Mark Souder

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that each side be given 5 additional minutes.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica), a former chairman of the subcommittee. He and I both were senior staffers in the other body and have worked on this issue for a long time. I appreciate his leadership in fighting narcotics throughout the United States.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, there are a couple of comments I want to make in closing general debate here. One is, just for the record, though it is not part of this legislation, we have clearly corrected the misinterpretation of the student loan bill. The Clinton administration had falsely interpreted the House legislation. The Bush administration continued to do that. It has been corrected. You only lose a student loan if you commit a drug crime while you have the loan. That is the least that the taxpayers should expect; and even then, if you go to drug treatment and test clean, you can get your loan back. Even then, if you get convicted, not arrested, but convicted of a drug crime, you still can get it back after 2 years, or if you go through drug treatment and get clean. The third time after you commit a drug crime and get convicted, then you lose your student loan. This is the least that the taxpayers should expect. We also have this constant debate whether it is a war or a disease. Former drug czar Barry McCaffrey always said he felt it was both, and I agree. Because with heart disease you do not see doctors getting assassinated on the street. You do not see heart surgeons getting shot in deals about heart surgery. Also it is a controllable disease. You do not have the equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous or narcotics anonymous for Alzheimer's. But it is a disease. That is why treatment is very important. That is why the prevention programs are very important. I appreciated Congressman Pascrell, and actually it was Congressman Cummings who first said that narcoterrorism is something that we live with every day. As I said earlier, tragically, 3,500 people were killed on 9/11. But that fall, 7,500 died because of illegal narcotics; 30,000 in 2002; 30,000 in 2003; 30,000 in 2004; roughly 7,500 in the first quarter of this year 105,000 people have died. While we get obsessed with every little thing going on in homeland security, we have terror on our streets, in our homes, and in our neighborhoods every day. We cannot forget and divert funds from the daily threat of narcoterrorism in the United States as we do this. I want to again refer to the Government Reform Subcommittee report that was unanimously adopted today. You can find it on the Web site of the Criminal Justice Subcommittee under Government Reform, 154 pages, 607 footnotes. If you tap the footnote, you can get the actual source. There you can get a full view of the whole narcotics policies, whether it is in HHS, Department of Justice, Defense, State Department. It is part of what we do in our committee. The ONDCP, the direct bill in front of us, has two major functions. One is directly under the control of the so-called drug czar, the director of ONDCP. It is a national media campaign, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, and the Counterdrug Technology Assessment Center. In addition, the drug czar reviews all budgets of all agencies with narcotics and has broad authority to make sure that we have a coordinated national drug policy, and this bill strengthens that. This bill was not easily put together. I want to thank first off the Members of both parties. We have had an extraordinary working relationship and have become very close friends, Mr. Cummings and I, but other members of our committee, too. We have had well-attended subcommittee hearings. We have held field hearings as well as hearings in Washington. Our staff, particularly Nick Coleman, who has just recently left to go to the U.S. Attorney's Office, has visited almost every HIDTA in America. We as Members have visited HIDTA directors here and have gone out and visited the different HIDTAs. Marc Wheat, the staff director; Dennis Kilcoyne; Jim Kaiser; Tony Haywood from the minority staff have worked hard in developing this comprehensive legislation. Mr. Cummings and I both thank our staff, because they help make us look good. In a bill this complicated, working with every agency in the Federal Government basically, in a bipartisan way, is not easy to do. Mr. Chairman, I urge all Members to support this legislation.

Mr. SOUDER. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to claim the time in opposition, although I am not opposed to the amendment.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I also strongly support this amendment. I appreciate the gentleman from Arkansas being one of the first Members to really push us to focus on methamphetamines. His district has been hard hit. Early on it was featured in People magazine. We did a congressional hearing in our subcommittee in his district where we heard from everyone, from drug court to people who were working directly with children and the impact on children. At another hearing in Minnesota, at the request of a number of Members, we heard in Ramsey County, which is St. Paul, that they went from zero to 80 percent of the kids in child custody in the welfare department being addicts of meth. From nothing to 80 percent, in 6 months. When methamphetamine hits your area, it takes over and overwhelms your juvenile systems, overwhelms the child custody system, and overwhelms the criminal system. I very much appreciate this amendment. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Graves) be able to reclaim the balance of his time.

Mr. SOUDER. Reclaiming the balance of my time, as Mr. Cummings just said, this shows the diversity of things that we tackle in our committee, in narcotics areas across the United States. We saw new shocking revelations yesterday on Barry Bonds. Masking agents are increasingly a challenge in trying to deal with steroids and other vitamin supplements and things that people are using in excess quantities to create artificial advantages in competition. How this thing goes down to young people whose bodies cannot handle this, as we heard in our steroids hearing, watching OxyContin, which is one of the most effective painkillers being used by people, taking people's lives, and it becomes a way that people rob banks and pharmacies and violence in society, abuse of other prescription drugs. In addition to cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, different areas will have different things come up at different times. But we need to know the science behind it. We need to know how it affects the human brain. We need to know the best ways to fight this. We need comprehensive efforts. That is what the Office of National Drug Control Policy is supposed to do. I commend the gentleman and support this amendment from the gentleman from Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I rise to support this amendment. I do not oppose this amendment. I think it is a good amendment. It is a phenomenon we have dealt with for some time, and I appreciate Mr. Filner's long, aggressive leadership with how best to deal with the southwest border in his district. We have worked together on border questions. This has recently been in the news because there have been more tunnels discovered in the last period than we have had for some time. The gentleman is absolutely correct, it does not do any good to build fences if you dig tunnels underneath them. Some of these tunnels have gone into other businesses, some into homes, some into open areas. It has shown a gap in our legislation. I am working with Chairman Dreier who is taking the lead on a bill similar to Senator Feinstein and Senator Kyl's bill to try to come up with appropriate laws that we need regarding these tunnels. Clearly, if you catch the ton of marijuana going through, that is clearly a violation of the law; but even the tunnel itself and digging the tunnel under an international border should have stiff penalties. I spoke yesterday with the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Julie Myers, and she is head of ICE and has been working directly with them in trying to do more of the tunnel enforcement. They have stepped up DHS efforts, and Assistant Secretary Myers is fully aware of this. We need to develop whatever legislation is required. What we need is our ONDCP director, and ideally he would have already submitted proposals to us. This says come up with proposals, and it gives him authority to develop implementation of a strategy and coordinate the other agencies. Some of this may be Department of Justice, EPA. That is why we have an Office of National Drug Control Policy to coordinate the different agencies that may be involved in this tunnel. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I think Mr. Cummings' point is a fitting conclusion as we move to the end of this debate. Our frustration is that since there has not been an authorization, the director of ONDCP has proposed a number of changes which would greatly undermine what this Congress intended. When we set up the High Intensity Drug Trafficking programs, the HIDTA, it was meant initially to focus on the Southwest border, which has not been particularly effective. In case anybody noticed, we do not have great control there, partly because we do not have an integrated Southwest border strategy. We have starts, we have a Southwest border HIDTA, but we need a Southwest border strategy. In these High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas, we move to the biggest cities and say, this is how the drugs come in and move into Indiana from Chicago and Detroit. You need the Baltimore-Washington HIDTA and the Los Angeles HIDTA, the Phoenix and the Houston HIDTAs behind the border. Other States then saw the effectiveness. What made HIDTA effective? The idea was if the Federal Government tried to do everything through DEA, FBI, Coast Guard, Border Patrol, Customs, it would not work. Sometimes even our Federal agents were arresting each other, and we were not getting integrated with State and local law enforcement. So the goal in HIDTA was if we put a 1 million, $2 million into an area, first off, we would require all of the Federal agents to be there and they would get half the votes, and then we would get the States and locals and they would get half the votes, and they would feel actual ownership of it. If they felt ownership, they would participate. As the head of the Phoenix Police Department told us at a hearing, it was moved over to OCDETF. It has done wonderful work, but OCDETF talks to supposedly State and local law enforcement, but State and local law enforcement do not get a vote. So they get put on a board, and they come to a meeting once in a while. HIDTA actually gives them a vote. The head of the Phoenix Police Department said his city council asks him on a regular basis, can you justify this, can you justify that. He has kept three officers in the HIDTA because he sees how that HIDTA money gets leveraged with the State police, with the U.S. Attorney's Office, with the U.S. Marshals, with the FBI, DEA, and with everybody else. Why, when we finally get a program that works at the State and local levels that leverages these dollars, would we gut it without even talking to the people involved? The Phoenix police chairman said he would pull his three officers out of the narcotics effort if it was moved. So did Chicago. So did city after city. And it is so exasperating that they continue to persist on this. But it shows it has done a great job of educating the HIDTAs. The New York City HIDTA is integrated completely with terrorism, and it is an amazing operation as we see those to links occur. The national ad campaign we are addressing throughout this bill because we think it has been effective and we need to make it more effective, and it needs to include meth. The administration was also proposing dramatic changes to the technology center. It is one of the most valuable things to State and local law enforcement because not only do we give them goods, but it is a model for what we are trying to do on homeland security, that is, when a police department says I would like this kind of radio, night goggle, protective gear, they analyze it. In my district, take Albion, 1,500, Kendallville is 10,000 people, Fort Wayne is 230,000 people. They can go through their list and say we would like these goggles, but then it goes through a review process and they say this is probably not what you need in Albion. Unless you can make a defense, you don't get that. You have to submit what kind of drug challenges you have, what types of things you need, and the Technology Assessment Center then, off of your list, you match up what your departments need. Everybody in homeland security gets this pool of money, and now they have all kinds of things that they may not ever need and mismatches. Now we are trying to have the State say, what is your homeland security plan; to have the locals say, what is your homeland security plan. Then in a technology center, we should have it work like in the drug czar's office, except the drug czar wants to get rid of his own Department. It is baffling why there is this persistent goal in the administration to wipe out the things that most benefit State and local and keep the parts that are nationally under their control. So I think this bill will comprehensively address a whole series of those concerns. I am pleased that we have been able to do this. The Meth Caucus has been bipartisan; this subcommittee has been bipartisan with Mr. Cummings and the full active membership of subcommittee. We have all been able to bring a bill forth and move through the full committee unanimously. Judiciary, Energy and Commerce, Education, and Intelligence committees all participated in this process, individual Members with their amendments as well as the Meth Caucus. I hope this bill will receive unanimous support. Three of the amendments we need a ``yes'' on. There is one amendment that would get rid of ONDCP, and I urge a ``no'' vote on that.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent that each side be given 5 additional minutes, given the numbers of speakers that we have on this amendment.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of this amendment. I want to compliment Mr. Rehberg and the group of cosponsors who have all been active in the anti-meth efforts. Montana has been truly a model of what the private sector can do. The campaign that Mr. Rehberg was talking about is so much more dramatic than what we have seen out of the Federal Government. It is extremely disappointing that we need to look at how to use this Montana model in how to get our national ad campaign engaged. As has been pointed out, there are some risks when you designate a percentage of the national media campaign to be devoted to one particular drug. But this says if there is a reduction and there is a proven reduction, then that requirement will not be there. Plus, if the Congress of Counties in the United States say this is the number one drug problem in America, if we are hearing about it in basically in all 50 States now, but 37 States have heard about it so aggressively that they are banning pseudoephedrine or moving to ban pseudoephedrine. And we just passed a bill in the United States Congress to in effect reduce cold medicines from 120 choices down to 20 because of the ravages of meth, if we are willing to take those drastic strategies; if the county officials across the country say meth is the number one epidemic; if local law enforcement is telling us that in big cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul or Omaha or Portland that the bulk of their people that are in jail, kids in child custody, are because of meth; if small rural towns in the Midwest and the West are hard hit by meth, California has these super labs that are there; if we are seeing it move into Pennsylvania and North Carolina and down into Florida, and now getting into New England; if this is that big of a problem, is this so outrageous to ask that 10 percent of the national ad campaign be devoted to fighting meth? Where have they been? I thank the gentleman who brought this amendment forward and strongly support the amendment.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Maryland for the time. I want to add that I, too, believe it should be more than 10 percent. Of course, the ONDCP director has that flexibility. I would also like to additionally comment a little bit more on the statement of administration policy and the bill in general that shows our frustration. I mentioned in the State Department on the certification process that the State Department has certification, but there are many other variables. In fact, that clause has been weakened to say ``demonstrably failing.'' What this says is the drug czar has to show whether these nations, such as Mexico, whether the pseudoephedrine producers such as India and China are fully cooperating, because we need to have the drug czar say what is happening on narcotics, and the State Department can make their own rulings. Furthermore, we have a big debate about how the budget should be counted. We believe that the administration has been misrepresenting what we are actually spending on narcotics in multiple ways. For example, in prisons, they count treatment as the only part of the prisons that is counted in the drug control budget. Well, we know many people are in jail because of narcotics. It leads to us not understanding what the actual costs of what we are doing are. Now, I support all that. I am not trying to say it should be cut, but understating it does not give Congress an accurate impression of what we are spending on narcotics. Similarly, in the Department of Homeland Security. So we are pushing in this legislation to address a wide range of things, and this particular amendment addresses one of the most egregious problems we have had, which anybody who has been watching this full debate sees, one amendment after another coming up on meth. That is because the people are speaking out. It is not just in the rural Midwest. It started out in Hawaii, in Honolulu, had to fumigate certain apartments because you can endanger the children and the people moving in the next time. When we did a hearing in Congressman Turner's district in Wilmington, Ohio, that very day in Dayton, Ohio, which is a large city, they found a string of seven houses that had the drug labs internally because you can smell it. That is partly why people go to rural areas, but they found the first big bust in Dayton because they brought up a string of houses so they could not smell it, much like they do with hydroponic marijuana. This is a thing with not only the crystal meth but even the drug labs are hitting the big cities. This is something that needs to be tackled. This is one where we can win. This is one when you show the ads, like are shown in Montana, they capture the people. They understand the danger of this drug, and what we need to do is make sure our national ad campaign includes that.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 2829.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of this rule. In background with this, I would like to make a couple of comments about ONDCP and the drug issues before commenting on the amendments in particular. We are, right now, over in the Government Reform Committee passing the 2006 Congressional Drug Control Budget and Policy Assessment. If you want to go to the Government Reform Web site, look under our subcommittee, Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Services, which I chair, ranking member Elijah Cummings and I have put together a unanimous report that I believe will be adopted unanimously through the full committee as well, that outlines, Department by Department, the budgets and our concerns with the national drug control policy. There are five major concerns in this overall budget policy assessment that you will see reflected both in the underlying bill today in ONDCP and the amendments that are coming to the floor. First is the appalling lack of a methamphetamine strategy coming out of ONDCP and this administration. Individual agencies such as DEA have worked on methamphetamines, but there is an appalling lack of national strategy you will see in amendment after amendment today on the floor, fully supported by myself and Congressman Cummings. And we worked helping draft many of these amendments. The frustration is incredible in this body and in the Senate, and that is reflected in today's debate and in this report; also interdiction assets, the frustration at an OMB-driven clause in the Homeland Security Department that would have separated narcotics from terrorism. Narcotics are the number one cause of terrorism deaths in America. On September 11, 2001, 3,500 people died because of terrorism. That fall, 7,500 people died with narcotics abuse and the terrorism associated with that in the United States. The next year, 30,000 people died in 2002. In 2003, 30,000 people died. In 2004, 30,000 people died. Already 7,500 people, approximately, have died in the United States. 105,000 people have died related to drug terrorism and abuse in America since 9/11. We need to understand that while we have to watch for the major terrorist attacks in America, we are fighting terrorism in family homes, on the streets, and in neighborhoods on a daily basis in every suburban area, every rural area, and every urban center of the United States. The Office of National Drug Control Policy, the so-called drug czar's office, was a creation of Congress. Senator Biden started it in the Senate. It was not something that the administration willingly did. The administration today says they do not like this bill. Why do they not like this bill? They opposed it in my committee, but it passed unanimously. They opposed it in the Government Reform Committee. It passed unanimously. It was accepted by the joint referrals, and it went to the Judiciary Committee. They came up with four proposals they did not like in it. It turned out that three, unbeknownst to them, and quite frankly showing some of our frustration with the drug czar's office, they did not even realize that three of the four amendments that they were objecting to were asked for by the Judiciary Committee, and now they were asking the Judiciary Committee to challenge that. Of course, Chairman Sensenbrenner did not take the amendments and knock them out; they were his in the Judiciary Committee. The fourth was the Dawson Community Act that was added to protect witnesses that was added by Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat of my subcommittee, and had been supported earlier by the administration. Then they wanted to knock it out. Right up until the Rules Committee, they were still trying to demote the drug czar from a Cabinet-level equivalency position. How can he give advice, and how can he review the budgets, as this act requires of the State Department, of the Defense Department, of the Department of Homeland Security if he does not have Cabinet status? It makes no sense. They are continually trying to undermine the attempts that we have had here. Over the past few years we have worked together in trying to move this bill. This bill moved unanimously through the House the last session of Congress. We believe we now have a bill that we will work through with the Senate as we work with the Republicans and the Democrats in the other body. And we believe this bill will become law if not unanimously, nearly unanimously. There are 15 amendments today. Some amendments did not directly relate to this bill. But if Members want votes on some of these, that will be fine. We are prepared to accept, I believe, 13 of the 15 amendments, one we believe we can work out in conference. We are opposing one. This is a bipartisan bill. And for those who have been concerned about meth, there is a lot in this bill related to meth that will force their hands. But the amendments today will make it clear that the United States Congress wants some action out of this administration on meth. It is bipartisan. It is suburban, rural, and urban and it is time that we started to act aggressively.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I sat here and listened to the last special order. It was the longest extensions of remarks devoted to how to increase taxes in America that I have heard. It is one thing for the other party to criticize us in spending and then vote against every attempt to control the budget. They can criticize us simultaneously as they did in the last hour for not spending enough in education and then not controlling the budget. There was such inconsistency. We are clearly in the season of partisanship, but the harshness and tone and the misrepresentation has been very uncomfortable. And I hope that as we go through this year we can have reasonable debate over very, very difficult questions on international trade, on how we manage our deficit, on how we manage our tax code, on how we manage our spending without the tremendously aggressive tone of partisanship that is increasingly happening in America. I want to talk about a subject that will hopefully be relatively bipartisan as we move through. It certainly has been in part. And there is a broader issue that has come up, and that is related to the issue of Colombia. Colombia, most of us think of, if I ask you what do you think of, probably the first thing you think of historically would be coffee. Colombian coffee. Juan Valdez and Colombian coffee. I know in Indiana and at least me from Indiana and many other people would think Colombia is spelled like the District of Columbia. But it is not. If you think it is not, just listen to the accent when they go ``Colombian coffee.'' It is C-O-L-O-M-B-I-A. Colombian coffee and Juan Valdez were established images in the United States until about the eighties when the number one thing Americans started to think about with Colombia was cocaine. Almost all, 90-some percent, of the cocaine that comes in the United States and all around the world comes from Colombia. Almost all of our heroin and a high percentage of heroin around the world comes from Colombia. Now Afghanistan has kind of dominated the world on heroin, but in the United States while Asian heroin and Afghan heroin is coming into the west coast, most of the rest of the country has either Colombian heroin or some variation of Mexican heroin. So now when many people think of Colombia, if I say, oh, I am going to Colombia, people go, well, do not get shot. They do not think do not drink too much coffee. They think do not get shot, and that is partly because of the book by Tom Clancy and then the movie, ``Clear and Present Danger,'' which talked about kind of the height of the Medellin cartel. Then the book, ``Killing Pablo,'' which then was followed up with a movie about Pablo Escobar running the Medellin cartel, and the visions of Colombia from those movies and books have really driven the definition of Colombia. What I want to do a little bit tonight to lay this out is to tell you a little bit about the history of Colombia; then how, in fact, the drugs because of the American drug habit and the European drug habit, it is not domestic consumption of cocaine and heroin that drove the problems and the violence in Colombia. It was U.S. and European drug addictions that drove Colombia to the situation where they are today. Then what we have been doing in Congress, starting under the Clinton administration, moving to the Bush administration, with Plan Colombia and the Andean Initiative and some of the impacts of that, and then finishing up with some of the hope of Colombia, which on Monday President Bush and President Uribe of Colombia signed the Colombian Free Trade Agreement and what that would mean both for us and for Colombia and for the Central American region. So let me first start with this map; and the number one thing that becomes apparent from the map, which I like a lot in this map, is you can tell that it is a geographically diverse country, that it is the start of the Andean mountains. Venezuela is over to the right. Lake Maracaibo, the number one oil region in all of the Americas and possibly in the world, the richest oil well is over there, the big lake, just south of the mountains. The mountain up at the top, I believe, is around 12 to 14,000 feet. Then you come into these kind of lower Andes where you get down to 14,000 feet here and about 8,000 to 10,000 feet in the middle. If you continue on down, actually the Andes do not go as much directly through Ecuador, but jump over to Peru and down through Chile. Then you get down to the huge Andes, where they are 23,000 feet, and Machu Picchu is in Peru, and then runs down through Colombia down in this range. The equator obviously moves here, roughly through Ecuador, but this whole area is the basic center of the world where the equator is working through. So all this side to the east is jungle, and you can see these big rivers down here, Putumayo coming through along the border between Colombia and Ecuador, all feed into the Amazon basin. Brazil is over here to the right, and all this area drains into the Amazon River, and then the Amazon River comes out and pours out to the north of Brazil. In this pattern, first off you see Colombia really has basically three parts. It has a coastal region, and it is, I believe, the only country in South America with both a Caribbean side up there and an eastern Pacific side here. So about half of Colombia is a little more on the Pacific and a little, about half, is on the Caribbean. So it is on both oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific. Then you have the mountainous region, and then you have this huge jungle. Now, in understanding the history of Colombia, by looking at the map you start to understand and can more understand the economics of Colombia, the democratic traditions of Colombia and the problem that we have with narcotics in Colombia and how we have been addressing the problems. But if you do not understand the geography, you cannot understand the history very well and the economics and the politics. First off, there are 1,098 municipalities. Many of these municipalities are very, very small. Most of them are in the mountains. Bogota, here is 7 million people in Bogota. Medellin, which is up a little higher in the mountains, is 2 million people. Cali, which is down over here in the mountains closer to the eastern Pacific, is about 2 million people. Cartagena, which is up kind of in between the edge of Panama and the larger mountain to the top, is about 1 million people. Santa Marta, up towards the big mountain, is about half a million people. What you see is the bulk of the people are actually in the mountains, but there are small municipalities scattered all through the mountains. Then there are some out here in the Amazon; but the Amazon basin, this whole green area over there, is basically uninhabited except for a very small native population. There are no roads to connect it. There are no airstrips other than the occasional coca producer plain, that it is basically undeveloped. There are a few cities, Barraquilla up towards the mountain between Cartagena and Santa Marta is another 2 million in the city; but other than Barraquilla and Cartagena on the coast, that coast is more developed. This coast has no big cities on it, and most of the people are in the mountains. So most of the democracy, the histories, the traditions in Colombia are in the mountains, not in the Amazon basin or along the coast. Well, how did that happen and why did it happen? Partly because they have great temperatures. In Bogota now, it is basically 70 to 72 degrees during the day, and it is about 40 to 50 at night. If you go another time of the year, it is in the 70s during the day and about 40 to 50 at night. In other words, it is fairly stable because Bogota is up at 5,000 to 6,000 feet. So are the other cities. So one thing you had was stable weather. A second thing which is important to understand, and I should have said this earlier, is that Colombia is the oldest democracy in South America, 200 years. You get this impression sometimes from the news media and other people that all of South and Central America, where all these military dictatorships that do not have a tradition, that Colombia just fights all the time, that they have these revolutions all the time. No, they do not. They have had periods of violence and different things. They had one military general dictatorship for 4 years in the 1950s. That is it. It has been a functioning democracy. We did not have the most stable government during our Civil War either. Abraham Lincoln held it together the best he could; but we were fighting with each other, and we had a period of civil war, too. In other words, the period of civil war, true, where you had a military governance and a period of civil war was basically the same as the United States. So Americans who point the finger and say Colombia is a violent country, it is not true. They are an old democracy, an old democracy. Basically, why was Bogota with 7 million people and Medellin with a couple of million people and Cali with a couple of million people, why are they in the mountains? Because to move 100 kilometers, which would be 60 miles, can take you up to 4 hours, 25 kilometers an hour, because you have these roads moving between these cities. Now, if you have a decent road, you can get all the way up to 25 miles an hour. It takes a long time to move between the cities. So why are they there? Well, because probably more Americans have been to, I think it is safe to say, Hawaii than Colombia. If you go to the Big Island in Hawaii, where are you going to find the coffee? The coffee in Central America, Hawaii, and South America is at elevations between usually 3,000 to 6,000 feet. If you go south of Kahlua-Kona and the famous Kona coffee region in Hawaii, you are going to see the same pattern that you see in Guatemala, in Ecuador, in Colombia and elsewhere, that is, somewhere around mid-afternoon some rain comes in. There is some cloud cover. You are high enough up in the mountains that you get rain and you get steady rain. At the same time, you do not get so much that it drowns your crops. You have the drying out in the elevation, and it gives you a mix. So you tend to see coffee at 3,000 to 6,000 elevation and with good soil. Colombia's coffee region is in this zone in here where the people are because, for many years, it was Colombian coffee that was their key ingredient that kept their economy going. Ironically, because coffee plantations are relatively small, as you see if you go to Hawaii and other places, it has not been a business that really thrives on huge conglomerate farms. Because you have that mid-size farm, you see this tradition of more, it is not as much of the middle class as the United States, but unlike other countries, where you see, say, bananas dominate or other products completely dominate like oil, like Venezuela, you do not have just a few rich people controlling 90 percent of the wealth. You have more of a middle class, thanks to the historic part of coffee. But guess what else you have in those mountains: you have gold in those hills. Interestingly, you also have not too far from Bogota almost all the emerald mines in the world. So interestingly, let me give you a little side point that is lost and is very wrapped up in our immigration debate in the United States. The number one source of income in pretty much every country, in Central America certainly, and even increasingly in South America, is expatriated income. What does that mean? It means that for all the complaining about the wage rates in the United States that the Mexicans who come in the United States, the Guatemalans, the Salvadorans, the Hondurans, Ecuadorans send somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of their wages back to their home country. It started in the smaller countries that that income became greater than any crop they produced; but even Mexico, until the recent rise in oil prices, the expatriated income going back to Mexico was greater than even their oil revenues because their number one business that they export anymore are immigrants who send part of their income back to their country. Colombia, when I was there last week from Fort Wayne, Indiana, my hometown, we have regional connections. We are a regional airport, but not a hub airport. So everywhere we go, every week when I go back and forth, I live in Fort Wayne and my family is in Fort Wayne, when I go back and forth, I have to take a plane to Detroit or to Cincinnati or to Cleveland or to Chicago or to somewhere to get to Washington. But I could take a plane to Atlanta. I had about an hour and a half in Atlanta and then a plane straight from Atlanta to Bogota. Bottom line is, I could go from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Bogota in about net, from the time I got to the Fort Wayne airport with that layover to Bogota, about 9 hours. To come from Fort Wayne to Washington, DC, takes me four to five, and I had the same number of plane switches. Now, with that type of access into Miami from Cartagena, you are talking like an hour and a half flight. It is just a basic short hop over. Now that said, we have between 600,000 and 800,000 Colombian immigrants in the United States. They tend to be, based on studies, the highest educated group of immigrants from anywhere we have for a variety of reasons, but the bottom line is that expatriated income to Colombia is about $3 billion. It is 3 percent of their national income. Now, what sent me into that discussion was gold and emeralds and jewelry are 5.7 percent of their gross national product. Meaning that in gold and emeralds alone, forget coffee which is a huge percent, that they have more of an internal economy than almost anybody in all of Central and South America. Now, when you look at that, the mix of what they have in their economy, it is not just about gold and emeralds. I know many people, like me, are fascinated with gold and emeralds, and many people are fascinated with coffee; but few people know that the same areas that were doing the coffee and where the gold and emeralds are, when you look at why is so much of the population in Bogota and Medellin and Cali, you have to look at flowers. Sixty-seven percent of cut flowers in the United States come from Colombia. The flight connections that I just talked about not only work for people; it goes even faster for freight, because the freight companies can do a direct flight into the different regional places and then distribute it. Think about that. If you buy cut flowers, the four big seasons are, I find this interesting, Mother's Day is the biggest, not Valentine's Day. It says something still for our values in the United States. Mother's Day is number one. Valentine's Day is number two. Then I cannot remember whether Christmas or Thanksgiving. The four big periods that they basically put the stuff in all these huge kind of, for lack of a better word, greenhouses on steroids, just huge floral operations are located near the different airports because the key thing is how to move these flowers into the United States in basically 24 hours so they can get into the huge chains, the Wal-Marts, the Meyers'es, the Safeways, the Targets, the huge grocery operation wholesalers where most flowers are sold. We are not talking about what you might get from your local greenhouse; we are talking about the huge operations where flowers are sold. The only real rival is Ecuador on roses. Colombia dominates 67 percent of the American market. Guatemala, I think, has some orchids. So you may find certain specialty flowers in some areas, but Colombia is basically where all our flowers come from. And flowers constitute nearly twice as much as expatriated income. In other words, now we have got coffee, we have got gold and emeralds and jewelry, and we have flowers. But there is also apparel. Medellin, in particular, is known as an apparel center. So you have another sector of the economy, apparel, that is around 5 percent. Now, the reason I am raising this is when I get into the drug question, part of the reason we think of, well, these countries, like Afghanistan, I would guess, it is safe to say right now that about 70 to 80 percent of their working economy is related to heroin. But Colombia isn't dependent on coca; coca is a small percentage. They have businesses in Colombia. They had businesses in Colombia. They had successful markets in Colombia. America's drug addiction hurt their business. It wasn't that they needed to have a product to sell. When you go to Bolivia, which had tin, and now President Alva Morales, who came out of the coca growers, because it was very hard to do substitution of other things because coca had been such a critical thing to the Cuchabama area, where President Morales was from, and it was done by a lot of the native peoples. And it is a very difficult question for he and others to handle in a country like Bolivia. But in Colombia they had a different country that was corrupted by America's and Europe's drug habits. Now, I mentioned apparel, flowers, coffee, gold and jewelry, and others. But guess what their two biggest things are? One is oil. Oil constitutes 26 percent of their exports. There are two big operators and then a smaller EcoPetrol is the Colombian company that is a partner; and basically Colombia owns the ground and the resources. The operating companies are two, B.P. and Occidental. Occidental is in this range up in there. Now, the question comes, how do you get the oil from there, which is part of this gigantic field that is coming down from Venezuela, to the coast, because you have to go through the mountains? Now, in that challenge, because unlike the traditional things they had, the oil is scattered up there and down here, the second biggest category besides oil is coal. And coal is in this region right here. Neither of those things are in places where they have very many people. Now, I want to do one other transition, but I want to illustrate that the biggest categories are energy and their biggest country that uses those imports is the United States. Colombia at one point was our eighth largest oil supplier. According to the President's energy plan, it is now emerging again as one of our primary oil countries. They have an estimate of 47 billion barrels in reserves. That is their estimate. That may be slightly high or it may be slightly low. But in this process of understanding how much oil is there, having a stable Colombia is important to our energy. The coal mine there is either the second or third biggest in the world, and I will show some pictures of it in a few minutes. And when they get the new mine open, it will be the biggest in the world, and it is low sulfur coal, which means it is safer coal. And where it comes into, the bulk of it, the coal mine in that area is owned by a company that is based out of Alabama, and it is co-owned then with the Colombian Government, and the coal comes into the United States for our energy. In fact, somewhere near 40 percent of their oil comes to the United States and somewhere near 15 percent or so of their exports are coal to the United States, critical energy sources if we are not going to mine it in the United States. And this is open-pit mining, as opposed to what we are doing mostly in the United States. We are sending miners down below. We have all seen the tragic accidents, and we are battling about mine safety standards in the United States. But if we don't have coal and we don't do nuclear, and we have pretty well dammed about every river you can dam in the United States. And Canada is pretty much doing the same thing. We have pretty well put windmills about everywhere you can put windmills, and there is now objection and pushback when we do the big windmill farms. We are working with solar. And there are people worried about oil; they are one of the big oil places where we have enough oil. But if you are going to shut off everything, then your costs are going to go up, because the less supply there is, the higher prices are going to be. And if you regulate it too much, nobody will go down and dig up the reserves in Colombia. So then it won't be so expensive, we just won't have any. We will just get to sit at home maybe and just freeze. So there has to be an energy supply that helps keep the price down, and it needs to be balanced. And this is relatively clean in a country that is favorable to us. And before I move into a little more depth with this, I want to share also, in thinking about Colombia, a couple of other points. Pablo Escabar isn't the primary export or famous Colombian, but we don't necessarily think of the people we might know. Grammy Award winning Colombian rock stars Shakira and Juanes sell out their concerts in the United States and around the world. They are very famous. I am more familiar with Shakira than Juanes, but they are both taking the U.S. market by storm. Fernando Botero is one of the world's most accomplished painters and sculptors. Wherever you go both in Colombia and other countries, you will see these big, kind of oversized Botero paintings and statues. It is an acquired taste. It is not my taste, but he is very famous. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is among the world's most widely read novelists and has won basically every writing award you can, and has a home there in Cartagena and is from the countryside. Juan Pablo Montoya has sped to the top of the Formula 1 auto racing circuit. He's a very famous racing driver. Colombia actress Catalina Sandino Moreno was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress this year in ``Maria Full of Grace.'' So when you watch the Academy Awards, you will see a Colombian as one of the nominees. I am a big baseball fan, and while Colombia doesn't have as many shortstops as Venezuela, Edgar Renteria, Orlando Cabrera, and other Colombians are in baseball. Even if you set aside all these economic and industrial exports, they also export culture around the world. The Colombians have stronger universities, they have more educated people, and people who are famously literate and writing many books, not just Marquez, but I wanted to use that as an illustration because we have a warped view in America about what Colombia is that makes it very hard for us to kind of tackle the battles on funding narcotics and what is actually happening in Colombia. Now, let me talk just for a little here about what happened in the drug wars. To some degree in these areas, the most famous cartel probably in world history is the Medellin cartel. Medellin was the home of Pablo Escobar. Last week, when I was in Colombia, President Uribe, who is originally from the Medellin area, asked me what did I think about Medellin; how did it strike me. And I said, well, my impression of Medellin was that it was a dusty little town and up on the hill Pablo Escobar had this fantastic estate that he had bought with his billions of dollars of American cocaine money, and then bought these exotic animals and started a zoo, and all the people came up to his zoo because they didn't have anything else to do. Then I flew into the airport that was above the city before we went to the other airport down in the city, and this is just one of their promotional brochures, but this is Medellin. Medellin isn't a dusty little town that Pablo Escobar had a little house above it with a zoo where people would go because there was nowhere else to go. Medellin is a city of 2 million people with all sorts of businesses functioning in it, with huge high-rises, parks all over the city, all sorts of athletic facilities and arts facilities, and with major universities there. How in the world did Americans who were tracking it not understand what was happening in Medellin? Partly because of the violence. I believe in my trip to Medellin this week I was the first Member of Congress to get into Medellin since all the coca wars broke out, because it has been so difficult to travel. Our ambassador was able to drive from Bogota to Medellin, and that is the first time an American ambassador has been able to go on that road for, I believe, 20 to 30 years. Things got really bad, and it left us with a really wrong impression about what Colombia is and what is happening in Colombia. So Pablo Escobar was controlling the Medellin cartel. And Colombia has been probably the most cooperative country in all of Central and South America in working with extraditions, when we go after these big guys. Why? Why would the different presidents work with the United States when in other countries they have not worked as much with us on extraditing, that is, sending their criminals to the U.S. to go through our court systems? Partly because they had an economy. It was our drugs that wrecked their economy. There has been some reluctance on the part of some of these countries to send their citizens back to the United States because they are worried. For all the talk about wanting to get rid of the drugs in their country, if they get rid of the drugs in their country, what is going to happen to their banks? Who will build the big buildings? Who will open all the stuff if you suck a couple billion dollars out of most economies and they sink? So to some degree, quite frankly, we get lip service. But in Colombia they actually extradite, if we can prove the case, major drug criminals. So we broke the Medellin cartel. Then many Americans know of the Cali cartel, which is another of the big cities I pointed to. It is more over in this zone in the mountains. So we had the Cali cartel, and we broke up the Cali cartel. In the process of breaking up these cartels, there are three violent groups in Colombia that have dogged over the years and challenged democracy. Rather than participate in elections, because they do not have any support, they chose to use violence. One is the FARC. The FARC are probably the best known, the most violent, and the ones most embroiled in the drug trafficking. I know some dissident groups want to make the FARC to be like their Che Guevara, communist revolutionaries who just want to have land reform, but, no, they are a bunch of drug-pushing drug addicts who want to violently overthrow their government because they won't participate in the democratic process. When they founded the FARC, for some of them it was about land reform, but it is long past that. They are basically thugs. One young man I met, and I have been to Colombia now 11 times, it could be 10, it could be 12 times, somewhere in that range, since I was elected to Congress in 1994, but when you go into Colombia and you talk to them--and I went with colleagues who are now, both of them, governors, Governor Blagojevich and Governor Sanford, and we were waiting for Speaker Hastert to come into the area. We weren't as important at the time, so because there was a big rainstorm going on, they turned his helicopter around because they didn't think it was safe, but they brought us in by taking a handkerchief and cleaning off the windshield of the helicopter and trying to find the ground, so we were there for a little bit. And they brought in a captured FARC. He was a young guy, and we asked him a question, and I can't remember if it was Mark or Rod who said, have you ever killed anybody? And he said, well, yes. And this kid is maybe 18 years old. And we said, why did you kill him? He said, well, he hadn't paid his fees. What do you mean, he hadn't paid his fees? He said, well, he owed us money and he didn't pay his fees. He said, I warned him. We said, well, how did you kill him? He said, well, he was eating lunch at a restaurant and I came up behind him and I took the pistol and I shot him in the back of his head. He hadn't paid his fees. Now, what the FARC does is they provided protection money first. In other words, if you wanted to grow coca for the different cartels, you paid the FARC, say 5, 10 percent, much like the Mafia worked in the United States in a shakedown operation, and then they ``protected'' you from U.S. forces. But then they decided that wasn't enough margin, so they started killing the people who wouldn't cooperate and grow coca. They didn't want you growing palm heart, they didn't want you growing bananas, they didn't want you growing coffee. Coca is more profitable, so we will shoot you if you don't. So Colombia has a huge number of displaced persons right now at the Nelson Mandela kind of training center, a housing center outside the edge of Cartagena where I visited several years ago with Congressmen Davis and Moran, and there are tens of thousands of people who have been chased out of these villages because they were being killed by the FARC for not cooperating in coca and they became drug runners. The second big group are the paramilitaries, or the AUC. Now, what happened there was, many people started hiring guns, kind of Pinkerton detectives gone bad. They started hiring guns to fight the FARC. So what happened is, the FARC would come in to one of these villages in the outer areas and basically shoot you if you didn't grow coca; then the paramilitaries, the AUC, would come in and kill you if you did grow coca. And pretty soon the AUC realized, hey, there is more money to be made in coca, so they start fighting over the different zones and over who gets to do the shakedowns. And what used to be the paramilitary protection, instead of operating as paramilitary protection, themselves became drug dealers. However, interestingly, because of their history of being hired for protection, in this period of being hired for protection, the AUC, the paramilitaries, have about 10-to-12 public support where the FARC only has one or two. Now from some of the leftist groups in the United States you would think the FARC has 10 to 12 percent or 20 or 30 or 40 percent, but they do not. They have minimal percent. But the paramilitaries, because they were trying to protect the villagers, had more but they went bad too. Now the third group, the ELN tends to work in these mountains and the mountains up towards the top. The ELN basically does not appear to be as heavily involved in coca. Their business is kidnapping people. They kidnap people for ransom, and that is how they fund their group. Of the two, I do not know how you could say kidnapping is less egregious than coca because at least in kidnapping you just kill the individuals with you. They captured some new tribes' missionaries and killed them. We do not know for sure, but we have not heard from them for close to 8 years now. And others, if they do not get the ransom, the historic pattern is they kill them. You always hope that the FARC has captured some of our U.S. soldiers, so we can hope they are alive. The FARC is a little different than the ELN. The ELN is kidnapping for money. The FARC is in the business of kidnapping for trade. And if you want to read a great book on the Diary of Kidnapping by Gabriel Marquez, it will give you some idea of what they put these different people through. But the ELN also appears to, at times, be more willing to work with communities and less violent overall. Even though kidnapping is awful, they are not in the business of cocaine, which kills in the United States, illegal drugs kill in the United States 20- to 30,000 people a year of which a big chunk of that is cocaine. So basically you are not just a kidnapper if you do cocaine; you are a murderer. You are a mass murderer if you are growing fields of cocaine. You can try to coat it over and say, oh, these poor peasants are just trying to make a living. Look, mass murderers. They are killing more people than somebody going into a school and killing six people. A coca field growing may be killing thousands of people, depending on how it is broken and how it moves through the city. They are mass murderers in every step of that process. The grower is a mass murderer, the people who process it are mass murderers, the people who transit it are mass murderers, the people who sell it in the street are mass murderers because they are killing people with the cocaine. It is not this kind of quiet little thing that you are drinking coffee on the side. It is killing people. And in trying to hold that accountable, we have these three different revolutionary groups that have more or less terrorized at the margin. At one point, at the peak of the Medellin cartel, which is what the movie Clear and Present Danger is about, based off the book, which is roughly, my first visit into Colombia, former Ambassador Busby was with us, and he was there during the period of the greatest violence. And I said, is the book Clear and Present Danger accurate? You were the ambassador during that period. And he said, not completely. I died in the book. But it was basically accurate in that somewhere in the vicinity of two-thirds of the judges and a big chunk of the legislative body was killed. Many mayors were killed. It is one thing to say we have differences between the Republicans and Democrats and we argue on the House floor about how to do it. We argue back in our districts. But basically it is another thing if you are running for office and they are going to murder you. President Uribe's father was assassinated. Vice President Santos was kidnapped and escaped. There are very few leaders who do not have huge prices on their heads. And particularly in that period it took incredible courage to be a leader in Colombia. And then it came back up again after the groups. For a variety of reasons, we got control of the Medellin and Cali cartels. It looked like we were stabilizing it and it took off again, which led to the modern Plan Colombia. The peak problem here in the second kind of wave that came up was, in the year 1999 Colombia, for all those things I was talking about, had a negative growth rate, the only year it has had a negative growth rate, about a 4 to 5 percent GDP that was negative. How did they get a negative growth rate? Well, one thing is that I talked about the oil fields up here. That pipeline has to go over the mountains, and in that area, Occidental Petroleum, the oil that was headed for Houston and into the United States, had 91 percent of their oil production stopped that year because they basically had, I think it was 200 pipeline attacks that, even at a fast speed, it takes you a while to fix the pipeline, 24, 48, 72 hours, basically meaning nothing got from the oil fields. Nine percent got there. I earlier said that oil was 40 percent of their exports. You knock out oil, you cannot get any money. The big coal mine that we visited, if you are there, how do you get it to the ocean? Certainly not by roads. There are no roads in the jungle. At this huge coal mine the people driving the trucks, let me give you an idea of the scale of this coal mine. In the U.S. roads nothing can be bigger than 40 tons. Their trucks are 140 tons that this particular coal operation is. It just gives a vague idea of the size of this mine; it is just an incredible scale. You can see a truck that is a 140-ton truck there. I have been in the iron mines in Montana and Arizona and in northern Minnesota, whether it is copper or iron, the open pit mining. You are talking in this little tiny corner is when we talk about the huge mines. And, in fact, much of this area has already been covered up and started to be reclaimed. Now, this huge mine, these guys who are driving these 140-ton trucks, they did not know how to drive a car. There are no roads there, or to the degree there are roads, it takes you at most, I said, 15 miles an hour. So most of these drivers, they are training the Colombians, the Drummond oil mine, which is, I mean the coal mine people who come out of Alabama, this is a book on what they have done for social balance. Because when you are up--let me show one other picture, and I want to go back to the big map. I want to show this one for a second from Drummond. This is the coal cars. In Indiana we have a law that you cannot, a train cannot block an intersection for more than 20 minutes. I asked, do you have a 20-minute rule? They said, no, we have a 30-minute rule. Now, in that map, and I will have it back up in a minute, but basically it has to go from that coal mine all the way out to the Caribbean Sea. They load 90 cars at a time with coal. The 30-minute rule, because they only have one track, that track has to shut down for 30 minutes so the empty cars can come back in to get reloaded. The operation goes 24/7, 365 days a year. In other words, basically it is a permanent block to an intersection. They do not have a 20-minute rule. The 30-minute rule means you switch directions. So basically you would need an overpass. But they do not have any roads anyway. It is a jungle. Now what happened with Drummond, because if you are out in the middle of nowhere and you are doing constant filling of train cars as far as the eye can see that direction, as far as the eye can see that direction, that are going 24/7, and you do not have anybody who can drive the trucks, and you do not have very many people, what do you have to do? You have to build the infrastructure. So they have been building schools in the area. They have been building housing in the area. They have been doing health care in the area. Seven thousand meals a day are served by Drummond coal mine because when you come into this coal mine they have different various places where you can eat. They provide multiple shifts for people to eat. And they provide 7,000 meals a day, which means that is an incredible food operation. It is an incredible health care operation. And what they have chosen to do is invest in the infrastructure and the people. Now, what is interesting about this investment in people is that part of the challenge that you have, if you are going to change the drug patterns in Colombia, is you have to have some alternatives for the people. So here is roughly where the coal mine was. It goes up by that big mountain up there and it comes, the train track will go somewhat similar to the oil pipeline. The trains in 1999 were being shot up and intercepted. You could not get anybody to get coal out if you are going to die, so until you could get a little bit of order, they could not ship coal. So they had a negative growth rate, not because Colombia did not have products, but because Americans got so addicted to cocaine, and Europe got so addicted to cocaine, that it brought a violent group of people into their nation that made their railroads not working, that made their oil pipelines not working, not to mention the mining and the textiles. Now, what they have now, well, in that railroad in the area, when we were there--and like I say, once again, we were some of the first people to be able to move around in the country. So going up there, I said, are the FARC around here and the ELN and so on? And the president of the company says, no, they are not in the immediate area. They are over there. Now, over there was, ELN was in the north mountains about 10 miles away and the FARC were in two locations in the south mountains between 8 and 12 miles away. To me that was close. My little hometown of Grayville, Indiana, is 15 miles from downtown Fort Wayne, and I think of it as close to Fort Wayne; and when I said, are they close, I was thinking, Grayville to Fort Wayne terms to me is close, and this is half the distance. But at least they are up in the mountains. Well, why are they up in the mountains? Two reasons. One is the Uribe government has provided protection. For example, there are now police stations in every municipality. All 1,098 in Colombia now have a Colombian national police presence, which they did not have in 1999. On that train track they have police every so many minutes with a cell phone, and they are each supposed to call in; and if they do not call in, the army goes in to find out what has happened at that point of the track. So when Members of Congress say, why did you vote for money for pipeline protection, why did you vote for money for this, it is because we are trying to stabilize the railroad tracks and the pipelines, because if you can do that, the reason the ELN went to the hills is, thousands of these people are working for Drummond coal mine. When they are working for Drummond coal mine and getting health care and getting education and having a job, they do not want a bunch of revolutionaries around. It is not good for their lives. And so they basically fight back. Now, let me give you a couple of other stories. We spent $4 billion in Colombia. They spent $9 billion, and that $13 billion is what has led to this change in the pipeline. It has led to a change in the ability to move around on the roads. It has led to the change that now they are going to put a second track in on that railroad which will enable us to get more coal into the United States in our southern ports and in our East Coast, low sulfur coal that is environmentally much more favorable to the United States. Because the money that we have invested and the Colombians have invested has stabilized the mountainous zones in the north Colombian zones to a greater degree than it has been for a long time. Now the economy is growing at a 3 to 5 percent rate, not a negative growth rate like it was in 1999. There is a direct relationship between security and the ability to have economic alternatives. Let me briefly describe what we did last--well, I said I went to Colombia 10 to 12 times, somewhere in that range; I am guessing 11. But the first time I went to Colombia was not that long after I got elected. We went in and we were the first delegation other than I think Senator Specter had been into Cartagena for just a brief period. But we were the first ones to go into the center of the country, into Bogota. We were allowed to come in for 3 hours. When we landed at the airport we were to duck down, get in a basically tinted window car with machine guns coming out of it, with sharpshooters on all the roofs at the airport all along the route till we got to the embassy. We had so many police going around, anybody who was walking on the sidewalk had to go up to the side of the walls, one person basically kept walking. The police cop went up and pushed them against the wall because they were so afraid we were going to get assassinated. Ambassador Busby, former Ambassador Busby, who I referred to earlier, who lived and did not die in the book Clear and Present Danger, said he had over $1 million price on his head if they knew he was there. It was a very dangerous place, but we felt we needed to make a statement that we were going to stand with Colombia. The next time I went back, and the next couple of times we were able to stay finally overnight, I think, about the third or fourth trip. One of the trips we went in with the former chairman of the International Relations Committee Ben Gilman, a couple of different times as well as with then-Chairman Hastert that we went into the hospitals because unlike other places in the country and the world, Colombians are dying. The Colombian national police have lost the equivalent of 30,000 American police officers, given the size and proportion. They are getting shot up all the time. They are not getting shot up because somebody is robbing a bank. They are getting shot up because Americans are using cocaine. Because Americans are using cocaine, they are shooting their police. But they have been willing to fight. This is partly what we are trying to do in Iraq. What is happening in Colombia is what we are trying to do in Iraq. Colombia has a democracy that we are trying to rescue and keep from going down the tubes, so to speak, and it looks like they are well on their way back. But we built up their national police. Then we took vetted units in the military that had a horrible human rights track record. It has been a big battle. We had a ban on U.S. funds going there. We got vetted units. Now they have attorneys that walk around with their different things and they have to graph, if somebody gets killed, which way they were lying so they know they did not use human rights torture. Sometimes it can be inconvenient when you are fighting terrorists. But quite frankly, Colombia is doing the best job and the best human rights job of fighting terrorists who do not follow human rights rules, who are more than willing to shoot you in back, are more than willing to use torture. But we have trained vetted units, and whereas in the 1990s, to be kind, the Colombian military defense establishment could not have fought their way out of a paper bag, I have a small town of, say, New Haven in my district of 14,000, I do not think their military could have defeated the New Haven police department. And their equipment was better than the New Haven police department. They just did not know how to fight. They did not have command and control systems. They ran when they got in a fight with the FARC and it was a disaster. We trained units who are now winning battles and it is hard to win battles with terrorists. And it is the Colombians who are fighting that we have done the training, and they are even buying equipment. We put 4 billion in, but they put 9 billion in. Even though the drug problem was our problem, not their problem, they have enough of an economy that it is working. What we are trying to do in Iraq is what is working in Colombia. It has been an investment that has helped rebuild and establish the country of Colombia, such that the kidnappings are down like 67 percent. You can now move around the country. I started to say then after our first trip we were able then finally to stay after visiting a hospital a couple of times, finally able to stay overnight. The first time I stayed overnight in Bogota, they took us underneath the hotel just like in the movies and had all these police jumping out; and when we slept in our room, we had multiple police outside each of our doors and on the floor and the perimeter around Colombia. That was a different experience. Finally, they let us go out to eat somewhere other than the hotel. This may have been about the sixth or seventh trip. They let us go out to eat, and when we would go out to eat, we would have to go the wrong way on a one-way street. They would have to seal off the restaurant to make sure that they were not going to assassinate the American Congressmen when we went out to eat. But it was progress. We were going out to eat and we did not have as many police around the hotel, and it showed that there was a gradual progress occurring. Then we got to go to Cartagena. Then we got to walk around town in Cartagena. Then I went to President Uribe's inauguration; and what I would call a minor setback was as I was sitting with Barney Frank and we heard this big boom, Congressman Frank said, I have never heard of a one-gun salute. And it was a bomb, mortar shells hitting the side of the presidential palace while we were all inside. We had a cadre of about 20,000 troops around; but these guys, who were getting more and more sophisticated, launched the mortar shells from about 1\1/4\ miles away from the top of a building. As they launched those shells, they were not very accurate and they first were short. Then they hit an apartment building that killed, I think, 40 people and injured 100 or something like that. Then they launched over the palace and they hit the side of the palace where we all were. But by that time, I think they got 20 or 25 rounds out of 110, but by that time the Colombian Air Force and Army were on their case and they stopped shooting. But that was just about 4\1/2\ years ago with the inauguration of President Uribe. So then we continued to make progress. Now, I mentioned the ambassador could drive. This time we were able to go to Medellin. Nobody has been able to go to Medellin. We were able to go to the coal mine. Nobody has been able to go to the coal mine. We had protection. Yes, we were still in an armored vehicle, but it was a disguised armored vehicle. There were not any machine guns sticking out of it. Yes, the people around us had protection, but you did not see machine guns. And, yes, one of the police cops had a machine gun, but basically they were providing traffic guidance to try to move us. The meeting with President Uribe and others, they did not have a big army surrounding us like we were going to get killed before. You are cautious. It is still a violent country. But we are cautious in parts of our urban cities. The plain truth is that we have made progress in Colombia in establishing freedom and democracy and giving alternatives. In Medellin, we visited an AUC demobilization center. I mentioned they were the second biggest group, the paramilitaries. 21,000 have now laid down their arms, and we are investing and with some of the money we are eradicating coca to now get these people jobs and to track them and to match them up like the floral industry that is booming in Medellin. And we there met four of the people who had been displaced people from their villages, and we also met a former armed person who had been very violent with the AUC and who has now been trained and went back to get his college degree. Things are really changing in Colombia, thanks in part to our investment. We still have problems in coca, and the reason I wanted to show you this map is, guess what has happened. The coca has moved out here. It has moved into the jungle. But it is not terrorizing the people. Colombia now has a growing economy. They are providing us with critical things; and with that growing economy, they have asked the United States Government to buy with their money eight Blackhawk helicopters because we have their economy going again. We have stabilized it. It is still a challenge. I am disappointed we have not gotten rid of the coca as much as we thought we would with Plan Colombia, but we have made progress. We have a friend in the region. Now, this week President Uribe and President Bush have agreed to the Colombia Free Trade Agreement that at some point will come in front of the Congress. No free trade agreement is easy. This is very critical. It was very important for President Uribe to understand that in this process he could not put out everybody in his country and understand in the United States we could not put out. So, for example, in sugar he would have liked more free trade in sugar. I would have liked more free trade in sugar. In Fort Wayne, Indiana we have Edie's, the largest ice cream plant in the world. We have Kraft caramels up in Kendallville. Bread uses sugar. In Huntington, Indiana, Good Humor has the second biggest ice cream plant in the world. We use sugar. In the South, in Louisiana and Florida, there is a sugar lobby that wants to keep our sugar prices high; but ultimately they are very powerful and in agreement our sugar guys got some protection for a while, for a long while, quite frankly. Way too long for me. But at the same time in Colombia they grow rice. And if they, in fact, took the rice business away from having some protection, over 15 years they will make the adjustments and you can do that. So this trade agreement is a balanced trade agreement, trying to work it through. One of the interesting things is, to give you another kind of wrinkle on how economics work and how trade agreements work, I never thought I would be having a discussion about chicken hindquarters. Colombians tend to prefer dark meat, and Americans tend to prefer white meat. What happens in a trade agreement to say we are suddenly going to have free trade, guess what our chicken companies are going to do? We are going to dump all dark meat on Colombia under its value and put all the Colombian chicken people out of business, which a very important thing in their small villages are their chicken people. So they had to have some kind of protection for hind parts. But guess who else wanted to have some kind of balance in handling chicken hind parts? Our corn growers. We ship incredible amounts of corn into Colombia. At lunch one of the days, next to me was the head of Archer Daniels Midland in Colombia. He was a Colombian, had been educated in the United States. And the corn that comes in from the Midwest, huge quantities, and in some areas all our corn is going down to Colombia for the chicken farms. If they do not have any chicken farms, we are not going to sell them any corn, which is, I think, our second biggest export to Colombia. We are not going to sell any corn to Colombia if we kill the chicken market. So when you work these exchanges through, both countries, I believe, in this have a balance between the political realities of Colombia and the political realities of the United States. But here is the bottom line: free trade agreements like this with Colombia will help fuel the economy that has stabilized there more than anywhere else. With Chavez going crazy up there choking us on oil, we need to know where we are going to get oil and energy. We need to know who is going to be our friends in South America. And we need to work with countries that are there. We also have a secondary motive here. If they grow coca rather than chickens, if they grow coca rather than getting emeralds and gold out of the mine, if they grow coca instead of selling us coal, if they grow coca instead of textiles, we die and Europe dies. We have an incentive directly with the nation of Colombia to make sure that we can make their economy work, that we can make their government successful, that we can have law and order in Colombia, because what is good for them is goods for us; what is good for us is good for them. That is the way it should work. And I am very pleased that the Presidents of both countries have signed this agreement, and I hope that whether it is this year or next year, we can move that forward because it is extremely important to Central America, South America, and to the United States.

Mr. SOUDER

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

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that it be in order at any time to consider in the House Senate bill (S. 1777) to provide relief for the victims of Hurricane Katrina; that the bill be considered as read; that the amendment that I have placed at the desk be considered as adopted; and that the previous question be considered as ordered on the bill, as amended, to final passage without intervening motion except 1 hour debate equally divided and controlled by the chairman and ranking minority member of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and one motion to recommit which may not contain instructions.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, much of what we do here in Congress is very contentious. Our 1-minutes and 5-minutes tend to reflect a lot of those deep divisions. And while we sometimes share basic views, I think that they get carried to extremes sometimes on House debate. I want talk about something we have actually done in a bipartisan way. We often hear that we do not do anything here in a bipartisan fashion and that all we can agree on are naming post offices. But this week when the PATRIOT Act passes, inside the PATRIOT Act is the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Elimination Act, the largest and most comprehensive legislation ever done by a United States Congress on methamphetamine. Nearly 20 years ago there were some attempts to regulate some of what was then called ``crank'' and some variations of methamphetamine that had already started in Asia and had been in Hawaii and had trickled in, even a decade ago or a little longer, into the West Coast, in Oregon and Washington State and California, but had not really hit the United States in full force. Then over the last several years, Members of Congress have been coming here frustrated with the fact that our administration, from the Republican standpoint and from the Nation's, our present administration had not been responding aggressively enough to the Methamphetamine Act, and how to address the control of pseudoephedrine in the United States, as well as the ephedra and pseudoephedra that was coming into the United States that was making and going into the mom-and-pop meth labs, as well as the crystal meth. Senators Talent and Feinstein introduced a bill on the Senate side to do what many States were doing, and that is, put pseudoephedrine behind the counter. Majority Whip Blunt introduced similar legislation in the House. In addition, Members from both parties introduced many different bills. Congresswoman Hooley and Representative Kennedy, in particular, led the effort to try to go beyond just putting something behind the counter, but to try to regulate international legislation; and their bills were incorporated in a more comprehensive bill that then also absorbed the Blunt-Talent-Feinstein bill. This all was attached to the PATRIOT Act. And I would have just as soon had a free debate here on the House floor and dealt with this, but part of the thing is that as we moved this meth bill through, we came under tremendous counterattack from the pharmaceutical industry that did not want any limitations on pseudoephedrine in the United States. We came under heavy attack from the China lobby and the Mexico lobby that did not want the threat of decertification on them if they did not cooperate on controlling pseudoephedrine. What this bill will do is limit the daily purchase, it will limit the monthly purchase, require purchasers to show ID and sign in a log book. Therefore, as Indiana passes a law, people will no longer be able to go to Michigan and Ohio to get their pseudoephedrine and continue to kind of supply the raw material for all of the mom-and-pop labs, 900 last year in the State of Indiana, whereas Ohio only had 300, which, by the way, was a growth from 30. But we go beyond just the control of pseudoephedrine and the few remaining States that did not have that control. We closed loopholes in existing import-export and wholesale regulations, not only the main markets, but the spot market. There are basically only nine plants in the entire world that manufacture pseudoephedrine. We need China and India and several of the European countries, and the Czech Republic recently closed down their plant; we need to regulate this, know how many quantities are coming through. We need to do better control on the southwest border, where much of what pours in from other nations in the world, Mexico basically puts a minimum of 40 tons of raw pseudoephedrine beyond what they use in the United States that is used in mom-and-pop labs. We also try to address not only the precursors for the mom-and-pop labs, but what immediately moves in behind. As we have seen in Oklahoma, as we have seen in many other States, and even in my State where the mom-and-pop labs go down, the crystal meth comes in behind. The crystal meth is even more potent to the individuals. It is not as dangerous to the environment. It is not as dangerous to our local law enforcement people. You do not see explosions in homes that kill and maim little kids. But to the individual user, crystal meth is even more damaging than the homemade meth, because it is pure and even more addictive. And this often moves in behind. So then the treatment programs are stressed, the highways still have people on it, that is why in addition to the behind-the-counter, we have got to go to the raw pseudoephedrine that is going into the crystal meth labs in Mexico and some of the super labs that are still left in the West. We have increased and toughened penalties against meth traffickers and smugglers. We authorized the meth hot spots program, something the administration continues to try to zero out, and we have never had it authorized. This authorizes that program which makes it much harder for the administration to try to eliminate it, as well as increases funding in the authorizing for drug courts, for the drug endangered children program and programs to assist pregnant women addicted to meth. This is an historic step. When the Senate passes the PATRIOT Act tomorrow, there will be lots of debate about the PATRIOT Act and all of that. But inside that bill is the most significant bipartisan effort we have ever done in the United States Congress on methamphetamine. And I am thrilled that it is finally going to become law after languishing and battling and watching all of the different interests try to defeat this. This is a triumph for bipartisanship. It is a triumph for locals who came to us and asked this to be done. It is a triumph to all of our narcotics officers around the United States and all of the drug treatment people around the United States and prevention people who have been saying, when are you going to do something on meth? Well, this week we are.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, George Soros, the radical liberal financier who dedicated himself to defeating President George W. Bush in the last election, has taken a lesson from Jack Abramoff. As much of Abramoff's pernicious lobbying technique has come to light, we've seen how he was adept at manipulating certain conservative organizations to pursue a decidedly anti-conservative agenda, namely the promotion of gambling. By working hand in hand with the Traditional Values Coalition, TVC, for example, he was able in 2000 to undermine conservatives' best effort to outlaw on-line gambling. Proxy organizations played a fundamental role in Abramoff's strategy. Since 1974, the American Conservative Union has held the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, which is billed as a 3-day meeting for thousands of conservative activists and leaders to discuss current issues and policies and set the agenda for the future. I myself have addressed the conference in the past. One can imagine a conservative's surprise to read on the CPAC 2006 agenda that a representative of the Marijuana Policy Project, MPP, is slated to moderate--yes, moderate--a panel Friday discussing drug policy. For those who are unacquainted with it, the pro-marijuana MPP has been funded by Soros in the past. Also represented on the panel is the Drug Policy Alliance, which is Soros' principal pro-drug arm. Incidentally, the moderator himself is a convicted drug dealer. What on earth were the CPAC organizers thinking? Why would the American Conservative Union allow extremist liberals like George Soros and Peter Lewis--who is responsible for most of MPP's funding--to access a meeting of conservatives? And, in exactly whose estimation would there be balance in a debate moderated by the MPP? Thanks to Accuracy in Media Report Editor Cliff Kincaid, these are just a few of the questions that the CPAC organizers now face. I'd like to submit into the Record his article of February 7, 2006, entitled ``Soros Infiltrates Conservative Movement.'' In exchange for a donation, is this 32-year-old conservative conference turning itself into a Soros proxy organization just like Abramoff's TVC? Over the last number of months, we've been surprised to learn how one such as Abramoff was able to exploit conservatives for his own purposes. Surely in this environment we can't miss seeing it when it's happening once again. [From Accuracy in Media, Feb. 7, 2006] Soros Infiltrates Conservative Movement (By Cliff Kincaid) Calvina Fay of the Drug Free America Foundation has pulled out as a speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which begins in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, because a ``mini-debate'' she was scheduled to appear in had been stacked against her. As it now stands, the event will feature two advocates of drug legalization, both of them funded by leftist billionaire and anti-Bush activist George Soros. Having put most of the left-wing political movement and many liberal Democrats on his payroll, it is apparent that Soros is now working to manipulate the conservative movement. It is surprising that CPAC is facilitating his scheme. A convicted inside trader who specializes in manipulating the currencies of the nations of the world, Soros is usually depicted as a ``philanthropist'' who believes in an ``Open Society.'' Hence, the name of his major funding mechanism, the Open Society Institute. In the Soros view, of course, an ``open society'' means encouraging behavior that undermines the traditional values and culture of America. This is hardly ``conservative.'' In addition to promoting drug legalization, his causes include open borders, gay rights, abortion rights, opposition to the death penalty, lighter sentences for criminals, and assisted suicide. He tried almost single-handedly to buy the White House for Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election by spending over $20 million on controversial ``527'' organizations promoting his candidacy. On foreign policy issues, Soros is a big backer of the U.N. and opposes the Bush Administration's war in Iraq and handling of the war on terrorism. The scheduled Friday CPAC event on ``A Conservative Drug Policy'' was to feature a mini-debate between Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) and Calvina Fay. The ``moderator,'' hardly unbiased, was scheduled to be Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP). The Soros Open Society Institute has given the DPA millions of dollars, including $2.5 million in 2004 alone. MPP has been funded by Soros as well as Peter Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Corporation, who was arrested in New Zealand several years ago after customs officers found marijuana in his luggage. Lewis, who gave $340,000 to MPP in 2004, is also a major funder of the ACLU. Court documents show that Kampia himself was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to prison for possessing and intending to distribute marijuana. While paying thousands of dollars to appear at a conservative conference, MPP is selling $500 tickets to a March 30 fundraising ``party'' at the Playboy Mansion. Playboy founder Hugh Hefner provided the seed money for the drug legalization movement, which is now underwritten mostly by Soros and Lewis. ``Playmates will be available to give tours of the mansion grounds as you enjoy great music and comedy in one of America's most renowned settings,'' says MPP's website. A member of the ``host committee'' for the Playboy event is Tommy Chong, who participated in pro-marijuana movies as part of the ``Cheech and Chong'' team and served nine months in prison for selling drug paraphernalia. You won't need an NSA surveillance program to know what's going on in the Playboy Mansion on March 30. When Calvina Fay saw that the CPAC ``debate'' had been stacked against her, she pulled out. However, her group will still have a booth at CPAC. So will the Drug Policy Alliance. Later in the day, after the ``debate,'' Kampia's MPP will host an event for all CPAC attendees and guests on why the war on drugs should not target marijuana users. It is not known if Playmates will appear. The Drug Policy Alliance also participated in CPAC last year, boasting that Executive Director Nadelmann was ``well- received'' and ``appeared on several conservative radio shows coinciding with the conference.'' This is troubling because DPA and MPP are part of a major deception campaign to convince people that marijuana is harmless or even has medical benefits. Accuracy in Media last year disclosed the existence of documentary evidence that the ``medical marijuana'' movement is a fraud that exploits sick people. Video footage of a pro-marijuana event showed Ed Rosenthal, formerly of High Times magazine, speaking to dozens of marijuana activists. ``With all the talk about medical marijuana, I have to tell you that I also use marijuana medically (laughter),'' he says. ``I have a latent glaucoma, which has never been diagnosed (more laughter). And the reason why it has never been diagnosed is because I've been treating it (laughter). . . But there is a reason why I do use it. And that is because I like to get high. (cheers, applause). Marijuana is fun.'' Another video excerpt showed Richard Cowan, former director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, saying that ``The key to it [legalization] is medical access because once you have hundreds of thousands of people using marijuana medically under medical supervision the whole scam is going to be blown. . . Once there's medical access and if we continue to do what we have to do--and we will-- then we'll get full legalization.'' Not surprisingly, a Federal investigation of ``medical marijuana'' clubs and dispensaries in California has found they had been used as a cover for drug dealing and money laundering. At the same time, evidence of a connection between marijuana and mental illness continues to mount. The influence of marijuana figures in the sensational murder case of Colin Roger Cotting, a 16-year-old in Alaska who allegedly raped his stepmother, beat her to death with a baseball bat, and stuffed her in a freezer. The murder resulted from a dispute when Cotting was confronted by his stepmother about his marijuana use. Cotting told police that he was too stoned on marijuana to remember what had happened. In a case that received national attention, Joseph Smith, the convicted killer of 11-year-old Carlie Brucia, tried to blame his criminal behavior on using drugs, including cocaine and marijuana. British newspapers are now covering a sensational case of ``cannabis psychosis,'' involving a music producer, Lisa Voice, who ``was viciously assaulted in her home by a family friend who had been made psychotic by the drug,'' as the London Sunday Times noted. She suffered a broken jaw, broken nose, collapsed lung, and eye injuries, and has already had 11 medical operations to rebuild her face and head. The attacker had been smoking marijuana since the age of 15 and believed he was getting subliminal messages from television. In Britain, penalties for the use and possession of marijuana had been lowered after the drug had been reclassified. But Dr. Shahrokh Mireskandari, lawyer for Lisa Voice, was quoted in the Sunday Times as saying, ``Let government ministers who say cannabis is a harmless drug come and explain that decision to Mrs. Voice and her many doctors. Cannabis should never have been reclassified and people such as Mrs. Voice now face a lifetime of pain because of the dangers of this drug.'' So why is CPAC giving Nadelmann, Kampia and their ilk a platform?

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank Chairman King and Subcommittee Chairman Lungren for their leadership in bringing this to the floor. I have serious problems with some non-Homeland Security parts of this bill, but I want to praise the Homeland Security section because I think they have done a terrific job. I would like to thank them in particular for two key provisions that we have been working to fix ever since Homeland Security has broken them. One is in section 502, the Office of Air and Marine Operations, AMO; and in section 503 relating to the Native American Customs Patrol Officers known as the Shadow Wolves. Section 502 relates to the AMO, which has historically been responsible for interdicting drug smuggling airplanes and ``go-fast'' speed boats; for supporting Customs drug investigations and raids as well as migrant interdictions; for providing airspace security in the Nation's capital and at special events like the Olympics; and for providing crucial maritime patrol aircraft, most notably the fleet of P-3 radar planes, for drug interdiction operations in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. Now they are being deployed as a picket fence. It makes no sense, and this bill helps to start to fix that before we destroy one of our best units in the United States Government. In section 503, the Shadow Wolves have fallen victim to the same kind of over-compartmentalized thinking that threatens AMO. The Shadow Wolves are one of the last remaining Customs Patrol Officer units in the country. They control one of the critical points of the border and operate on the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation in southern Arizona, which has 70 miles of the U.S.-Mexican border running through it. Here we have a Native American group that has been honored all over the United States and the world, something we need at several other parts of the border, and they want to break them up and make them fit some arbitrary thing, when they are really more like detectives than patrol officers, and put them as part of the Border Patrol. I do not have any axe to grind with the Border Patrol. I think they do a great job. But units like AMO and the Shadow Wolves do not fit this cookie cutter approach in trying to systematize this agency, and this bill fixes that before we lose some of our most effective anti-drug units in our entire government. And I thank the chairman and the subcommittee chairman for finally addressing this question.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Madam Speaker, I rise today to commend the distinguished chairman of the Education and Workforce Committee for putting together a well-balanced bill to reform our Nation's outdated pension laws. Putting this bill together has been a long and difficult process, and the Chairman should be commended for his perseverance and diligence. Our Nation's pension laws have not undergone comprehensive reform for over 30 years. Unfortunately, the recent examples of United Airlines and Bethlehem Steel show that this system is broken. We cannot have a situation where companies continually underfund their pension plans, go bankrupt, and then transfer their pensions to the PBGC. Workers lose the money they were depending on for retirement, and American taxpayers are expected to pick up the slack for companies' irresponsibility. H.R. 2830 will help ensure that workers' pensions are better funded. It changes current law to require plans to be 100 percent funded. If plans are underfunded, this bill will force companies to make up their shortfall in 7 years. H.R. 2830 will also help stabilize the PBGC by raising the premiums companies pay for the PBGC's protection. Further, by requiring employers that terminate their pensions in bankruptcy to pay an annual premium of $1,250 per participant to the PBGC for the 3 years after they emerge from bankruptcy, this bill makes terminating pension plans a less attractive option for employers. Companies who want to dump their pensions to escape bankruptcy and raise their bottom line will have a tougher time doing so. Furthermore, the Pension Protection Act will help stop the unacceptable practice of labor and management negotiating for pension benefits that both sides know are unaffordable. If a pension plan is underfunded, it will not be able to increase benefits or pay shutdown benefits unless it pays for such benefits immediately. I would also like to commend Chairman Boehner for his efforts this week to reach an agreement with the United Auto Workers union over their concerns with the bill. Mr. Chairman, I have the largest manufacturing district in the country, and many union members let me know their concerns with this bill in its original form. Unfortunately, this bill would have allowed some companies to freeze their employees' pension benefits and limit accruals--even if they had the money to fund them. The agreement that Chairman Boehner reached with the UAW requires companies to use all the money in their plan before they can freeze benefits and limit accruals. This will prevent companies from gaming their funded status in order to deliberately trigger these benefit restrictions. Again, I thank Chairman Boehner for his hard work writing a bill supported by such a broad coalition of both labor and management groups, and urge my colleagues to support it.

Mr. SOUDER. Madam Speaker, I appreciate my friend and colleague from California's passion, even when he is wrong and overstates his case. The comparison to Iraq is just such an egregious misrepresentation of American democracy to anybody in the world who is watching this. We sat in the Education Committee for days, into the late hours of the night taking amendment after amendment. They lost the amendments. That does not mean democracy does not work. It means that we spent in the areas of the subcommittee and the committee working this for years, working through committee and bringing the document to the floor with many compromises in it. Now, I share some of the concerns of my colleague from California, because I have had a frustration in watching people who work their whole life, see their pensions reduced or eliminated at the time some of the executives have enriched themselves. And I supported this bill. I supported this bill because long term it will help the Pension Guaranty Corporation, but short term our goal has to be how are these companies not going to go into bankruptcy? How can we make sure that they can function, have their pension funds there and avoid the problem, and then long term stabilize the Guaranty Corporation? Secondly, as a representative of the number one manufacturing district in America, I have more manufacturing jobs and percentage of the work force in my district in manufacturing than any other, I was very concerned about some of the provisions and how this might relate to GM. I very much appreciate the leadership of Chairman Boehner in our committee of working first the process through so that people have the hopes of pension. I mean, we all understand the basic principle here. We have the same problem in Social Security. We are more underfunded, quite frankly, than private areas. We have this in Medicare. We have this in any savings program where we assumed there was going to be a huge work force paying in and now it is a declining work force paying into a huge retirement population. How do we work this through? This bill is an attempt to address it in a comprehensive way. But I was concerned about a provision that would allow the basic pensioners to have to pay first. In other words, there would have been the option, even when the company had an ability, through changing their funds around, to not freeze pension wages, and pension benefits, that they could have done so. Chairmen Boehner and Chairman Thomas have fixed this. This is now supported by the UAW and by GM. That is a pretty big accomplishment, to have a pension bill supported by the UAW and GM, and I want to commend the leadership of the Education Committee, Chairman Boehner and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee for working out this critical thing so that management does not get crippled in their ability to put funds in to strengthen these pensions. At the same time, people who are 50, 55, already retired, who do not have the ability to adjust their pensions will not get it arbitrarily frozen. And I think this is a great compromise that had hours and hours and days and days of work on this, and it is an example of how democracy works, not how it does not work.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Madam Speaker, I thank the chairman for his cosponsorship and his leadership in making sure that this meth bill can pass this bill in the form of passing a conference report, which is the only real way to get this done. I also want to say briefly that I support section 215, which amends the Import and Export Act to make sure that we can have better prosecution methods. Eighteen of the 40 major organizations that are involved in terrorism also deal in narcotics. The Methamphetamine Act is the single, first comprehensive anti-meth bill that we have ever introduced in Congress, let alone passed in Congress. It is a sweeping anti-meth bill. It will require all pseudoephedrine and ephedrine products to be stored behind the counter or in a locked cabinet; impose a daily and monthly purchase limit; require purchasers to show ID and sign a logbook; and require training of all employees handling the product. It closes a number of loopholes in existing import, export, and wholesale regulations of meth precursor chemicals, including import and manufacturing quotas to ensure no oversupply leads to diversion; and regulation of the wholesale ``spot market.'' It requires reporting of major meth precursor exporters and importers. It would hold them accountable for their efforts to prevent diversion to meth production. It toughens Federal penalties against meth traffickers and smugglers. It authorizes the Meth Hot Spots program as well as increases funding for drug courts, drug endangered children programs, and programs to assist pregnant women addicted to meth. In addition, it has EPA environmental regulations. I want to thank Democrats and Republicans for all their bipartisan effort. This is something we did in a bipartisan way. This is our best chance to really get ahead of this epidemic that swept from Asia to Hawaii to California, the Northwest to the Plains, to the Great Lake States, is headed into the East and is into North Carolina, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New York and headed to the Atlantic Ocean. This is our attempt, a massive coordinated multicommittee that took many chairmen to do this, Senators Talent and Feinstein of the Senate to do this. I thank Chairman Sensenbrenner, I thank the leadership, because this is a big day for those of us who have been fighting the anti-meth cause.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, anyone who has been exposed to this is just appalled. And one thing that surprises me is even as our own country was lackadaisical on international prostitution for many years and would not stand up on international conferences, and as we are lackadaisical about looking at the horror of pornography worldwide, we are then surprised that there is this huge demand for both young boys and young girls in sexual trafficking. We need to understand what some of the core issues are that are driving this. In the subcommittee I chair, we got involved in a case where USAID funded an NGO that was complicit in human trafficking. With one group of funds to one NGO from the State Department, they were trying to rescue minor girls from a brothel in India. Another NGO funded by our tax dollars at USAID interfered in the rescue and ultimately facilitated the potential retrafficking of the girls. We need legislation like this so we can be the leader in stopping sex trafficking and go directly after those agencies in the United States that are complicit in this. Lastly, I want to thank our former colleague, Linda Smith, for devoting so much of her personal time in rescuing these young girls. Human trafficking is--plain and simple--modern slavery. The victims of human trafficking, by and large, are women and children in extreme poverty. They suffer some of the worst crimes imaginable. This bill makes the necessary provisions for our country to continue as the global leader in fighting human trafficking, and to do what is right at every level of government in order to effectively combat the scourge of human trafficking. This bill effectively ensures that various agencies in our government are united in their efforts and armed with appropriate tools to combat trafficking in humans. I absolutely do not want to see another situation, like that being investigated by the Subcommittee I chair, where a USAID-funded NGO is complicit in human trafficking. This situation involved the efforts of one NGO, with funds from the State Department, trying to rescue minor girls from a brothel in India, and another NGO, funded by USAID, interfering in the rescue, and ultimately facilitating the potential retrafficking of the girls. It is critical that the United States and its agencies and programs are united in efforts to combat human trafficking. This bill is essential for such efforts. Among the key provisions of this bill that strengthen our efforts against the crime of human trafficking, while also providing necessary help for the victims: First, it strengthens our efforts to combat sexual exploitation and trafficking crimes committed by ``peacekeepers'' in war-torn countries; It directs the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, to establish a pilot program to help victims of trafficking by providing residential treatment facilities; It authorizes new programs aimed at reducing demand for commercial sex while also strengthening law enforcement programs aimed at investigating and prosecuting trafficking in persons; Includes compassionate, essential, provisions to assist victims of human trafficking--those women and children who have seen the worst side of humanity--to put their lives back together. This bill strengthens existing human trafficking laws by reaching out to help the victims with various forms of emotional and material support programs, such as providing guardians ad litem for alien children who are suspected victims of human trafficking, and providing victims with access to legal counsel. H.R. 972 gives our law enforcement agencies the tools necessary to fight against this terrible crime of human trafficking, domestically and internationally. The bill also incorporates child protection and trafficking prevention activities into USAID, State, and DOD post-conflict, and post natural-disaster relief programs, increasing anti-trafficking efforts in situations where so many women and children are exploited. I commend my colleague, Mr. Chris Smith, for his leadership on this important issue. He has done more than anyone I know to bring attention to this terrible crime and its victims, and he has been the driving force behind efforts to combat human trafficking. Mr. Speaker, thank you for bringing this vital legislation to the Floor today. I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 972, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.