SHOW: CNN Crossfire

HEADLINE: FTC to Set up List to Block Telemarketer Calls

BYLINE: Tucker Carlson, Paul Begala

BODY:

BEGALA: Washington regulators want to help you get rid of pesky calls from telemarketers. The Federal Trade Commission wants to set up a list that you can put your name on to block 80 percent of those unwanted calls. They often come during dinner time or worse, during CROSSFIRE. But to do so the Feds need $16 million to get started, and Republican Congressman Billy Tauzin the chairman of the committee involved says hold the phone.

He's worried that the FTC's crackdown may duplicate efforts under way by the FCC and other agencies in Washington.  In Chicago, Robert Bulmash, the president and founder of Private Citizen and the author of a 39-page book called "So You Want to Sue a Telemarketer".  And here in Washington, Fred Smith, president and founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

CARLSON: Mr. Bulmash, it's hard for me to believe and I didn't even know until today that at this point in American history when the country is under siege from foreign threats, from terrorism. There are people who really believe the federal government ought to spend millions of dollars, not to mention energies protecting people from telemarketers. Doesn't strike me as a huge threat.

ROBERT BULMASH, PRES. & FOUNDER, PRIVATE CITIZEN: It doesn't have to be a foreign threat to be invading our homes.  We have a right to be left alone.  We have a right to be left alone some place.  And if that right doesn't exist at least in our homes that right doesn't exist at all in America.  We're people.  We're human beings.  We're not walking wallets.  And that's how the telenuisance industry is treating us.

CARLSON: Do you have evidence? I mean, have people been killed by telemarketers? No, let me ask you a real question and that is. In this age when people have caller I.D. among other things, when there are electronic ways for the individual, the individual citizen to repel telemarketers why should the federal government get involved?

BULMASH: Because first of all, I estimated that over $2 billion a year is spent by residents with telephone companies to get Caller I D, unlisted numbers, privacy manager, call intercept services. It's like an arms war.  The telephone companies are selling equipment and phone numbers to the telenuisance industry, and then they're selling residents equipment in order to block the calls that are helped along by the telephone companies.  Everybody's making money off of this and we are losing our privacy.  Our right to be left alone.

BEGALA: Thank you. It's always good to see you. One of the things I love about you is you're not afraid to defend the indefensible. Telenuisance, I love that phrase that Robert has just coined...How many of you think these telenuisance guys are a huge pain in the ass? We're swimming against public opinion here.

SMITH: A degree. But there are a lot of irritating things in America. There are people who don't like talking head talk shows. Horrible!

BEGALA: Lock them up, too.

SMITH: But the fact is we don't have federal laws. Nuisance is part of a free speech society. It's a society that recognizes that advertising and the ability to reach people, even people who don't think they want to hear what you have to say can be very useful. It breaks some of the monopolies we've seen in the past. Without telemarketing would the telephone deregulation have gone as far as it has? You have to find some way to get the new person on the block.

And crazy Eddie TVs and telemarketers are nuisances, they're irritating, they're maddening, but they're part of the competitive process, part of free speech, and we jeopardize our rights. Bounty hunters who basically are going to get paid because they didn't essentially put your list on the name right are really assuming that government knows how to list manage. After 9/11, one of the things we found out, the government's not all that good at list management. Indeed government lists have a pretty sordid record in history. Do we really want another government list where if they make mistakes, what will happen? They'll get a bigger budget, a bigger agency, more power.

CARLSON: But Mr. Bulmash, it seems to me that in your attacks on an entire industry, what you're really attacking is the elderly, students, people who need extra money, in short, telemarketers who are people, too.  And you're going after them like they're not even human beings.

BULMASH: And what about the elderly, the ill, the infirm at home, trying to recover after a hospital stay with arthritis, with emphysema that can't get to the phone.  These telemarketers know before they make their next call that the most likely result of that call is going to serve only to disturb the person called in their home.

CARLSON: Aren't they offering companionship, too?

BULMASH: Companionship?

CARLSON: Well, sure, they're calling to say, look...

BULMASH: They're a bacteria.

CARLSON: I'll talk to you. I'll listen to you as long as you like, I'm here for you. That doesn't count?

SMITH: One of my families pointed out that a Smith would talk to a lamp post. There are people who like the conversation.

BULMASH: You know, there are hundreds of cigarette outlets in mini marts and businesses throughout the country.  What if all 100 million of them started calling all the phone numbers in our homes?  I mean, we would be running to the phone like pavlovian dogs on an hourly basis, responding to these nuisances.

SMITH: You've never taken your phone off the hook like some of us have. You pick it up, you put it there it beeps for five or ten sends.

BULMASH: And what about the emergency calls? (CROSSTALK)

SMITH: When I call my niece. When I call my niece, when I call my brother, when I call CROSSFIRE. Why did they find out? They know it's me. They can either answer or not. Maybe I'm an unwanted guest on your program.

BEGALA: Always answer to you.

SMITH: Basically, look, we have technologies, and they're rapidly improving. Rather than rush in with an FTC rule, incidentally, by a Republican FTC, just shows the seductiveness of this city. Even conservatives come here and get seduced in a matter of moments.

BEGALA: My friend, Laurence, a brilliant professor of law at Stanford, reminded me the other day that the word phony came from at the advent of the telephone. Con artists and ripoff artists who called people up and tried to fleece them. That's gotten so bad that I want to read you a few strategies that another friend of mine came up with. This is one of the most brilliant strategies from one of the most brilliant people I know.

Some guy named Carlson wrote an essay recently. This is what he says to telemarketers.

"Well to tell you the truth, Brandon, I can't. I'm kind of busy. I am having my other leg amputated in the morning. Got to pack for the hospital."

He also told one, "I'm out on bond right now. Maybe you read about it. I killed three people in a drug-related murder spree a couple of years ago. I'm out now trying to beat the charges."

This is what people have been reduced to. Decent citizens having to make up claims that they're murderers.

SMITH: No, no, no. You missed it. What we're seeing in telemarketing now is a creative outlet for the talented people like yourself who can come up with those stories. We basically have to recognize that advertising is not something we love all the time. But it is something that is essential. It is essential to essentially a free society. It's the only thing that breaks up a invested monopoly.

CARLSON: Mr. Bulmash the name of your (UNINTELLIGIBLE) threat, "So You Want to Sue a Telemarketer", you making some money on that by the way?

BULMASH: We sold thousands.

CARLSON: So somebody's profiting from telemarketing.

BULMASH: Our members have collected over 1.7 million dollars since 1996 from telemarketers.

SMITH: Bounty hunters.

CARLSON: But my question is to you, I assume, that you're telling people you ought to sue a telemarketer. And isn't this exactly the kind of frivolous lawsuit ties up the court from letting people file real lawsuits?

BULMASH: What is frivolous about our fundamental, human right to be left alone in our homes?  What is frivolous about that?

CARLSON: You don't have that right, I not sure if you noticed.  You don't pay your taxes, Mr. Bulmash and actually armed guys from the IRS come to you and take you out of it and take your home away.  You don't have that right in this country. Maybe in Venezuela, not here.

BULMASH: I think you do have that right if you're following all the laws.  We are, indeed, citizens of a country.  Justice Louis Brandeis said in 1890 that the right to be left alone is the most comprehensive of rights, and the one most valued by civilized man.  We've got an entire industry out there barging into our homes.  This is not appropriate.

BEGALA: There's a particularly odious practice in America, right. Citizens don't like that practice, they petitioned their government for redress of grievance, the government is acting on it to outlaw it, it's called democracy.

SMITH: 64,000 people petitioned the FTC. There's 280 million Americans who didn't petition the FTC.

BEGALA: 279 million of them hate these telemarketers.

SMITH: They hate them, but they basically use them. And they use them because one of the ways we learn about new telephone services, let's take other areas. We're not going to try to regulate political callers yet. We are not going to regulate charitable callers. But if I want to use a professional to raise money for my organization that does get regulated. When government starts filtering out the kind of people who can call us, where do they stop? Are they going to start having laws that families with small children can't have calls from adult.

CARLSON: Robert Bulmash, we are almost out of time.  And I want to ask you about cell phones.  No telemarketer has called me yet on a cell phone.  Many Americans, maybe most now have and use cell phones, many of them as their primary phone.  It kind of makes this argument we're having almost obsolete, doesn't it?

SMITH: In November of this year phone numbers will become portable. You'll be able to transfer your land line to your cell phone line and we're going to start getting telenuisance calls on our cell phones. It's going to cost us money.

BULMASH: When we talked about political calls, in the last election cycle, President George W. -- or George II, he was making prerecorded telemarketing calls, trying to get people out to get the vote out.  Those calls were illegal, because they did not include an address or phone number as required by the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

CARLSON: Do you think he's -- because of that do you think he's an illegitimate president? What should be the penalty for that?

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: Mr. Bulmash is telling us what the penalty is.

BULMASH: The penalty is spelled out in the federal law: $500 per violation. If he only called 20 percent of America's 100 million residential lines, that means he would be in debt to about $5 billion if the state AGs would go after him.

CARLSON: Well, on that note I want to wish you luck collecting, Robert Bulmash and thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Fred Smith, thank you.

SMITH: My pleasure.