ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The following news flash cheered me for the better part of a second:
“Large telecom companies and attorneys general from every state unveiled Thursday a new pact for combating robocalls, the latest step toward cutting off such calls before they reach a consumer’s phone,” The Wall Street Journal reported breathlessly in an “exclusive.”
The second paragraph slowed my pounding heart a bit:
“Some of these carriers are doing some of these things. We need all carriers to do all of these things,” said North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein. He said he hopes the industry cooperation will help “shine a light on activity occurring in the dark.”
All that took a second before I realized that, yes, the cellphone carriers (telecom companies) and states attorneys general say they intend to smash to smithereens solicitors’ ability to smother us with robocalls.
Sure, their intention to act decisively and effectively appears commendably high.
But that’s because hot air rises.
None of the programs I downloaded on my iPhone blocks the solicitation calls that outrageously invade my privacy and impel me to want the strictest possible governmental ban on all telephone sales intrusions.
I and every true American want draconian penalties and a special federal force of enforcers (FFE) equipped with the latest and greatest in tactical nuclear weapons to nail every miscreant violator who dares reveal or dial my private cell number — or anyone else’s.
And this FFE has a clear mandate to muzzle the mangy mouths not just of robocall-factory operators.
The real SOBs that call you live from some hoggish huckster’s boiler-room juggernaut of unbridled predaceousness should face pit-of-hell punishment.
I’m talking here about federal penalties ranging from tar and feathering to rendition to the famed truth-extraction chambers of that moral epicenter of the religion, Saudi Arabia.
The presidential candidate who swears on a stack of copies of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” to do that, in his first month in office, gets my total wholehearted grateful support (but only if his initials are the 4th, 10th and 20th letters of the English-language alphabet).
Yes, the irony of Adam Smith and the advocacy of government breaking the fingers of the Great Unseen Hand is noted and intended.
And, to coin a fresh expression, it’s intended to be out of the box.
As are most of The Donald’s policy moves that cause the “What, me a Republican?” ensemble of Matthew Dowds, Paul Ryans, Bush Pères, Fils and their waterboys — yes, the Compasionata of the Republican Party — to pull their white hairs out and cross the aisle to lap-dance Democrats.
You don’t think the privacy intruding hucksters lobby hasn’t more juice than even that Who-Knew? hari-kari expert Jeffrey Epstein or the powerful “friends” who visited his Lolitavilles at 9 East 71st St. on Manhattan Island or the island he owned in the utterly inappropriately named Virgin Islands?
Think again.
Try holding your breath till you see telephone solicitors, robo or live, bloody their noses against a no-call wall.
This would be a wall, we gather from the attorneys general’s announcement, erected by lawmakers revealing a surprising willingness to turn down the lush green of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Green doled out to campaign and party fun-bundlers by honest citizens on honest telehawkers’ payroll just trying to help reelect their good-government lawmakers, governors, county commissioners, councilmen (“council people,” for the mush minds).
See, no call wall, but you’re not still holding your breath.
So, suicide by self-strangulation is not so easy after all — unless you took the same classes Epstein took at that exclusive bunkbed papers-sheets suicide school in the Caribbean.
The one they’re still looking for.
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