madam speaker , i rise in support of this rule and the underlying bill .  i believe this piece of legislation is one of the most important pieces of legislation that we will take up in the 109th congress , and i do not believe it is getting an adequate level of public attention considering the enormity of the significance .  in my 11 years in the house of representatives , i have seen more and more the movement of our economy into a global economy where our u.s. corporations are increasingly finding themselves having to compete no longer with other domestic corporations , but foreign companies that operate under very , very different rules in their domestic country of origin , and particularly as it relates to pension plans .  what i am getting at , madam speaker , is that we desperately need to modernize our pension laws and probably most importantly , more than anything else , we have seen tragically , in recent years , many workers come to their retirement years to find that their pension plans are insolvent , that the company that had guaranteed them a retirement is bankrupt , and increasingly that these pension plans are underfunded .  now is this a perfect bill ?  no .  there is no bill that comes through a legislative process as complex as this involving two committees that anybody can label as perfect .  but this is moving us in the right direction .  we are going to go to conference with the senate and what is going to emerge is going to be a good bill .  i think this is a very good product .  chairman boehner and chairman thomas deserve a great deal of credit for the effort and hard work they have put into this .  i believe this is going to have ramifications for protecting our workers and making our companies more competitive in this global marketplace so we can increasing compete effectively and create jobs and protect jobs and defend the hardworking american people who are depending on these retirement plans to be there in their retirement years .  