Annoying-- Some Would Say Unbearable-- Solicitation Calls Are Back

Pallone pretends he opposes robocalls but he keeps taking their bribes and pretending

I imagine they stopped for a couple of months because call centers closed down. But I've noticed the calls identified with a "V" on my landline's screen-- solicitation calls and robocalls-- are back. It's just one or two a day now, down from 20-25 a day. People hate them and want government to do something about them-- not pretend they're doing something about them (while taking their bribes, the way chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Frank Pallone does).

Over 3 million people are employed by U.S. call centers and the big companies that operate them lobby extensively and give gigantic bribes to politicians in both political parties. So we'll never be rid of them... unless we outlaw political bribery itself... and good luck with that.

There are 7,400 call centers-- employing over 50 people each-- in the U.S. The biggest-- and most grotesque-- one is Alorica (47,298 employees), but there are plenty of other companies operating call centers like AT&T (47,152), Verizon (40,614), Conduent (28,144), Teleperformance (22,548), Comcast (17,940), Spectrum (15,908), Teletech (13,394), Sykes (13,217), Sitel (11,523), ADP (11,374).

Robo calls and phone solicitations are hated by everyone. But the government-- at best-- takes half-steps to keep them from annoying and scamming people. Yesterday-- as the Supreme Court-- prepares to decide whether automated calls to cellphones, however annoying they may be, are constitutionally protected-- constitutional law professor Garrett Epps penned a piece for The Atlantic on the issue: The Supreme Court Could Use the First Amendment to Unleash a Robocall Nightmare. "Today," he wrote, "advocates for 'free speech' will offer a good way for the Court to become the least popular institution in America: by making it decide that Americans have to live with unsolicited, repeated prerecorded calls-- so-called robocalls-- to their cellphones."

The call centers and their allies are trying to use the First Amendment to challenge a federal law that forbids anyone from calling a cellphone to transmit a recorded message.

They are enough of a nuisance that I don’t answer my cellphone anymore if I don’t recognize the number. They are also forbidden under a law called the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), passed in 1991. But the plaintiffs in this case-- a professional organization of political managers, strategists, and pollsters-- are asking the Court for it to be otherwise, to invalidate the TCPA’s robocall prohibition. If they prevail, it will be open season on your cellphone, courtesy of your Supreme Court.

As the Electronic Privacy Information Center warned in an amicus brief in this case, technology in robocalls has reached a staggering level: “There are now dozens of services offering mass texting software to marketers that are easily accessible online.” These companies offer ways to “spoof” (that is, portray the calling number as a local number), to make thousands of calls at once, and to drop voicemails into customer voicemails. With a 30-second online search, I found myself being offered the services of a company highlighting that its “calling capacity has been expanded to allow over 16 million calls daily for large political broadcasts.”

Does the First Amendment protect this intrusive technology, which is, in many ways, tailor-made for large-scale fraud?

The 1991 statute made it unlawful “to make any call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using any automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice... to any telephone number assigned to a … cellular telephone service.” The penalties for violations can reach as high as $1,500 a call. (One witness at a congressional hearing in 2018 told the lawmakers that the Federal Communications Commission was pursuing him with a demand for $180 million in fines for an alleged spoofed robocall campaign.)

So far, so good. But in 2015, for reasons that aren’t clear, Congress quietly inserted a new exemption into a mammoth budget bill. Under the amendment, robocalls would be permitted if they were “made solely to collect a debt owed to or guaranteed by the United States.”

There’s little legislative history to explain the change, but it was obviously a bonanza for private collection agencies. Note that it is not simply debts owed to the federal government; the exemption allows collection robocalls for any debt that the United States guarantees. When it considered the statute, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals noted that as many as 41 million student loans are guaranteed by the federal government; it noted also that “various other categories of such debt are handled through other departments, which include the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services.”

The 2015 amendment immediately attracted the attention of industry groups, including the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC), an industry group whose members run political campaigns or advise political groups seeking to influence public opinion. These members, the group’s brief says, “make calls to discuss candidates and issues, solicit candidate donations, conduct polls on political and policy issues, encourage voters to return their ballots, and organize ‘get out the vote’ efforts.”

Under FCC regulations, political calls can be made to residential numbers. But, the commission argues, cellphones present different privacy interests, and robocalls to them are much more intrusive. At the same time, the number of households that don’t have landlines is exploding, so the ability to call landlines is less valuable than it was.

After the 2015 amendment was enacted, the AAPC brought a suit in a federal court in North Carolina, asking the court to strike down the entire robocall ban. Its argument deployed one of the most powerful and elusive concepts in First Amendment law: the idea of a “content-based restriction on speech.”

“Content basis” as a legal category originated with a 1972 case called Police Department of the City of Chicago v. Mosley, a challenge to a Chicago ordinance that banned picketing within 150 feet of a school-- unless the picketing was part of a “labor dispute.” The Supreme Court unanimously struck down the ordinance; in an opinion for seven justices, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote, “Above all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.”

...If any differentiation at all among categories of speech violates the First Amendment—if, as Kennedy believed, there is no way to balance the importance of that rule with other interests—then the AAPC is right. The First Amendment says we all have to field phone calls—dozens or maybe hundreds a day, to the point that our cellphones become useless. If the Court refuses to extend the new, rigid doctrine to robocalls, it will call into question the repeated preachments from the high bench that government can’t ban speech just because people don’t like it.

However, if it does strike down the robocall rule—well, as the southern saying goes, it will pretty much be running without opposition for the office of SOB.

One of the sleaziest and most destructive (and powerful) lobbying firms in America-- Squire Patton Boggs-- sent out a pre-packaged, pro-call center "OpEd" to California media yesterday "reporting" negatively on AB-3007, the Assembly's latest attempt to prevent robo-call operations from invading everyone's privacy. The twisted and unsigned OpEd attempts to make the case that current ineffective regulations are good enough. No Californians think they are. The call centers are furious because the new bill would "add to the existing robocall consent requirement by authorizing a person called who gave prior consent pursuant to a prior agreement to revoke that consent 'at any time and in any reasonable manner, regardless of the context in which the consent was provided.' Additionally, the bill would repeal the authorization for the use of automatic dialing-announcing devices to make calls pursuant to an established business relationship or the recipient’s request. Moreover, this bill would require telephone corporations, upon request, and at no additional charge, to make technology that mitigates consumer impacts of automatic dialing-announcing devices available to customers and to offer to customers an option to have the telephone corporation prevent calls and text messages originating from a particular source. These requirements would be implemented by the Public Utilities Commission." And this is exactly what Californians have been demanding for years.

The call centers and their scumbag lobbyists are also upset because they can be sued if they continue to annoy people and "the bill would also authorize the court to impose up to treble damages for a willful or knowing violation of those requirements."

The Squire Patton Boggs author of the article threatens that "If AB 3007 gets signed into law, I have no doubt that another wave of robocalls litigation in California will be coming in this way."

The trade organization representing the call centers is USTelecom and they spend millions of dollars lobbying and bribing members of Congress. So far this cycle they gave over $1,000 each to 25 members of Congress from both of the corrupt political parties. These are all members who would sell their mothers:

• Shore PAC (Jersey crook Frank Pallone's PAC)- $7,500
• Filemon Vela (Blue Dog-TX)- $7,000
• Frank Pallone (D-NJ)- $5,000
• Keystone Fund (Mike Doyle's PAC)- $5,000
• Hawaii PAC (Brian Schatz's PAC)- $5,000
• Robert Latta (R-OH)- $3,000
• Bill Johnson (R-OH)- $3,000
• CherPAC (Cheri Bustos' super-corrupt PAC)- $2,500
• Mike Doyle- (D-PA)- $2,500
• Billy Long (R-MO)- $2,500
• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)- $2,500
• Steve Scalise (R-LA)- $2,500
• Mark Warner (D-VA)- $2,500
• Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)- $2,500
• Greg Walden (R-OR)- $2,500
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)- $2,000
• Marc Veasey (New Dem- TX)- $2,000
• New Millennium PAC (Robert Menendez's PAC)- $2,000
• Eliot Engel (New Dem-NY)- $2,000
• Jeff Duncan (R-SC)- $2,000
• Brian Schatz (D-HI)- $2,000
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)- $1,500
• Jim Clyburn (D-SC)- $1,500
• Dan Sullivan (R-AK)- $1,500
• Lou Correa (Blue Dog)- $1,500

They also wrote $1,000 checks for over 30 other members this year-- and the year is still young! Everytime you get a robo call, think of all the nice bribes the companies pay Frank Pallone, Kevin McCarthy and Cheri Bustos. How to stop robo calls and telephone scams? How about starting with 20 year prison terms for the owners and managers of the companies (because I'm mostly opposed to capital punishment)? Oh, yeah... and stop allowing bribery to members of Congress like Frank Pallone.