressional district, and they told me, and I will not go into great detail about it, but about a process that will absolutely prevent, and I should not say ``absolutely'' so often that will prevent meat from being contaminated, and when it is contaminated, it will alert the consumer so that never again will we have to worry about getting bad meat and different bacteria in the meat, and it would be very low cost, and it will just spread across America, and it is a marvelous idea, and do you know that he has been waiting for his patent for over 2 years, and if this system was in place, the system they are trying to foist on us, his information that he used to--he used, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in time and investment to develop this new technology. It would have been published, all of his people all over the world would already have known about it, his competitors, and he would never ever get any return on it. So why should he even try in the first place? That system would never emerge because no one would have the profit motive to come up to try to invent it. Then of course we have got letters from a person who is trying to act like--talk to this person as well who has developed a way of debugging not only buildings, but crop land without the use of chemicals. We are poisoning our homes and poisoning our environment and poisoning our land in order to get rid of bugs that are eating our crops. This person has a new technology that will eliminate these bugs, kill them without the use of poisons, without the use of chemicals. Yet he says to me, ``I'm afraid to write up a patent application because if it takes 15 years or 5 years or 10 years for me to get my patent issued, all of the foreigners will steal my idea, and I'll never get any benefit from it.'' Someone wrote me and said ``I need a new system to try to detect breast cancer.'' Now these are things we do not think of, breast cancer, or meat spoilage, bugs that are being killed. These are little things that just slip by, but they make all the difference in the world to what our standard of living is, what kind of land that we will be in, whether or not we will--all of our food will be eaten by bugs or rodents or things like that, or we have to poison ourselves with chemicals to get rid of that problem. These problems can be solved if we keep the door of technological progress open. This will slam the door in the face of these people. They know it. They are writing and calling every day saying, I cannot see a future and I will never move forward with my invention if these laws are in place. The American people will suffer, and they will never know what hit them. They will never know that there was equipment to debug their homes without chemicals. They will never know about it in the future. Their children will be sick and their grandparents will be sick from the fumes, and our food will have the chemicals in it. They will never know there was an alternative, because the inventors could not apply for a patent without the worry of having it stolen from them. Mr. Speaker, I had a man in my office when this was going to the committee, he ran a small solar energy company. And as I told him what was going on, his face became red and he was pounding on the table. He said, Mr. Congressman, if that bill passes, I have put millions of dollars in trying to invent this method of improving the amount of electricity that comes out of solar energy. If they publish my patent, the Japanese will be in production of what I have invested my whole life in; they will be in production and they will be using the money that they are making from my technology to steal my technology from me legally in the court system once my patent is issued. Mr. Speaker, this is wrong. This is wrong. It is going to hurt America. It is coming to a vote, and it is sliding right through the process. H.R. 400 will come to a floor vote on Thursday. There is an army of lobbyists contacting Members of Congress, paid for by multinational corporations and by huge American corporations. Members of Congress need to talk to their constituents and the constituents need to talk to their Member of Congress. That is the way America will be saved. That is the way America has always been saved, not by some top dog somewhere making some decision. During the American Revolution when Thomas Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence, a third of the colonists were supporting the British. They were basically people who were of the elite classes. Throughout our history, when American freedom was in jeopardy, it was the American people themselves and not our corporate elite and not our business executives, and not the big, important, handsome, and beautiful people that stepped forward. But it was those average Americans, average you and me type people, who saved the day, who charged up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt, who fought with the 69th Regiment, the Irish Regiment at Gettysburg, who fought the American Revolution, and afterwards saw that they did not get anything from it, and those same Tories came back who had supported the British and made all kinds of money by speculating on currency, on continental currency. But I believe in the American people. I know that they will meet the challenges. They will keep our country free. When we celebrate Thomas Jefferson's birthday, and his birthday week, we will hold that torch high, because that is our job. It is not the job of Government. It is not the job of the other guy. It is the job of every human being who believes in liberty and believes our country must maintain the standards of justice and decency and the legal protection of individual rights far beyond those of any other country on this planet. Of that we can be proud. Mr. Speaker, as long as we have that kind of commitment, America will remain that dream, that hope for all mankind. And we will lead the rest of the world into a new era when other people do have more opportunities, because we will maintain our standards, rather than trying to bring our standards down to those of other countries. I am confident that we have a chance to win, but I am warning the people now. I am ringing the alarm bell. The people of this country have to step forward. I know they will. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record the document entitled ``Mutual Understanding Between the Japanese Patent Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office''.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, the last spokesman, one of our colleagues, the gentleman from Florida, [Mr. Scarborough] just mentioned protecting the genius of the United States of America. Well, next week the House, this House, the body of the House of Representatives, will vote on a bill that will determine America's basic law on technology for the 21st century. In a quiet, almost stealth maneuver, major multinational corporations are trying to slide through this Congress legislation which will gut America's patent system. My colleagues heard me correctly. It will gut America's patent system. America has had the strongest patent system in the world. That is why we have the strongest economy of the world and our people have enjoyed opportunities and freedom like no other people in the world. And it is now under attack. America has had this strong patent protection in place since the founding of our country. It is in our Constitution. If this dismantling of America's patent protection proceeds, it will lead to an historic rip-off of America's technology. I say historic because it will lead to an end of America's preeminence in the arena of technology. And it has been this arena, as I say, that has secured us from foreign threats and permitted us the economic advancements that have given our people the strongest standard of living and the highest standard of living of any country of the world because our people, not just the elite, enjoy opportunity and freedom in America. If they gut our patent system, it will destroy our ability to compete with those countries that have cheap labor because we now will be stripped of our technological advantage. It will also strip our defenders of their technological advantage. This bill, H.R. 400, which I call the Steal American Technology Act, will be voted on in this body next week, but probably half of our Members do not even know it is coming up or know anything about it, yet they are being contacted by lobbyists. And unless the American people step forward and contact their Member of Congress and say vote against the H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, lobbyists from multinational corporations will have the say on the passage of this bill which will gut our patent system. What does H.R. 400 do? It mandates, and hold on to your seat here, it mandates that every patent application, every inventor who applies for a patent, will have his patent published for the entire world to see even before the patent is issued. This means that every enemy of the United States, every competitor of our country, every Japanese and Chinese copycat will have every one of our technological secrets and be able to use it against us before our patents are issued to our own industries and our own inventors. It also mandates a reexamination. It opens up the book to many different avenues that foreign corporations can challenge existing patents. Even those who own existing patents will be challenged. Finally, it eliminates the Patent Office as part of our Government and resurrects it as a corporate entity. We have had a Patent Office as part of our Government since the founding of our country. Now they want to corporatize it, turn it into a corporation that will be able to receive gifts from other countries and other foreign and multinational corporations. Our patent examiners have worked so hard. So hard. There has never been a scandal among our patent examiners. Now by corporatizing the Patent Office, we are opening them up to all kinds of who knows what influences. These are people who make decisions that are worth billions and billions of dollars. They now will be opened up to outside influences. This bill, H.R. 400, is a catastrophe. It will have a dramatic impact on our standard of living. I call it a Pearl Harbor in slow motion. This bill will be voted on next week unless people contact their representative. Many people will come here and vote and the only contact they will have had is with the lobbyists that are paid for by multinational corporations. Luckily, the leadership has provided us an alternative. I have two pieces of legislation, H.R. 811 and 812, which will be offered on the floor as a substitute, and I would ask my colleagues to vote for my substitute which will be presented, my substitute, the Rohrabacher substitute, to H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act. If this bill passes, H.R. 400, we can imagine that American inventors will be left open to the greatest theft of our technology in the history of our country. It will impact our standard of living. I am sounding the alarm bell and I hope my colleagues and the people of the United States are listening. We can defeat it but only if Americans act together.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, today I am proud to introduce H.R. 1275, the Civilian Space Authorization Act. This bill authorizes appropriations in fiscal years 1998 and 1999 for, and provides policy direction to, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Office of Commercial Space Transportation in the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Office of Space Commerce in the Department of Commerce. This is an aggressive but responsible bill. Based on the Committee on Science's Views and Estimates, which calls for strengthening our Nation's research and development investment while pursuing the bipartisan goal of balancing the budget, this bill provides a slight increase in funding for NASA above their fiscal year 1997 level, while holding the other two agencies essentially constant. This bill reflects priorities set by the Science Committee and its Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee over several years, under both parties' leadership. We strongly support human spaceflight, space science, and the aeronautics and space technology efforts which will keep American industry No. 1, and open the frontier of space to commercial enterprise. With a few exceptions, we have approved the President's budget request for NASA. It is a greatly improved budget submission than the one he made in fiscal year 1997, especially with regard to the outyears. In two areas, we have added the funds necessary to achieve important goals. In others, we have made small reductions or limitations on the use of funds. After preserving the safety of the Space Shuttle Flight Program, NASA Administrator Goldin has repeatedly stated to the Congress and audiences all over the country that his most important goal is dramatically reducing the cost of transporting people and cargo into space. NASA has made an excellent start in that direction with the X-33 program and its smaller sibling, the X-34. We are fully funding those programs, and indeed specifically funding the X-33 amount. Unfortunately, the NASA budget only has funds to develop and flight- test one concept for the X-33. NASA has indicated, both in testimony and direct conversations with me and staff that they wish to pursue additional X-vehicles in the future to continue pushing down the cost of space transportation. They also wish they could have funded more than one X-33 concept. This bill uses most of our increase over the President's request to fully fund a different, competitively chosen X- vehicle concept using the most advanced technologies possible. This will provide technical redundancy to the X-33, enable downstream competition in the reusable launch vehicle industry, and accelerate the drive toward cheap access to space. Another important goal of the subcommittee is preserving steady funding for Space Science. We are providing some small increases to the Space Science accounts in this bill, particularly for analysis of the data coming back from science missions, and also for important initiatives like asteroid detection and NASA participation in the Air Force's Clementine II asteroid intercept mission. Perhaps the most well known program in this bill is the International Space Station program, which we are fully funding at the President's request, so it will enable important science and help open new frontiers to American free enterprise. Of course, the station program is currently facing the challenge of lack of funding from the Russian Government for their share of the hardware. The Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics held an excellent hearing on April 9 which discussed both the problems with the Russian partnership and the great importance of completing the space station on schedule for scientific and commercial reasons. I am hopeful that the White House will work with us over the next week so that when this bill is marked up in the full Science Committee on April 16, we can address the problems with Russia in this legislation. Now, this bill doesn't just fund NASA. As commercial space activities continue to grow, creating high wage, high technology jobs here in America using private capital, it is vital that the Government provide a stable and streamlined regulatory and positive business environment for this emerging industry. That's why President Reagan created the Office of Commercial Space Transportation and the Office of Space Commerce. This bill funds and directs the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, now part of the Federal Aviation Administration, to license commercial space transportation vehicles and spaceports. We also fully fund and permanently establish, the Office of Space Commerce, which promotes the growth of current, and the emergence of new, commercial space activities. As I said earlier, this bill provides significant policy direction as well as authorizing appropriations. That direction boils down to two important themes: ensuring NASA's accountability in spending nearly $14 billion each year in taxpayer funds, and improving the cost effectiveness of all government civil space spending. Regarding accountability, this bill gives NASA four major directives. First, in the International Space Station program, the Congress should be better informed as to the thinking behind, and the commercial impact of, the international hardware barter agreements NASA is negotiating with various foreign entities. Second, we want to make sure that as NASA consolidates its nonshuttle operational contracts and moves those activities more into the private sector, that NASA fully consider and inform the Congress regarding the issues of competition and fixed-price versus cost-plus-fee contracting. Third, we direct NASA to pursue independent cost analyses of its programs which include all costs to the taxpayer. And finally, we direct NASA to provide the Congress with a detailed report on the status of the Earth Observing System's Data Information System. Of course, all of us on the committee and in this body want to ensure that our constituents' tax dollars are spent as effectively as possible, particularly as we drive toward a balanced budget in 2002. So for civil space, like all other so-called discretionary programs, the Congress and administration must work hard to continually improve and reform the cost effectiveness of all Federal space activities. To that end, this bill does several things to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of the taxpayers' investment. We include an initiative to improve NASA's procurement of new technology. We direct NASA to actively pursue the greatest possible commercial participation and use of the International Space Station program. We direct NASA to purchase space science data from commercial providers. We fund a continuing program at the Stennis Space Center to purchase commercial remote sensing data to more cheaply meet the needs of the Mission to Planet Earth program. We strongly state our commitment to move from government-operated space launch vehicles to the purchase of commercially provided launch services, including the possible option of a privatized Shuttle fleet. And we place in statute a very important provision of the President's National Space Policy mandating the purchase of, and preventing NASA competition with, commercially available space goods and services. So, Mr. Speaker, this is quite a bill. We fund vital Federal space activities in three agencies, and set a positive policy direction for the future of American enterprise, as well as Government projects, in space. I look forward to speaking on the floor for its adoption as soon as possible after the Committee on Science reports it to the full House.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, on Thursday of next week on this floor will be a debate which will actually end in a decisive vote for the future of the United States of America. Unfortunately, the vast majority of all Americans have no idea that there is even a piece of legislation like that which will be debated in one week on this floor even working its way through the system. There has been a blanket, overall coverup on this issue in what would be called the traditional media of the United States of America. The networks and the major newspapers have not touched this issue because they do not want the American people to know that a major decision affecting their way of life, the standard of living of their children, America's competitiveness, and the economic well-being and the national security of our country will be at stake with one vote. That is because this issue is relatively hard to understand, yet it is so vital that if the vote goes the other way, I believe this will be the first step on an escalator down for the people of the United States of America, because it will be ending and eliminating the greatest advantage that we have had as a country, and that is our technological edge over our competitors. The American people enjoy a high standard of living, not because we work harder than other people. People all over the world, many of them work longer hours; they are hard-working people, but yet they live in poverty. They have standards of living that we would never accept in the United States of America for even our poorest person. What gives us as Americans the edge? What ensures us the fact that we have wealth that is created in our country that can uplift the standard of the average person? It has been the technology that our citizens have developed and produced and invented over the history of our country. America has been a nation of yes, hard-working people, but there are hard-working people everywhere. Most importantly, we have been a nation of technology which has permitted our people to increase their standard of living, to live high and above the rest of the people of the world. Even at a time when there is international competition with countries where the people earn far less wages, we can out-compete them and we can look forward to a bright future, if we have the technological edge. But what is happening here next Thursday is a vote on the fundamental protections of law for American innovators, for American inventors, and for the owners and developers of new technology. We have had basically the same law in the United States of America for 200 years. Again, most people do not fully comprehend that this has been a protection granted to Americans that is different in other countries that has enabled our country to produce this higher standard of living and this great opportunity for the average person. They do not recognize that because it is little known that written into our Constitution by our Founding Fathers is a patent office and protection for inventors. That is why the inventors were in the United States of America. That is why the great creators of that technology that produced all of the wealth that enabled us to live better, that is why they were Americans. People came here from all over the world. Americans do not have any special trait. We just have freedom and opportunity and a legal system set down by our Founding Fathers that understood the necessity of individual freedom and individual rights being respected in order for the whole of the American people to progress. And now we are changing the fundamental law in a very hushed manner so very few people know about it, the fundamental law that directs and protects the development of technology in the United States of America. Next Thursday, on this floor, on April 17, will be a vote in which two bills will come head to head, one bill H.R. 400 and the other H.R. 811. It is a combination of H.R. 811 and H.R. 812. H.R. 400, which I call the Steal American Technologies Act, will, if passed, open up the United States to the greatest theft of our intellectual property and our technological achievements in the history of our Republic. It will be the equivalent of sending a message to everyone in the world to come and get our technological secrets and use them against the American people. It is as bad as that. That is H.R. 400. That bill, what does it do? No. 1, and hold on to your seats for those of my colleagues who do not understand what is going to happen on this floor in 1 week, this is a bill that will mandate that every inventor in the United States who applies for a patent will have his or her patent published for the world to see after 18 months even if that patent has not been issued. Now, what does this mean? From the history of our country, from the very beginning of our history, when someone has applied for a patent, when an American has applied for a patent, he or she has had the right of confidentiality, knowing that none of that information would be disclosed unless that patent was issued; and when the patent is issued, that means that person, that individual owns that technology. That has been a right for every American. And what is happening now? Next Thursday we will vote to discard that right, that no longer, after 225 years of American history, that right, which has been a force for good in our society, will be discarded by a vote here on the floor of the House of Representatives because H.R. 400 mandates the publication of all of our secrets. There will be no more industrial espionage. You heard about that. You have heard about people coming into the United States in order to steal our secrets. There will be no more industrial espionage because after 18 months, every bit of secret information about the development of our new technology will be sent to our worst enemies, people who want to destroy our country, people who want to destroy the American way of life, people who care not one iota for the standard of living for our people but want to pull those millions and billions of dollars of wealth into their pockets rather than see the American people enjoy the fruits of our free society. This is almost unbelievable. It is almost beyond belief, until you hear people stand up and argue this case as if, oh, this is going to be good because everybody will know what is being developed and then we can all work together. All work together. There are people in this world who are intent on not working together and they will be very happy to steal everything that America develops. The second provision on H.R. 400, which will be on this floor in a week, is called reexamination. The publication angle of H.R. 400 is enough, is enough for us to say get rid of this terrible threat to the American people. But that is a future threat, I might add. Publication only affects the future technologies. What we have discovered when looking into H.R. 400, and I did not know this until several weeks ago, there are small provisions in this bill which open up the door to reexamination, which is the No. 2 provision, reexamination. What does reexamination mean? That means now, today, and all through our country's history, when you are issued your patent, it is your patent and there is almost nothing someone can do to challenge your right because it is your property. It has been decided upon and perhaps only one other criteria can be used to fight against it in court. Instead, H.R. 400 opens up a panoply of options for not only our big corporations but foreign corporations and multinational corporations to go at and challenge every one of our existing patents, not only are future patents going to be published before they are even issued, so that thieves can take away our future technology, the current technology that we have that gives us billions of dollars in royalties that comes to the United States every year. These foreign corporations that are paying royalties now will have the option, instead of paying royalties, to file suit and to interfere and to act and to call for reexamination of current patents. Finally, the last and perhaps another just as equally important provision of H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, which will be voted on in this body on the floor of the House in 1 week, is that it, again, hold on to your seats, it will obliterate the Patent Office. That is right. The Patent Office is written into the U.S. Constitution, and it eliminates it as a Government entity and resurrects it. Resurrects it as what? A corporatized entity. Corporatized. What does that mean? That means there will be some entity that used to be the Patent Office and now it will be corporatized, something like the Post Office, Government but not Government. This bill mandates, for example, that this new corporate structure will have business leaders on its board of directors. Now, what does that mean? I thought the business leaders were the ones who were going to be dealing with the patents. We are going to put the people who actually make money dealing with patents on the commanding board of directors of this company? The board is also enabled to borrow money and the taxpayers are still on the hook. Patent examiners have been shielded for 200 years from outside influences. Patent examiners have never had a scandal. These hardworking public servants, like judges, have such power in their hands to determine who owns billions of dollars of wealth, but they have been shielded up until now from outside influences. Will they be shielded? Will they be shielded from this new corporate entity? Let me add, there is one other thing I forgot to mention; the new corporate entity, according to H.R. 400, will be permitted to accept gifts. Accept gifts from corporations? Accept gifts from foreign companies? Accept gifts when they are making determinations about who owns what wealth in the future? What kind of effect will this have on the decisionmaking at this new corporatized Patent Office? Mr. Speaker, this is a formula for catastrophe. This is a formula for the destruction of the American way of life, and I cannot stress it too strongly here, it is going to be voted on and the American people do not know about it. It is coming next week. There has been a lid placed on coverage in the mass media. We do not have shows on the network or in our major newspapers. They are not doing stories about this threat to each and every one of us. It is not there. I have a piece of legislation, and the gentleman from California, Duncan Hunter has a companion piece of legislation, H.R. 811 and 812, that go in exactly the opposite direction from the bill, from H.R. 400, the one I just described. H.R. 811 is the Patent Term Restoration Act, which I have authored. Basically it restores a guaranteed patent term to the American people. If no one understands why we have to restore a guaranteed patent term, I hate to inform them, but we have already lost our right that has been with us since the founding of our country. Our people have always had a right when they apply for a patent, no matter how long it takes for that patent to be issued, that there is still a guaranteed time period, 17 years, when someone would reap the benefit from that invention, either the investor or inventor, whoever owns that patent. That was taken away. That was eliminated by a provision that was snuck, and I repeat, snuck, into the GATT implementation legislation. GATT 3 years ago did not require us to change our patent laws, but someone put that provision into GATT, and thus the Congress was faced with voting against the entire world trading system or agreeing to this fundamental change in patent law. This was a betrayal of the American people in the worst way. My bill restores the guaranteed patent term. So no matter how long it takes to issue your patent, no matter who is against you, once that patent is issued the American has a right to a guaranteed patent term of 17 years. By the way, it was replaced with something that sounds pretty innocuous, like many of the things in these bills sound innocuous. The provision that replaced our patent term guarantee was a provision that said you are going to have patent protection from 20 years from the date that you filed. However, however, 20 years, all it really means is the clock is ticking against the inventor. If it takes 10 to 15 years to get an invention patented, for the patent to issue, that patent applicant basically has lost all of that time. All of that time. No, we do not need the clock ticking against the inventor, we need a guaranteed patent term, which has been our right. That is what my bill does. The companion bill, H.R. 812, bolsters and strengthens and makes more productive and reforms the Patent Office and strengthens our Patent Office, instead of obliterating it like they do and corporatizing it, in H.R. 400. These bills will come to a direct head-on-head vote. My bill will be offered as a substitute. H.R. 811, strengthening the patent system, will come right up against it and there will be one vote. Right now there is an army of lobbyists going through this town contacting Members of Congress because they are interested in how they are going to vote. Unless the American people, unless the American people contact their representative, the major influence on how this vote will turn out will be lobbyists that are paid for by huge multinational corporations, foreign corporations, and yes, even some, many, of our major domestic corporations who are in league with these multinationals. Mr. Speaker, we can turn this around if the American people do contact their elected representatives. That will make the difference. By the way, interestingly enough, how do we communicate if we cannot get the news media to cover the story? I have tried everything. I give these speeches. I even have a web site, www.house.gov/rohrabacher/. That is www.house.gov/rohrabacher/. I had to go to the web site. I have gone to talk radio. Thank goodness we have democracy on the air. Thank goodness we have Rush Limbaugh and Michael Reagan and others, because the regular media will not cover this story that is so vital to the future of our country. What coverage we have been able to get through these speeches on the floor, we have received letters, I have received letters and Members of Congress have received letters from all over the United States, from small inventors, people who are afraid. The two most recent letters my office received, one was from a gentleman who is conducting research into breast cancer. He has made some breakthroughs but he is afraid to try to patent his discoveries. He is afraid of that because with the new H.R. 400, that would mean it would be published for the whole world to see, and he would reap no benefit from it. He is afraid, whether he should disclose what he has invented. Another person who wrote my office is a person who has developed a new system of killing bugs. That may sound rather minimal to people, killing bugs. It is not minimal. We are pouring tons of pesticides into our environment every year, and this man has invented a new process that requires no chemicals, a new method of dealing with infestations of bugs in homes and in fields that would prevent us from being poisoned. But he is worried. He has spent a lot of money in trying to develop this new process. He does not know if he wants to make it public through the patent system, because if he applies for the patent they will disclose this, if H.R. 400 is passed, even before he gets his patent and people will steal his process. These are the letters coming to me: Breast cancer, things dealing with insecticides into our system. How is this going to affect our way of life? Can the Members not see just by those two examples? Who would have thought of those two examples before I said them? There are thousands of people all over this country who are inventing ways of making things better. That is what Americans are all about. We are tinkerers. We are people who use our ingenuity. That is what Americans are all about. We are changing the fundamental law, and we are pulling the rug out from under them. We will make sure that the giant corporations in Japan and China and even our own giant corporations can steal from them. And when we do that, the American light of ingenuity will be put out. It will not go on. We have fostered, we have nurtured this creative genius among our people. If we change the rules in protecting their rights as individuals, that light will be put out and our standard of living will suffer. Colleges and universities are getting the word. Throughout the United States of America we have been receiving letters from colleges and university people. People who are involved with research programs all over our country are writing and saying: You mean everything that I have been working for will be disclosed to America's enemies if we file for a patent? Small inventors, small inventors throughout the country have joined together to try to fight this but they are an unorganized group of people, the most unorganizable group of people I have ever seen. That is what they are, they are individualists, men and women who come up with new ideas who are hard to organize. Thus the major corporations want to steal the profit of their genius. I will have more to say on this floor a week from now. Mr. Speaker, we have seen venture capitalists, people who put money into the inventors. All of the great inventions happen here in the United States of America: the light bulb, the telephone, the reaper, the telegraph, the airplane. We have had the great inventors. We have had the great inventors because investors have known that they would have 17 years of a guaranteed patent term to reap the reward. The Government did not finance the research into most of these great inventions. It was done by individual investors and individual inventors, and these were the people who made the great breakthroughs. But if we pull the rug out from under them and we make their inventions public even before the patent is issued, then what is going to happen? If we take away the guaranteed patent term, there will not be investment capital. They will come to people and say we have to tax you some more. We have to have a Government program to have research for our country because you cannot rely on the private sector. You cannot rely on the private sector because they change the rules of the game. Do we really want the Government picking out who is going to get all the research money? They are going to pick their friends. Politics and bureaucracy are going to come into play, as it was not part of the process over these last 200 years. We will become what the Soviet Union was. Do we know what that is? We will have changed the rules of the game. We will become a society aimed at collectivism versus protecting individual rights. This has been recognized. For example, the Long Island Association of Industries is a group of 1,000 industries on Long Island who got wind of what was going on, read the legislation and they are outraged. They are outraged that the big guys are setting up the little guys, and some of the big guys happen to be multinational and foreign corporations. Amgen, a biotech corporation out in California, large biotech corporation, has put billions of dollars into research. And then this is going to be made public before the patent is issued so that all over the world they could just take what has been discovered and use it? A solar energy company was in my office when this was breezing through the committee. Yes, H.R. 400 has already gone through committee. The solar energy company executive said to me: ``Mr. Congressman, if they pass this legislation and they publish my patent applications before I get issued the patent, my Japanese competitors will be in production of the things that I have invested in and spent millions of dollars to produce and develop and discover. And the Japanese will be producing it. And they will be selling it on the market. And they will use the profit from selling my technology to defeat me in court, these huge corporations.'' Mr. Speaker, it makes no sense. H.R. 400 says, how are we going to protect these American inventors? You ask them, if you are going to publish it, their information, before they get the patent, how are they protected? And do you know what the answer is? Well, once the patent is issued, if someone is using their idea, they can sue them in court. We can imagine the Wright Brothers trying to sue Mitsubishi Corporation. So sue me. You can go over to Japan to try to sue some huge corporation or China or some of these other countries. Impossible. This is a formula for the theft of America's technology and the decline of our standard of living. A pharmaceutical company, Allergan, pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars trying to develop new drugs in our country. What happens, it takes years to get through the process. If their patent is made public, they will not spend that money. No one will spend any money to develop new drugs anymore that will cure diseases for our people because they will all say why should you spend the money to develop it. This bill, I compared it yesterday to a bouquet of flowers. When you ask these people who are supporting this bill, who are pushing this bill through the system, why they could ever support, how could you ever support a piece of legislation that would be so destructive to America's interests, that would open us up to theft internationally, do you know what their answer is? Their answer is, there are a lot of good things in this bill. Then they will go through a list of nice little things that keeps the money in the patent office. It helps facilitate hiring new patent employees, and they will go through a list. This is very similar to being handed a bouquet of flowers. If you are handed a bouquet of flowers and somebody says look at the flowers and then you realize the bouquet that he has handed you has a bunch of snakes in the bouquet, poisonous snakes. And you ask them, are these snakes poisonous? And if that person only wants to talk about the flowers but refuses to talk about the snakes, he does not like you. He is not giving you that bouquet because he thinks a lot about you. He wants to destroy you. What is happening is that a bouquet of flowers has been handed to the American people. There are some nice little reforms in H.R. 400. They can talk about them all day, but we do not want to talk about the bouquet of flowers. We want to talk about the poisonous snakes that will destroy our country and poison our system and kill our families. That is what we want to talk about. But they will talk about how nice the rose looks. I want to talk about why we are publishing our information for everybody to steal. But look how nice the flower is. How about talking about the daisies. How beautiful. What about this idea that now you can have all of our patents attacked, the ones that are issued. Do not talk about that. The bottom line is, the flowers are not what is important if the bouquet is filled with deadly snakes. H.R. 400 is filled with deadly snakes and we need to talk about it. Why would anyone want a bill like this? Why? Well, Bruce Lehman, head of our Patent Office, went to Japan 4 years ago. He signed an agreement with the Japanese, the counterpart of the Japanese head of the Japanese Patent Office. He signed an agreement to harmonize, harmonize America's patent law with Japan. Mr. Speaker, I will tell my colleagues, I believe in foreign trade and international trade. Harmonizing our laws is a good thing. As long as we are bringing the standards of America, maintaining those standards and bringing other people up to our standards, that is a good thing. Instead, their form of harmonization, Mr. Bruce Lehman, head of our Patent Office, agreed to make our system like Japan's. This is enough to shake anybody up. Our Patent Office agreed to change our strong patent system, the strongest in the world, to make it exactly like the Japanese system. This is horrendous. This is incredible. This is something most Americans cannot believe is happening. There will be a vote on this issue. All the things I described in H.R. 400 are part of this agreement to harmonize our law. It is bringing down the level of protection in America to the level they have had in Japan. This 18- month publication, this no guaranteed patent term, this uncertain patent term, that is part of their system. And in Japan they do not invent anything. Their people are under the domination of a group of economic shoguns who beat individuals and beat the average person into submission if that person threatens the power elite in any way. If we change our laws to be like Japan's, those economic shoguns, those economic gangsters that run that economy will be right here in the United States of America doing to our people what they do to their own people. This law will pass, this harmonization will happen next week in a vote unless the people of this country call their Representative and say: H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, is horrible, vote against it. If the American people do not contact their Representative, these huge corporate interests internationally have hired lobbyists to contact your Representative. Mr. Lehman, by the way, not only agreed to harmonize our law, but he was the same guy, head of our Patent Office, who not too long ago wanted to send our entire data base for our Patent Office, the whole data base, the home computer database, every bit of information he wanted to send it in disk form to the Red Chinese. That was his plan. Some of us went crazy and we stopped him. But what he said was he wanted to do it so they will know what not to steal, they will know what not to steal. Unbelievable. Incredible. It is sending the worst thieves in the world the combination to your safe and saying this is so you will know what safes not to try to crack. I mean, after all, they will not have to be thieves anymore, they can come in any time they want. This is what is going on. This is the threat to our way of life. Basically we have had a group of patent examiners who are now facing a major change in their way of life. They are going to see it right away. They are all opposed to this bill. All the small inventors, people and researchers in our colleges and universities across America, Amgen, the biotech company and Allergan, the pharmaceutical company. These are people who understand what is going on. The small inventors of course, they all oppose H.R. 400; but they cannot get the word out. They are looking for allies among the American people who understand the importance of the issue that we will be deciding. There are an army of lobbyists and they are working this issue. But the American people can win. We have won these fights before. But it takes all of us to step forward and be active. Mr. Speaker, I believe that next week we have got a good chance of winning but we also have a good chance of losing. It can go either way, but it will be a vote. It will be one of those crucial votes that go by that no one will ever understand exactly what happened to them 20 or 30 years down the road if we go the wrong way. This is Pearl Harbor in slow motion. This is our Government giving away our seed corn to foreigners. This is a situation where, if the Wright Brothers would have had their discovery stolen from them by Mitsubishi Corp. because our Government publicized all of their secrets, the aerospace industry would have been developed in Japan and not the United States. And all of the Americans now who have quality high-paying jobs in that industry, they would be going, they would not have those jobs. They would say, gee, did not America used to be the No. 1 leader? The American people a generation from now will never know what hit them if we go the wrong way next Thursday. So I would hope that my colleagues will join with me in defeating H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act. Join with me in voting for the Rohrabacher substitute, which is H.R. 811 and 812.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I have been involved with many various groups of people who are struggling for their freedom in different parts of the world. Tonight, I would like to mention two of them. One is the people of Burma. The people of Burma are still under the heels of a despotic regime. Let me note that those people in Burma are led by a nobel laureate named Aung San Suu Kyi. Aung San Suu Kyi is one of the true heroes of our day. I would hope that as the American people hear about the issue of patents, which I just described, that they will realize that there are some people, no matter how brutal a regime, that are still willing to trade and do business with countries and governments like that in Burma. That government and the Burmese people are separated by a wide difference in the sense that one is the oppressed and one is the oppressor. We set our policies, and as Americans we should always be identifying with the people who are the oppressed people and not those people who are the oppressors. This is important for our trade policies as well as our personal and political policies. The other country I would like to mention is Afghanistan, where the Taliban movement is in control of three-quarters of the country. There is a king of Afghanistan in exile in Italy today who could and offers a positive alternative to the chaos and somewhat repressive nature of those individuals or other individuals seeking power in Afghanistan. I would hope that the people of Afghanistan can someday free themselves from the tyranny of chaos that has gripped them since the Russians invaded their country back in 1979-80. So tonight, as part of my message, I would hope that people in Burma and the people of Afghanistan who have struggled so long and hard for their liberty understand that while we are here on the House floor debating issues like the patent law and other laws that really impact us greatly in the United States of America, that we also understand that America is a shining light of hope for the people of the world, whether they are oppressed people in Burma or in Afghanistan or elsewhere, and that in Afghanistan, where there is a chance for the king to bring about a new era, that the United States Government backs him and helps to end the cold war which was put to an end by the strength and freedom of the Afghan people.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

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

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, next Thursday, April 17, the House of Representatives will make a crucial decision, and this decision has yet to be covered by the mainstream news media of the United States. Thus, the American people are for the most part unaware of this oncoming threat to our country and to the well-being of our citizens. So let me sound the alarm bell, and that is what I am hoping to do tonight, sound the alarm bell. In the next few minutes I will be exposing a maneuver which, if successful, will do incredible long-term harm to the United States of America. Yet, at this moment, this legislation is being quietly maneuvered through the process and is likely to pass a vote in the House of Representatives and be made into law. What I am referring to is dramatic and fundamental changes that are being proposed to be made to America's patent system, a system of rights and government institutions that have ensured that the United States has been, since the founding of our country, a technological leader in the world; that our fellow Americans, basically, were the inventors of the reaper, the inventors of the telegraph, the inventors of the telephone, the inventors of the television and of the electric light and the airplane and the microprocessor, and the MRI and other marvelous health technologies that we enjoy today, that have made our life a quality life compared to what it was just a few short years ago. Those Americans were the ones who invented these fabulous technologies that changed the way of life for the people of this world and uplifted the standard of living of the American people. That was no mistake. We had patent laws and a patent system that protected the individual and made it profitable for investors to finance the development of new technologies. Written into our Constitution is the establishment of the patent office. Now, most people do not even understand that. They have no idea that we are any different than any other country of the world when it comes to technologies and inventions. They have no idea. They know that we are different than other countries in the world in that we have freedom of speech, that we have freedom of press, we have freedom of religion, and that we respect the rights of the individual, and that was the purpose of our Founding Fathers, to establish a government that would protect people's rights. Yes, people know that about the United States, but they do not know one of the major factors that have given them the standard of living, given our people the standard of living that they enjoy, that has meant that they have reasonable and decent lives, was the fact that there were other protections in our Constitution, protections for the rights of people who invented and created things, things that would improve our lives. From the earliest days of our Republic we had these protections and we had a patent office, actually part of our Federal Government since the time our Constitution was written. In fact, up until 2 years ago we had, as protected by law, by the United States law, all the way from our country's founding until 2 years ago, we had something that was called the guaranteed patent term. Now, what is that all about, a guaranteed patent term? Well, what a guaranteed patent term has been in the United States of America is something that has ensured that we have been the ones who invented all of these wonderful things. The guaranteed patent term, from the time of our Constitution until two years ago, was that when someone had invented something, when they went to apply for a patent, that inventor, once that inventor applied for the patent, no matter how long it took the patent to be issued, the inventor was guaranteed a certain patent, legal patent term. At first it was 14 years and then it was expanded over 100 years ago to be 17 years, so we have had a guaranteed patent term of 17 years. Now, what difference does that make, people will ask. Well, they did not have this in other countries. Inventors had their ideas stolen from them by very powerful people, and in fact, in other systems, it would be so mixed up in the bureaucracy, a person would never be granted a patent until 10 and 20 years after they applied. But in our country they knew that no matter how long it took a patent to be issued, they would have 17 years to recoup their investment. This meant that people invested in our country, the private sector invested in new inventions and new ideas, which made all of the difference in our standard of living. We did not have to rely on the government to invest in new technology development because we had people in the private sector who would seek out inventors and creative people and give them money voluntarily to try to provide them the resources they needed to invent the telephone. How different would our lives be today if the telephone had not been invented? How different would our lives be if these inventions that created the bountiful harvest of food in our country had not been invented? But private inventors sponsored by private investors did the job because they were guaranteed 17 years of protection. Well, 3 years ago, and I am sorry to inform those of you who are reading this for the first time or listening to this for the first time, 3 years ago our right to a guaranteed patent term, a right Americans have enjoyed since the founding of our country, was taken from us and taken from us in a very stealthy manner, so most of the American people have no idea that this right has been taken away and what the implications of that right are. The fact is that that right was taken away by a provision that was snuck into the GATT implementation legislation. That GATT implementation legislation of over 2 years ago now, 3 years ago actually, basically replaced the 17-year guaranteed patent term with an uncertain patent term. In fact, just a look at this issue from a distance, some people actually thought the patent term was being expanded and made longer. Instead, what happened was, 17 years of a guaranteed patent term was exchanged for a patent term which is called 20 years from filing, and it sounds like there would be even more protection. Nope, no. In fact, what this did was take a situation where you were guaranteed, you knew how much time you would have in a patent and you were guaranteed that as a right, and instead, because the clock was ticking against the bureaucracy and this deterred people from trying to interfere with the process, now we have replaced it with 20 years from filing. What that means is, once someone files for a patent, the clock is ticking against that person. The clock is ticking against the inventor, against the investor, and whatever time it takes is taken away from their time of protection, away from their property rights. This will be a dramatic decrease in the amount of money that is spent in the United States to develop new technologies, the technologies that will keep us the No. 1 leader in the world economically. These new technologies are the only things that permit us to out-compete the slave labor and the cheap labor overseas. It is the good technology that has permitted the American people to increase their standard of living. But no, now that has been taken away, or it was in the GATT implementation legislation which eliminated the guaranteed patent term. By the way, if someone's patent takes 15 years to issue, as many of our breakthrough technologies do, unimportant technologies issue very quickly, but things that make a difference, I mean billions of dollars of new wealth, that takes 10 years, 15 years sometimes, that means that for those 15 years foreign multinational corporations do not have to pay royalties into the pockets of our inventors. That is 10 to 15 years that the money is going to be in their coffers instead of in the pockets of American inventors, instead of in the bank accounts of American citizens. I consider this act of sneaking this into the GATT implementation legislation to be a total betrayal of the people of the United States. I voted for fast track. Fast track, which is what permitted them to sneak this provision into the bill, basically permitted them to change the patent law. Let me explain how that worked. Fast track means that we as Members of Congress vote to give the right to the administration to negotiate a trade agreement with potential trading partners. The administration, in exchange for that agreement, that they can basically negotiate the agreement and bring it to Congress and put it before Congress, and we were only permitted up and down votes, that is what that fast track means, that we would only be permitted an up-or-down vote on this legislation that had been negotiated with our foreign trade partners. But in exchange for fast track, the administration had to agree to two things. No. 1, there would not be anything included in the implementation legislation brought to Congress. There would not be anything in that legislation except that which was required by GATT itself. No. 2, we would have ample time, 50 days, to look over the GATT agreement in order to make our decision. The administration waited until the last possible moment to put the GATT implementation legislation before Congress, just a few days before Congress was to adjourn, and they expected us, in I think it was 10 days, to work on this and to basically approve it without having a chance to read it and look it over. One of the reasons we want to look it over is to find out what is in the GATT implementation legislation. Sure enough, there was a provision in that legislation that dramatically changed our patent rights. However, that provision was never required by the GATT agreement itself. In other words, that was not something that they had to put into the bill in order to be consistent with the GATT agreement they had made with our trading partners. Someone had snuck it into the bill. When I say snuck into the bill, I mean snuck into the bill. I got wind there was some change going to be made in our patent laws, so I began calling the Trade Representative and others in the administration, asking whether or not there was actually going to be a provision in the GATT implementation legislation that changed American patent law. I was told that I did not have a right to know. I, an elected representative of the people of the United States, as are the rest of my colleagues, and the administration told me I had no right to know what was going to be in a piece of legislation that was to be presented to the Congress of the United States? That is not only a betrayal, but an arrogant betrayal of the American people. Basically, Mr. Speaker, we ended up in a situation where the Members of Congress were forced to vote in favor of the GATT implementation legislation that included a major change, a fundamental change, in the protection of American technological rights. We were forced to vote on that as one package. In other words, we either accepted this drastic change, this drastic change in American patent law protection, or we had to vote against the entire world trading system. We had to isolate the United States from the entire world trading system. That was a betrayal, and I will never again vote for fast track authority going to this administration, under any circumstances. They lied that time, and I say lied, and that is exactly what this was, was a lie when they presented it to this body with a provision that was not mandated by the agreement itself. They lied when they said they would give us ample time to discuss the issue. During my efforts to basically return to the guaranteed patent term and to try to stop it from going through in the GATT process, I learned of an ongoing plan that was aimed at, and I hesitate to use these words but they are accurate, aimed at destroying, that is right, I said destroying, the American patent system. The American patent system, which has been the gem of our society, which has permitted us to develop technologies that will actually change our way of life and make our lives better as compared to other people around the world, the gem that has improved the life of the average person in our country as compared to the life of people in other countries, this gem is being destroyed. The patent system that gives us the technological edge is being destroyed in a very hushed and quiet manner, and it will come to a vote, the next step in this process, it will come to a vote on the floor. Mr. Speaker, here we are facing a very quiet maneuver, something that has been kept out of the mass media, something that the regular media, the news media in this country has not covered, that is going to make a dramatic change in America's fundamental technology and a dramatic change in our rights and a dramatic change in our standard of living. It will be something that over a long period of time will have a greater impact on our standard of living than our natural resources and the other great things that have made America such a wonderful country. When did this all start? It is going to come to a head on April 17 when the Steal American Technologies Act, H.R. 400, comes to a vote on the floor of this House. About half of the Members of this House have no idea this bill is coming to a vote and have no idea what this bill is all about. Four years ago Bruce Lehman, the head of our Patent Office, went to Japan where he signed an agreement with the head of the Japanese Patent Office to harmonize America's patent laws with those of Japan. To put this in perspective, America's patent laws over the history of our country have been the strongest and most protective laws in the world. That is what gave America the edge. Yet Bruce Lehman, head of the American Patent Office, went there 4 years ago, signed an agreement, a hushed agreement I might add, which I did not find out about until years later, to harmonize our law. He was not signing the agreement to harmonize our law to bring Japanese protection up to the level of protection that is enjoyed and has been enjoyed by the people of the United States. Instead, what Mr. Lehman supposedly, representing the interests of the United States, signed was an agreement to make our system, our patent system, a carbon copy, a mirror image, of the Japanese system. Let us make sure this is understood. The changes that were agreed to by our representative were to make our strong protection a weak protection like they have in Japan. In Japan, Japanese economic shoguns beat their competition down ruthlessly. If you are not in the ``in'' clique, you have no rights. The Japanese economic shoguns who rule that society know they have leverage on people because the laws do not protect the individual in Japan. They are aimed at the collective good in Japan, and the individual rights that have been so much part of our system, they do not even think that way. That has permitted these powerful interests in Japan to keep an iron grip on that society. That is why it has been so difficult to open their markets to American goods, because we were not dealing with their consumers who would want American products, we were dealing with Japanese powerful businessmen who know what power is all about and had used it in their own country. Now we are changing our laws, our patent laws, to harmonize with them so they can do to the American inventor and the American people over here what they have been doing to their own people for 100 years. What is worming its way through Congress is legislation that is implementing phase 2 of this notorious harmonization agreement. Phase 1 of the agreement was, guess what; what do you think phase 1 was? Phase 1 was the elimination of the guaranteed patent term, and the replacing of it with a system based on 20 years from filing, an uncertain term, which is the Japanese system. That was phase 1. That was what we got. Immediately they tried to implement this agreement with Japan by sneaking it into the GATT implementation legislation, and forcing Congress to either vote against the entire world trading system or ratifying this secret and hushed agreement with the Japanese. Phase 2 of that agreement with the Japanese is coming to the floor in one week, H.R. 400. How do I know? I know because H.R. 400 includes a provision that would destroy a vital protection of our law, our patent law, and replace it with a provision that comes directly from the Japanese code. The Japanese code said, you know, it is 20 years from filing instead of a guaranteed patent term of 17 years. We change it to that. What else does the Japanese code say? What is this provision? Hang onto your hats. If H.R. 400 passes, we, like the Japanese, will have a system, a legal system, that mandates that when our inventors invent something and go to apply for a patent, after 18 months, whether or not that patent has been issued, it is going to be published for the entire world to see. So if we have a system where breakthrough technologies, like the microprocessor or the MRI or the laser system, which took 20 years to get a patent, or polypropylene plastic which was a major breakthrough in the way we packaged things around the world, it took 20 years to get that patent issued, what is going to happen is after 18 months, whether or not the patent has been issued, every one of our technological secrets are going to be published for the entire world to see. What does that mean? That means our technological secrets will be used by our enemies to destroy us economically. People who hate America, people who want to destroy our way of life, people who want to bring down the standard of living of the American people will have our technological secrets. This is the elimination of a right that we have had as well. We had a right, from the founding of our Constitution, to a guaranteed patent term. That was eliminated by this sneaky maneuver in the GATT implementation legislation. Now H.R. 400 goes the second step and it eliminates what right? From the founding of our country until this bill, if it passes, we have had a right of confidentiality. When an inventor goes with his patent application to the Patent Office, he has had a right that none of that information will ever be published, will ever be published, until his patent is issued. Because once it is issued, he then has protection. He has legal rights, then, that will protect him, and he knows that his adversaries, economic adversaries, cannot steal from him and use his own ideas against him. This was a right our people had. Members have heard of industrial espionage. That espionage is that we do not want our adversaries to have our technological secrets. H.R. 400 will come to the floor of the House of Representatives a week from Thursday, and it will, if passed, mandate that every one of our technological secrets will be published for our enemies to use against us. It will eliminate the right of confidentiality. If it does any good, I guess you can say they could probably use this as advocacy, it is certainly going to eliminate industrial espionage. Some laugh. This will be the first step in the destruction of America's ability to compete with other nations where they have cheap labor and slave labor. This will be the first step on the escalator down for the standard of living of the American people, and billions of dollars into the pockets of our worst enemies and competitors. H.R. 400, I call it the Steal American Technologies Act, there are Members who are advocating this with a straight face and they are saying, if we published this, this will show our enemies what not to steal. Bruce Lehman, head of our patent office, last year was stopped short and believe me, it took all of our effort to do it, in his efforts to do what? What was his plan? He wanted to send the entire database of the patent office to China, the disk. He wanted to send our computer disk with the entire database of our patent office to China. That is like sending the worst thief in the world the combination of your safe and saying, we are just sending it to you so you will know what not to steal. By the way, that was what he said was the purpose of sending the database, so they would know what not to steal. Something is haywire here; something is haywire here. The news media in the United States is not covering it. The American people do not know about it. And H.R. 400 is being supported by an army of lobbyists from multinational and foreign corporations that are going to meet each and every Member of Congress to try to get them to vote for this heinous piece of legislation. Disclosing all of our secrets? Disclosing all of our technology? When this bill was first introduced, it had a different name. The name of the bill, now H.R. 400, is guess what? It is the 21st Century Patent Law Reform Act. Boy, does that sound positive. The 21st Century Patent Law Reform Act. What was this bill called when it was first introduced as 1733, which was 2 years ago? This bill, which was introduced by Carlos Moorhead and Pat Schroeder, was first called the Patent Publication Act. They were trying to sneak this through and they had no idea anybody was going to be on to it. That is what happened. It was called the Patent Publication Act, but it got too hot, because that is the real purpose of this bill. The real purpose of the bill is to force our system to harmonize with the Japanese system so you publicize this. You publicize this after 18 months, you publicize the patent application, but they say, that is all right, we are including in H.R. 400 the right of people to sue, to sue. If someone, when you have applied for a patent and your patent is published and some Japanese huge corporation or Chinese, like the Chinese army has these big companies now that steal our stuff over in China, if they start using your technology, then you can sue them once your patent is issued. That is what right they have given us. So sue me. Can you imagine small American inventors trying to go up against these corporate giants, these corporate gangsters in these dictatorships like China or Vietnam or these corporate goons over in Japan? So now these people who are trying to push this bill through, who have hired lobbyists to come and see your Member of Congress, my Member of Congress, everybody's Member of Congress being visited by these lobbyists, they are doing everything they can to pass the bill. And when you ask them, why are you supporting this bill, people call up their offices, after they have heard about how horrible it is. Every inventor in the United States is desperate to stop this bill. They are desperate. They know what this will mean. So when people call up their Congressman and they say, why are you supporting this bill, I notice that you are supporting this H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, and the Member of Congress says, oh, just like the authors of the bill, they have been told that this is what they say, they talk about some really nice reforms in the bill. There are a few here that are pretty good things in H.R. 400. They talk about, for example, ensuring that patent fees are retained in the patent office to make the patent office better and allowing the patent office to hire new employees, for example, and to protect inventors against fraud from phony advertising, sort of a truth in labeling type provision. That is all in H.R. 400. By the way, I support those reforms. Those are very good reforms. But those are minor changes compared to what the real intent of the legislation is. They are figleafs. They are covers. They are a facade for something evil that is about to go on in this body. It is like giving someone a bouquet of beautiful flowers. You have handed someone a bouquet of beautiful flowers. Then the proponents of the legislation hand the bouquet of beautiful flowers, and you are very happy. I have this bouquet of beautiful flowers. But then you happen to notice there are snakes in the bouquet. This bouquet is crawling with snakes as well as flowers. Well, you say, well, by the way, are these snakes poisonous? They say, let me talk about the flowers, see how beautiful the flowers are here in this bouquet. No, I want to know if the snakes are poisonous because I do not want to hold on to it. Look at that beautiful rose in the bouquet. Why are you talking about snakes when you can look at the rose? I do not want to take this home to my family. These snakes are poisonous. They will kill my children. Do not think about that. Look at the beautiful flowers. Let me tell you about all the flowers. That is what is going on with H.R. 400. They are talking about beautiful flowers, when the bouquet is filled with poisonous snakes. One of the snakes is mandating publication so that everybody in the world can steal it, steal our technology, steal our ideas and use them against us. That is a snake. I had an industrialist in my office, a guy who ran a small solar energy company. And when this piece of legislation went through committee, and it has already gone through committee, he said, Congressman, if they mandate that I publish all of my patent applications, what is going to happen is they are going to use my patent applications, then will use all of the things that I have spent money for, millions of dollars to develop. They are going to go into production in Japan with my ideas, and all the money that they make from producing my technology they will use against me to defeat me in court and to steal my technology from me in court. They will be using my ideas and my innovation and my development to destroy me. That is a real snake. That is a real poisonous snake. That is what is going to be happening if H.R. 400 passes. That is a threat to our future. H.R. 400 is the Steal American Technologies Act. But by the way, that snake that I just described, that is about new patents. If that was not bad enough, let me mention another snake that we have found hidden in the bouquet of flowers. I did not find this until recently when we had legal minds go over this bill with a fine-tooth comb, with a microscope. What did we find? Another snake hidden among the flowers. That is that current patent owners, you see, the one I was just talking about where you have to publish your patent application, that only dealt with future technology. Current patent owners in the United States of America are going to find that there are provisions in this bill that opens them up to challenge by these huge corporate interests and by foreign and multinational corporations. In other words, once their patent has already been issued to Americans, we are going to find these huge corporate entities overseas coming in and filing court cases and challenging American patents that have already been issued. Today it is very limited, very limited scope as to what you can challenge someone who owns a patent. They do not want it brought up again and again and again. What H.R. 400 does is open it up to a panoply of issues that you can bring before a court. Every one of our patent owners is going to be put in jeopardy. All of our current technology will be put in jeopardy. Not just the future, not just publication but current technology. It is going to be challenged by the big boys of the world, both foreign and domestic. There is a snake. There is a snake for you. How about another snake that we found in the bouquet of H.R. 400. Another snake is the snake that would permit these very same interests to interfere with a patent applicant as the process is moving. Once they find out, once they find out what he is up to because it has been published, they could actually go into the process and interfere with the process. That is what we found out. Can you imagine that. We are opening up, our own people are going to be cut off by the biggest people in the world. They will probably make a little change in the patent and then go in and try to interfere with the process. That is a real snake. That is a snake to everybody. What about publication, what happens? By the way, one thing you have to understand, if the patent is not issued and you have then published it after 18 months, what happens if the patent is never issued. That means our American inventors are putting their heart and soul and investment in something and it does not pan out and the patent is not issued, what happens is everybody in the world knows all of their work. And if the patent is never issued, they have no rights whatsoever to sue anybody who is using their information. Mr. Speaker, all of this was confidential before. It only became public up until this bill, if it passes, for since the founding of our country this has all been confidential information. By the way, there is one big snake in this H.R. 400 Steal American Technologies Act, one big snake in the bouquet that I have not mentioned. It is probably the biggest snake of all. And it is so easy to see that proponents of the bill have had to go a long way to try to disguise it. Basically for the first 200 years of our country, since our Constitution, the Patent Office has been part of the U.S. Government. We have had patent examiners. Patent examiners make quasi- judicial decisions that determine who owns technology that represents billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars. These people, they have had to be cleaner than judges because they determine ownership of technology, of property, of what will become money, of wealth. These stalwart public employees at the Patent Office, these patent examiners, have been shielded from outside influences because they have been Government employees. Do my colleagues know what? In 200 years of this country's history, there has never been a scandal, never been a scandal with these patent examiners. The patent examiners have never been through scandals that have gone through many other different parts of our Government, because they have been shielded. They have been protected from outside influences. And what does H.R. 400 do to the Patent Office that has been part of the U.S. Government since our country's founding? It obliterates it. It destroys it. It eliminates it. That is it. It takes the Patent Office and turns it into a corporate entity, a corporate entity. Maybe something like the Post Office. They do this in the name of privatization. I am here to say that I am a Ronald Reagan conservative, I look at privatization as a very good thing. But there are core functions of government, the court system, our military, core functions of government, institutions that are set up to protect our individual rights, and you do not leave that in the hands of a corporate elite. You do not corporatize that. That is a legitimate function of government. Mr. Speaker, they want to take the Patent Office and turn it into a corporate structure with a private board of directors made up of, and it is mandated in H.R. 400, to be made up of people with a business and financial background, meaning corporate leaders of this country will appoint who is the head of the Patent Office and oversee the policies of the Patent Office. And what effect will this corporatization have on this, on the honesty and the protection of our patent examiners from outside influences? All I can say is that part of H.R. 400 is a provision that permits this new entity, this corporate entity, the Patent Office becomes a corporatized entity, permits that entity to accept corporate gifts, private and corporate gifts from foreign companies, from domestic companies. It permits this entity which will determine who owns what technology to accept gifts from the people who it is having to decide on who owns what. This is beyond belief, taking our patent examiners and subjecting them to who knows what outside influences by who knows who. More than that, the new corporate entity will be able to float bonds so that they can build huge palaces. This is one of the things that Bruce Lehman would like to do. He wants to build a huge new patent building. And by the way, if the new Patent Office corporatization does not have the money for some reason, well, the taxpayers are the ones who have to meet the obligation if those bonds that are floated by this corporate entity are not repaid. H.R. 400 is the Steal American Technologies Act. It has already gone through subcommittee, passed I think by voice vote, went through committee. I think it passed by either voice vote or a close-to- unanimous vote. It has already passed through these committees and there is an army of lobbyists in the Nation's Capital, hired by multinational and foreign corporations as well as some of our own domestic corporations, who are here trying to basically do what they have a right to do, which is influence the vote of Members of Congress. The administration is behind this piece of legislation. They are backing it. Of course, this is the same administration which has been compromised by receiving campaign donations from Chinese interests, from Communist Chinese interests, I might add, by some of the same people we could expect to steal the American technology as soon as it was published. But the administration is backing it. So we have these forces at play. These forces are working right now and this bill will pass unless the American people personally get involved. This is the way it has always been when there has been a threat to our well-being. Unless the American people get involved, the Government can go in the wrong direction. Unless people actually call their Member of Congress and say, for goodness sakes, oppose H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, and please support the bill, H.R. 811, Congressman Rohrabacher's bill, and H.R. 812, a bill which will reaffirm, it is called the Patent Term Restoration Act, reaffirm and strengthen patent protection in America. It is diametrically opposed to H.R. 400. What we have now are my bill, which would strengthen the patent office, and H.R. 812. H.R. 811, my bill, which would strengthen the American patent protection, over here, versus a piece of legislation, H.R. 400, that would destroy our patent protection as we know it and destroy the patent office. They are coming to a head on the floor of the House a week from Thursday. What will happen is my vote will come as a substitute motion, which means it will be a vote either for H.R. 811 and 812 or for H.R. 400. If H.R. 400 passes, gets the higher number of votes, it will be passed into law, and I believe it will pass through the U.S. Senate. As I say, it will have dramatic repercussions. It will be, and I honestly believe, be a Pearl Harbor in slow motion. Our standard of living, our way of life will be attacked and 20 years from now people will never know, will never know what hit them. It was just 100 years ago when two young Americans decided that they would set out to discover the secrets of manned flight. Two young Americans, Orville and Wilbur Wright. They did not have a lot of education, but they had freedom and they were Americans and they had a dream. They owned this bicycle shop in Ohio and they read everything they could get their hands on. Perhaps more than any other Americans, these two young men represented the spirit of what our country was and hopefully always will be all about. Orville and Wilbur there in their bicycle shop, reading and writing letters to people all over the world, struggling to find, to discover that secret, the secret that would permit all of mankind to soar, to soar into the heavens like birds, like meteors. They worked hard. They had very little money. They had investors. They did have investors, and their investors knew if they discovered this, there would be a time period when their secret would become profitable. They would discover the secret and they would be able to make some return on their money. That is why people invested in them. Orville and Wilbur knew they would have a 17-year guaranteed patent term and they also knew their secrets, what they discovered would be kept secret until their patent was issued. These two young Americans did what the crown heads of Europe and the huge empires around the world could not do. The Kaiser could not do it. The French, the English crown could not discover the secret, the technology that would permit man to soar like the birds, to fly into the heavens. All they had was their enthusiasm and their freedom. I visited Kitty Hawk, NC, last year, and it is one of the most inspiring sites that I can imagine. I would recommend that to anyone who is listening or reading this in the Congressional Record. Kitty Hawk talks about the indomitable spirit of the American people. They had an indomitable spirit because they lived in a society that protected creators. It protected investors. It protected innovators. It protected the likes of Orville and Wilbur Wright, normal, common, everyday Americans, rather than a legal system that protected the elite like they have had in Japan, or the elite in Europe and the other countries from which our forefathers and mothers fled to the new world to live a new life and to live in freedom. So the people like Orville and Wilbur were able to dream great dreams, and one day, and after years of failure and trying again and trying again, they did it. They discovered the secret, and the secret for them was the shape of the wing. It was the shape of the wing that they had not seen before that permitted them to understand lift; that managed to take mankind off of the ground on the windy shores of Kitty Hawk, NC, and catapulted mankind into a new era. Here we are, less than 100 years later, less than 100 years after that first flight, and look how this has changed our way of life. Look what their discovery has meant for the United States of America. Their discovery has meant that we have built a tremendous aerospace industry that not only took man to the moon but has facilitated jet air travel throughout this planet, and has uplifted the standard of living not only of the people who work for the aerospace industry, who have good paying jobs, but everybody else who is able to enjoy the goods and services and visits that we have learned to expect as Americans, as part of our way of life and our freedom to travel. What would have happened if Orville and Wilbur Wright would have had to publish their secret before that patent was issued? Would there have been a Mitsubishi Corp. who would take their invention and create an aerospace industry in Japan, while at the same time using their money and resources to destroy Orville and Wilbur Wright and destroy them in our own court system? If H.R. 400 would have been in place, what would have happened was that the Japanese would have had all their secrets, and before that patent was issued the Mitsubishi Corp. could actually have come and interfered with their right to get the patent. It could put a challenge on if the patent had already been issued. It could have tied up these little guys from Ohio and tied them in knots, and they could have used the resources from the Wright brothers' own discovery, the wealth that was created by this new knowledge, to destroy the Wright brothers. Now, that is only one example. That is only one example of how technology and the protection of technology will directly affect our standard of living. Hundreds of thousands of people work in the aerospace industry in the United States today. Good high-paying jobs. That is because it was started with Orville and Wilbur Wright. It was because our creators and innovators have had that protection. And now we are trying to harmonize our system with the Japanese law. We cannot stand by as free people and let this happen. We cannot let it happen. We cannot let our own huge corporate interests, who are pushing this bill, and they are all of the big companies now thinking that we have to pass this bill. Because of what? They call it globalism. They say that we are entering in this new era of global harmony. Well, Lord protect us from those people who would perfect all of the people of the world. Because usually these idealists who want to create a perfect world end up causing great damage to the people of the United States of America, to our rights and to our liberty and to our way of life. Globalism, this thought that has captured the imagination of our corporate leadership, now is being used as an excuse to do things that will hurt the standard of living of the American people and will reduce the protections and the legal rights of our people. This patent maneuver is just one example of that. It is maybe the first easily defined and easily described example of that. We cannot permit the corporate interests, who basically have the right to live here and enjoy the protection that the American people have given them, and they use their investments to go overseas to countries like China and create factories, perhaps even based on the technology they have stolen from their fellow Americans, we cannot permit this to happen so that our wealth and our technology and our ideas are used against the United States of America in the name of some global concepts. It is not globalism they want. They are putting that money in their own pocket. They know that and they are justifying that sellout of the American people by talking about globalism. I have not met any corporate leaders who come into my office and told me about the big meetings they have had with their Chinese leaders on the mainland of China about human rights. They always talk about how most-favored-nation status and trading with the Chinese is going to bring about more liberalization on the mainland of China and more respect for human rights, and yet they have never spoken to the red Chinese bosses themselves about human rights. I guess they think it is osmosis that will create these ideal flows. Well, I know those people who were sitting in my office trying to get me to vote for most-favored-nation status were really interested in a 20-percent return on their investment rather than investing in the United States of America and getting only a 5- to 10-percent return. I know that is what it is all about. That is fine. If I can vote against it, I will, but I understand where they are coming from. What is happening with H.R. 400, they have convinced themselves, the corporate leaders have convinced themselves that they are creating this new global economy, and that they can basically bring down the level of protection for American citizens and it will not bother them at all because they are creating this new global economy which will be better for everybody. No. Their real purpose is to put more money in their pocket and to excuse every dastardly act that they need to do to make that money, even if they are making deals with the worst butchers in the world. The people of Tibet could be totally incinerated tomorrow, millions of them, and our corporate elite would still want to have most-favored- nation status with China. Where does this all fit in with, of course, the campaign donations made to this administration? Where does it fit in with the subject of patents? It is the Red Chinese as well as the Japanese and other copycats around the world who are going to use our technology. They are going to have the benefits, these monster regimes will have the benefits of all the innovations and creative ideas before our own people are even issued the patent. That is what H.R. 400 is trying to do. H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, will give them all that even before the patents are issued. We cannot let that happen. And we can stop it. The lobbyists can be defeated if people let their Member of Congress know that they are opposed to H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, and want their representatives to vote for the Rohrabacher alternative, H.R. 811 and 812. They can be stopped. Whether it is Orville or Wilbur or whether it is Tom Edison, or whether we are talking about the people that have come up with the ideas and fought the wars, the people who have built the churches, the people who teach in our schools, the people who make this country what it is, a great and wonderful country, and have defended this country, these are ordinary American people. These are people who have come here from every part of the world to live in freedom, and not to have our laws harmonized downward with the laws that they came here to escape. They came here because this was going to be a better place, where individual rights of all citizens would be protected. The ordinary people of the United States of America. People who are not rich. Both of my parents were raised on farms. Homesteads. My dad was a marine who fought in World War II. I spent 10 years as a journalist before I got involved in politics, and I did not make much money. It is ordinary people that will save our Republic. It is ordinary people that have saved and preserved our freedom, and this is one of those occasions when the ordinary people of the United States have got to make their will felt or we will see our freedom diminished and we will pay a price in the long run. I am confident that a week from Thursday when this vote comes, that good will triumph and American freedom will be preserved because the people will speak and they will not let down the Orville and Wilbur Wrights of the past. They will not let down the patriots of bygone eras, and they will not let, in the name of some global concept, our rights as Americans to be diminished and to be frittered away by an elite that seems to have lost their patriotism and their direction and their moral values. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time. {time} 2115

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. There will be a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives next month, probably the middle of next month, that will mean a great deal not only to every Member of the House of Representatives but to every citizen of the United States of America. As we just listened to our colleagues from the other side of the aisle talking about some of their observations of what has happened with the treaty with Mexico and some of the other economic dealings that we have seen in recent years, it is clear that there is an elite in the U.S. Government and in the United States and in our financial institutions who are not loyal to the interests of the people of the United States. This lack of loyalty perhaps is due to the fact that they have a vision for a better world. They are trying to create a global economy and, thus, they are willing to sacrifice the interests of the American people. They are willing to sacrifice the standard of living, the freedom and the prosperity, and actually the national security of our country in order to build this more perfect world and a global economy. I think that this has manifested itself in NAFTA and some of these other things, the GATT. But we will have a vote in one month on H.R. 400, which I call the Steal American Technologies Act. My legislation, H.R. 811 and 812, will be there as a substitute for this horrible piece of legislation that is the latest example of this elite class who are trying to create a global trading system at the expense of the standard of living of the American people and the rights of the American people. H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act which is coming to this floor for a vote, is being pushed through the system by an army of lobbyists who have been hired by multinational corporations and huge American corporate interests, who have struck deals with those foreign corporations in order to change, fundamentally change the technological laws, the laws that govern technology in America. The fact is we have had the strongest patent protection of any country of the world, and that is what has ensured the American people for these last 200 years the ability to have a higher standard of living than other countries of the world, because we were able to out- compete them. We had the technological edge. It was our inventors, the Thomas Edisons, the Cyrus McCormicks, the Wright brothers, all of these people who were protected by the strongest patent system in the world, who stepped forward to give the American people the standard of living and this great chance for opportunity to uplift their way of life and improve the standard of living of their children. But that law is changing. Our country's national security was based upon our technological superiority, but the laws that governed us, that gave us the creativity and the technology to defeat our adversaries, economically as well as militarily, are trying to be changed and they are doing it in a sneaky way: H.R. 400, which I call the Steal American Technologies Act, which will be voted on in about 3 or 4 weeks. What it will do is, number one, eliminate once and for all the guaranteed patent term, which has been the right of the American people for 200 years. It will, and hold on to your horses on this if you have not heard about this bill, it will mandate that every American inventor who files for a patent, whether or not that patent has been issued, that his patent application will be published after 18 months for the entire world to see. This means every economic adversary, every enemy of the United States, everyone who would destroy our country and our way of life almost, have every one of our secrets in order to use our technology against us. And, finally, H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, will actually abolish the Patent Office, which again has been part of our country since the founding of our Constitution, and resurrect it as what? As some corporate entity. A corporate entity, I might add, which will be able to accept gifts; gifts from foreign countries, from different people. We do not know what effect that will have on patent examiners, which have been the people who have made the decisions to protect us and to protect our rights as Americans to own what we create. This will be one of the most important decisions this Congress will make. Two generations from now Americans will suffer, our security will falter, our way of life and our prosperity will go down and the American people will not know what hit them. It will be a Pearl Harbor in slow motion if this passes. The only thing that will stop it, the only thing that will stop it is if the American people call their Member of Congress to offset these lobbyists that are hired by the multinational corporations and tell their Member of Congress to oppose H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, and to support H.R. 811 and 812, which are pieces of legislation that I have authored, Congressman Rohrabacher, which will strengthen the patent system. I want to thank my colleague for granting me this time from his time tonight. This is such an important issue for people to understand, that democracy will not work and America will not be strong unless our people get involved. This whole effort, and I will close with this thought, it is a shocking thought, why are people trying to push something which is so evil and detrimental to the United States? Yes, they believe in a global economy, but part of their motive in reaching this global economy is they are trying to harmonize our law with Japan. The elements that I just talked about in the law, which is changing in H.R. 400, are nothing more than an agreement that has been reached with Japan, a hushed-up agreement to change our strong patent law into their weak patent law. The harmonization of our law with Japan. It is absolutely an outrage. It is frightening to think it is happening and there are lobbyists all over this city from powerful corporations trying to push it through. I appreciate the gentleman's giving me this time to warn the people out there who are listening and reading this in the Congressional Record. We can beat this but we have to act.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure tonight to join with the gentleman from Pennsylvania, Mr. Curt Weldon. The gentleman and I have both been active in working with the Kuwaitis on this issue. Most people do not even understand that there are hundreds of people being held by Saddam Hussein in Iraq, who are just innocent women and children, husbands and wives, men and women, just ordinary Kuwaitis who have been whisked away by the Iraqi Army during the Gulf War and have never been returned. It is one-tenth of 1 percent of the population of Kuwait that is still being held by Saddam Hussein. That is the equivalent in the United States of 250,000 people being held prisoner by a foreign hostile power. The United States can be proud and we Americans can be proud in particular of the role that we played in freeing the people of Kuwait from the aggression of Saddam Hussein and from the hold of Saddam Hussein. We can be proud that our soldiers, our men and women marched off and struggled for peace and freedom and succeeded. But the job is not done when the equivalent of 250,000 Kuwaitis are still in the hands of Saddam Hussein. One thing that we can be proud of, we won the war against Saddam Hussein. We won it. In fact, I was just in Kuwait several months ago and they have initiated democratic reforms in that country that seem to make it all worthwhile. They now have free newspapers and radios and criticism of the government, opposition parties. This is one of the highlights of the Middle East. This is a shining example of what happens when people really do want to try to set up a free society. The human rights abuses that Kuwait used to be known for have somewhat disappeared. But now they turn around, the people of Kuwait, their sons and their daughters are gone. Their husbands and wives are missing. Over 600 people are missing. The United States should make it clear that there will be no normalization of relations with Iraq until those prisoners are released. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon].

Mr. ROHRABACHER. As I say, we have every reason to be proud of what the United States did during the gulf war to protect Kuwait and the other people of the Middle East against aggression. We have every reason to be proud of Kuwait since then because they have become a more democratized system. They have more of a functioning, representative government and they have reached out to end human rights abuses and moved forward to establish freedoms they did not have before. We can also be very proud of the Kuwaitis for what they did when they were being held hostage and occupied by Saddam Hussein. They in fact risked their lives, common Kuwaitis risked their lives to protect the lives of American citizens who happened to be in Kuwait at the time that Saddam Hussein invaded. Just as the Kuwaiti people risked their lives for those Americans they did not even know, we should tonight make it our business to tell Saddam Hussein and the regime in Iraq that those Kuwaitis who they hold must be released and we must think about them. We may not know them but we know the Kuwaiti people risked their lives for Americans they did not know. Let us pay that courtesy back and insist that Saddam Hussein release all those prisoners.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I join with the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Weldon] and my colleagues tonight in calling on Saddam Hussein to release his captives. The war in the gulf is not over until the hostages that Saddam Hussein is holding have been released. The United States should not normalize relations with the regime in Iraq until these innocent people, the sons and the daughters, the husbands and the wives of the people of Kuwait have been released by their Iraqi captors.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. I appreciate the gentleman's comments. When we talk about the Judeo-Christian heritage of our country, and let us remember, by the way, there are many people who agree with the Judeo-Christian tenets, for example, are in the Muslim community as well. This is not an attempt to try to force any type of religious prayer or religious concept on others. But what we do and what today we are faced with is that those people who stand for certain values and certain traditions find themselves under attack. One of the greatest parts of the Judeo-Christian heritage is a concept called individual responsibility, that you are responsible for your actions and that you will face that responsibility before God. And so really, individual freedom is part of that Judeo-Christian heritage that we talk about. That is where it ties into our Founding Fathers, who believed that freedom of religion was a right that they would fight for. That has been so turned around and so disfigured today that what we have got are people who are trying to express their own religious beliefs are being told, in the name of separation of church and state, in the name of the Constitution to shut up. How many times do we have to hear the ACLU and others say, you cannot put a manger scene in front of city hall, before we start saying to ourselves, something is wrong here. Whose freedom are we talking about? The freedom of someone who wants to just express a belief in God, whether it is a manger scene or a Star of David during a time of religious importance to one of the great faiths of our country. There is nothing wrong with having them be able to express themselves, and we Christians or Jews or Muslims express ourselves that way. But we have the left wing who is committed to use the force of law to prevent people in our society from expressing their religious beliefs using the separation of church and state as a hammer to prevent us from expressing ourselves. In my part of the country out in Orange County, the Boy Scouts of America are spending tens of thousands of dollars in order to defend themselves against what? Defend themselves against some liberal left- wing parent who is trying to force the Scouts to take God out of the Scout oath because his children do not want to say ``God.'' Because his children do not want to say ``God,'' it should not be in the Scout oath. This is absolutely an attack on the freedom of those people in the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America. Yet where is the outcry in this? Where are the people who supposedly believe in freedom of speech? The greatest threat today against people who believe in God, whether they be Christians, Jews, or Muslims, is the U.S. Government coming under the domination of atheists who want to suppress people's expression of their own religion.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. They have an obligation.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Your basic point about those of us expressing another view becoming beaten down, I will have to say, I just expressed something a few moments ago about the hiring of homosexuals by the Boy Scouts. Let me say that I personally never criticize people's personal lives. I do not. I will answer to God for my personal life and I have my own set of beliefs. I just will not criticize people for their personal lives. But let me say, I demand the right for myself and for others to have the right to make those value judgments and to make those stands and to express them. But I can tell you right now, I will be attacked by saying the Boy Scouts have a right to set their own standards, I will be attacked as if I am advocating an attack on somebody else. In reality, it is the opposite. It is the people with more traditional values who are under attack.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. If the gentleman will yield further, we have more people being told they cannot put a traditional manger scene in front of city hall or at the school yard during Christmas time. At the same time, these same people, by the way, are insisting that we are engaged in censorship if we refuse to let the NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts, give grants to people who blatantly attack religion, blatantly attack other people's faith. It is okay to subsidize it, but it is wrong for us to put up a manger scene to respect the birth of Christ or to have a Star of David to reflect our worshiping on Passover or some of the other religious holidays that we have. This has come to the point where the Boy Scouts of America, for example, as I said, not only, people are trying to force God out of the Scout oath. Here is one of the most decent organizations in the history of our country, who has done more to help young people through these hard times in their life, when they are coming into adulthood than Scouting, the young men and young women of our country teaching great values. Now they are having to spend tens of thousands of dollars, just, No. 1, to keep God in the Scout oath and, No. 2, to have standards so that they will have standards so that scoutmasters have a certain moral standard. There have been a lot of attacks on the religious right, and I will say that I do not attack other people's beliefs, but one thing I demand is that my beliefs that I hold true should not be attacked as well and we should have a right to express it. The religious right more often than not is simply saying and representing a group of Americans that have a set of beliefs and just want to believe that for their own family. And they are saying the Federal Government should not force us to accept another standard which we believe to be immoral. And the Boy Scouts of America, it has to do, and I will be flat out about it, the hiring of homosexuals as scoutmasters. That is their right as a private organization to do that. And I believe that, if they did not have that standard, a lot of parents would not permit their children into the Scouts and to go out under adult supervision of someone who is sexually attracted to someone of the same sex. But that is the right of that organization. In San Diego, in California, they said the Boy Scouts could not even use school facilities. They could not use the school facilities which their tax dollars are paying for unless they were willing to take the ban off hiring homosexuals as scoutmasters. In other words, they have to eliminate their moral standards. This is ridiculous. This is an attack on their rights.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to reclaim my 5 minutes. I was unfortunately delayed earlier.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, earlier in these 5-minute speech periods we heard from one of my colleagues, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Forbes], about a fight that Mr. Ray Damadian has gone through over these last 25 years in order to secure his right of ownership to a piece of technology that he invented. We are talking about the inventor of the MRI. This technology, which has saved thousands, perhaps even millions of lives over these last 25 years and permitted the medical profession to diagnose people without having to cut them open, as in the past, has been a tremendous boon to all of mankind. It, in fact, has been a major export item for the United States of America. The MRI was one of those great inventions, along with the airplane, along with the light bulb, along with so many other inventions that Americans are so proud came from the United States of America. And Ray Damadian, perhaps more than anybody that I know personally, reflects this type of creative genius for which Americans are so proud and this type of creative genius that had meant everything to our standard of living and improved the well-being of people all over the world in the process. As my colleague Mr. Forbes stated, Mr. Damadian has been in a 25-year fight to maintain his patent rights. Twenty-five years he has fought against this huge corporation, General Electric, for the rights of ownership of his own creative genius. Why this is important is because Mr. Damadian was protected by a relatively strong patent law and a strong patent system. In fact, the United States has had the strongest patent protection of any Nation in the world. This is what has given us the edge on all our other competitors around the world. This is what has made America safe and secure. This is what has given the average person in America an opportunity and a standard of living that is basically sought after by people from all over the planet. It has been our technology and our freedom. And the American patent system is what has created this impulse, this momentum for the creating of technology. Our patent system is under attack now. The Ray Damadians in the future, if we permit H.R. 400, a bill that is going through Congress as we speak, if H.R. 400 passes, the Ray Damadians of the world will be chewed up and spit out by the huge corporations, just like his counterparts in Japan and other countries are beaten down by the economic shoguns of their society. What is happening is there is an attempt, and hold on to your horses here, folks, you may not have heard this before, what is happening is there is a move to make American patent law, which has been the strongest in the world, to be exactly a mirror image of the law in Japan, and they are not bringing up the Japanese standards to the protection our people have been afforded. They are bringing down the protections that have been offered to Americans. In 20 years this will mean the United States will no longer be the technological leader of the world. The standards of our people will be under attack, and they will never know what hit them because they changed the fundamental laws. It is happening very quietly here, and the multinational organizations have hired the best lobbyists in town to come here and influence Congress and unless the American people let their feelings be known, H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, will pass, and the Ray Damadians of the world, the men who create the technology that changes our way of life, will find themselves vulnerable and pretty soon we will not be seeing the MRI's being invented, pretty soon we will not see the technology of the Wright brothers. In fact, the Wright brothers will end up vulnerable to the Mitsubishis of the world. If that would have been the practice back at the turn of the century, the aerospace industry could have well been developed in Japan instead of the United States and the American people would never have known what hit them. We have to stand up for the United States of America and stand up for the fact that we need to be the technological leaders of the world. H.R. 400, believe it or not, mandates that every person who applies for a patent in the United States, after 18 months, whether or not that patent has been granted, it is going to be published for the entire world to see. Every thief, every copycat, every economic adversary, every country that hates us and wants to destroy the American way of life will have the advantage of being in possession of all of our technological secrets even before the patent has been issued. In Ray Damadian's case that means General Electric would actually have had his information before the patent was issued to Ray and, for sure, he would not have been able to defend himself. We will cease to be a great power. Our people will cease to have the standard of living if we cease to be the technological leader of the world. H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, will make us incredibly vulnerable to our economic adversaries. And, by the way, it also obliterates the Patent Office in the U.S. Government. It will take away the Patent Office, which was established by our Constitution, and replace it with a corporatized entity, and who knows what kind of influences will be on the patent examiners when they are now in a corporatized job rather than a Government job. Our patent examiners have worked hard. They have been part of our system but they have been protected by civil service and other protections and the knowledge that they were Government employees. The fact is that will not be the same if we make it a corporatized entity. H.R. 811 and 812 will fight against H.R. 400 and protect the American patent system. I ask my colleagues to support H.R. 811 and 812 and to oppose the Steal American Technologies Act, H.R. 400.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, today H.R. 400 passed through the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property of the Committee on the Judiciary. H.R. 400, what I call the Steal American Technologies Act, is disguised as a patent reform bill. This bill was first entitled, when it was first introduced last year, the Patent Publication Act. Well, people might ask themselves, how does the Patent Publication Act all of a sudden become a patent reform bill? Well, that is because the patent reform bill is a title that does not describe exactly what is going on in the bill, but the Patent Publication Act does. This bill has not changed a bit. The purpose of the bill is exactly the same. Now, hold on to your hats, make sure you understand the magnitude of what is about to be said. This bill, H.R. 400, which I call the Steal American Technologies Act, mandates that after 18 months, if an inventor in the United States applies for a patent, even if his patent has not been issued, after 18 months it is mandated that all the details of his patent will be published for everybody in the world to see and to steal. That is it. Every one of America's technological secrets will be mandated to be published so that those adversaries in Japan or in China or anywhere else in the world will have all the details and probably be able to go into production and use our intellectual property, all of our new ideas and technological discoveries against the United States of America. That is why I call this the Steal American Technologies Act. It is beyond belief that this is going through the House of Representatives, but it will be on this floor unless the American people call their Congressman or Congresswoman to let them know how heinous it is to permit our adversaries to steal our technology and use it against us. This is exactly what is going to happen, because the huge multinational corporations who would benefit from stealing our technology and not having to pay royalties are in an unholy alliance with our own big companies who do not want to pay royalties to American inventors. The idea of course is, oh, it is going to happen anyway. These things would have been invented. You put an infinite number of inventors in a room with an infinite number of typewriters and eventually everything will be invented. No. We have had a strong and prosperous country because we have had the strongest patent protection of any country of the world. Now they are trying to change that, because they are taking away the confidentiality of American inventors, they are taking away our rights to a guaranteed patent term, and this H.R. 400 also obliterates the Patent Office. That is right, Mr. Speaker. What this does, H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act also would take the Patent Office, which is written into the Constitution, and resurrect it. As what? A corporatized entity. Our patent examiners are strong and faithful people, they work hard, and the reason they have been able to do a good job is because they have been government employees protected from outside influences. Now we are changing the entire rules of the game, just as America is entering into this new technological age. Mr. Speaker, this is a Pearl Harbor in slow motion. This is a catastrophe that will hit our country and destroy our standard of living that is based on America being the technological leader of the world, and the American people in the future will never know what hit them. They will just say, wait a minute; did we not used to be the leader in technology? Could we not out-compete all these countries? That is because we had strong patent protection, and our Founding Fathers knew that as long as Americans had this patent protection, we would have the ideas and creativity to save our country. I have a bill in opposition to the Steal American Technologies Act. My bill is H.R. 811, and there is a companion bill, H.R. 812. That is 811 and 812, which would restore to the American people their guaranteed right that has been part of our rights as Americans since our Constitution was written, for a guaranteed patent term, that is being attacked today, will be taken away from them. My bill guarantees confidentiality, so when our inventors come up with new ideas, they are not going to go to our adversaries and be used against us. There is not going to be a line at the Patent Office for a copying machine, and a line over to the fax machine, and get it overseas as soon as possible. H.R. 812, the companion bill introduced by the gentleman from California, Duncan Hunter, will maintain in the U.S. Government a strong Patent Office and an efficient Patent Office to protect us and to make sure that our people are serviced well, which is a function, a proper function of Government. This is an attempt to harmonize our law, and those who support H.R. 400 will tell us that we need to harmonize our law with the rest of the world. No, we need to strengthen the protections of the American people. I ask for the support of my colleagues for H.R. 811 and 812 in opposition to H.R. 400.

Mr. ROHRABACHER

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, just to add a little bit or shed a little bit of light on this, we have a wide diversity of opinion here in the House of Representatives just like in the United States of America. We have a wide diversity of opinion. That is one of the great strengths of the United States of America. I see my friend, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Serrano], over there. We have a lot of disagreements, but we know that we can respect each other's opinion even though we have some mighty differences of opinions. I happen to agree, interestingly enough, I happen to agree that some of the things that happened in Waco, TX, and some of the actions taken by the FBI have been very questionable and indeed would make honest people worry some about what is going on in the FBI. Expressing that should be no reason, and for other people to sort of think that that is sort of an oddball opinion. That is not an oddball opinion at all. I think we can respect each other, for I know that some people have come to me from the minority communities over the years and have expressed to me that law enforcement is attacking them in a different way than they would be attacking people in the majority Caucasian community. I have to admit some of the times I have dismissed some of those criticisms. But I will have to admit also that there are some things that have happened in recent years that have sort of given me a different point of view to take some of those charges a little more credibly and to listen to them and to think maybe there is something to these criticisms. So let us hope that in things as volatile as this, where life and death matters are being discussed, we do maintain a civility. One major issue that is going to be happening here in Congress and we are involved in right now deals with the patent issue. I am fighting a major fight along with 50 other Members of the House who have cosponsored my bill to maintain a guaranteed patent term for the American people and to ensure that our patent rights are not diminished in order to create some global trading system. Some people want to create a global trading system at the expense of the rights of the American people because they think everybody is going to be better off because of it. That is their point of view. The American people better understand that we have got these globalists who are trying to eliminate the right, certain patent rights that the American people have enjoyed since the founding of our country. H.R. 400 is a bill that is coming through Congress right now, I call the Steal American Technologies Act, which greatly diminishes the patent rights of the American people and thus in the long run will make America technologically inferior, undercut our prosperity, and our national security. Our technological superiority is what has made us a prosperous and secure country. I am asking my colleagues to join me in cosponsoring H.R. 811, which is my bill to restore the patent rights of the American people, and to oppose H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, which, among other things, get this, H.R. 400 does this: mandates that every patent application, whether it has been issued or not, will be published for the entire world to see after 18 months. That means every copycat, every one of America's competitors and adversaries will have every one of our secrets, all the details. They will probably be into production of our new technology ideas even before the patent is issued to our own inventors. This is lunacy. Yes, some people have a right to the other opinion because maybe it is a good thing in order to create a global market, but they are trying to create a global market over the well-being and prosperity of the American people and diminishing the rights of the American people. I ask my colleagues to join me in supporting H.R. 811, the Patent Term Restoration Act, and opposing the Steal American Technologies Act, H.R. 400. Mr. Speaker, I believe when the American people understand this move by the multinational corporations to diminish our patent rights in order to create a global marketplace, the people will rise up. They will call their Congressman and they will call their Senator to ensure that, if you want a global market, do not do it by diminishing the guaranteed rights we have had since the founding of our Nation and that has ensured us to be the technological leader of the world. This is a big fight. It is the little guy versus the big guy. But also when we have a debate like this, it is important for us to sit down here and slug it out on the issues. In this particular case, should we have a guaranteed patent term, H.R. 400, the Steal American Technologies Act, says no. Should we have the right of confidentiality so when a man submits a patent, whether it is confidential, H.R. 400 says no, they are going to publish it for the whole world to see. Should we have a strong working patent office as part of our Government, which H.R. 400 would corporatize. Defeat the Steal American Technologies Act, H.R. 400. Support H.R. 811, the Patent Term Restoration Act.