Page:United States Statutes at Large Volume 107 Part 3.djvu/476

 107 STAT. 2414 PUBLIC LAW 103-204—DEC. 17, 1993 (1) some 43,000,000 Americans have one or more physical or mental disabilities, and this number is increasing; (2) discrimination against individiuds with disabilities persists in such critical areas as employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting, and access to public services; (3) individuals with disabilities continually encounter various forms of discrimination, including outright intentional exclusion, the discriminatory effects of architectural, transportation, and conmiunication barriers, overprotective rules and policies, failure to make modifications to existing facilities and practices, exclusionai^ qualification standards and criteria, segregation, and relegation to lesser services, programs, activities, benefits, jobs, or other opportunities; (4) census data, national polls, and other studies have documented that people with disabilities, as a group, occupy an inferior status in our society, and are severely disadvantaged socially, vocationally, economically, and educationally; (5) individuals with disabilities are a discrete and insular minority who have been faced with restrictions and limitations, subjected to a history of purposefiil unequal treatment, and relegated to a position of poUtical powerlessness in our society, bas^ on characteristics that are beyond the control of such individuals and resulting from stereotypic assumptions not truly indicative of the individual ability of such mdividuals to participate in, and contribute to, society; (6) the Nation's proper goals regarding individuals with disabilities are to assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent Uving, and economic self-sufficiency for such individuals; and (7) the continuing existence of unfair and unnecessary discrimination and prejudice denies people with disabilities the opportunity to compete on an equal basis and to pursue those opportunities for which our free society is justifiably famous, and costs the United States billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses resultingfiromdependency and nonproductivity. (b) SENSE OF THE CONGRESS.— I t is the sense of the Congress that the chief executive officer of the Resolution Trust Corporation, the Director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Chairperson of the Board of Directors of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Chairperson of the Federal Housing Finance Board should take all necessarv steps within each such agency to ensure that individuals with disaoilities and entities owned by individuals with disabilities, including financial institutions, investment banking firms, underwriters, asset managers, accountants,fundproviders of legal services, are availed of all opportunities to compete in a manner which, at a minimum, does not discriminate on the basis of their disability for contracts entered into by the agency to manage the institutions and their assets for which the agency is responsible or to perform such other functions authorized under any law applicable to such agency. SEC. 34. REPORT TO CONGRESS BY SPECIAL COUNSEL. (a) REPORT.—Not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Special Counsel appointed under section 2537 of the Crime Control Act of 1990 (28 U.S.C. 509 note) shall submit

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