I came across this at
The Talent Show (an excellent blog all kos readers should drop by, btw).
In the course of telling Kerry he needs to ramp up the rhetoric, Greg suggests Kerry start with this, reprinting a story from an Indian newspaper, The Business Standard:
(my emphasis added)
Bush's party to raise funds via Noida, Gurgaon
Bipin Chandran in New Delhi
Business Standard, January 31, 2003
The US Republican Party now has a band of young and enthusiastic fund-raisers in Noida and Gurgaon.
HCL eServe, the business process outsourcing arm of the Shiv Nadar-promoted
HCL Technologies, has bagged a project to undertake a fund-raising campaign for the US Republican Party over the telephone.
This is the first time such a project has been handed out to a company outside the US. The market research and public relations companies engaged by the party usually undertake such projects.
HCL eServe has put in place a team of 75 people to work on the project out of its call centres in Noida and Gurgaon. According to industry sources, the number of seats could be ramped up depending on the success of the campaign. These operators are required to call up people in the US seeking theirsupport for President George W Bush and a donation for the Republican cause.
HCL eServe functionaries, however, refused to comment on the issue. "We cannot comment on any client-related issues as a policy," said the company spokesperson.
According to the sources, the calling process involves high degree of automation in order to limit human intervention. "The process is designed in such a way as to limit human intervention. The company wants to complete the process using the integrated voice recording technology, which allows navigation using voice responses," said the source.
The Republican contract comes on the heels of a successful anti-abortion campaign run by HCL eServe for a US politician...
The article then goes on a bit about the company's financial info, etc.
Now, the story is over a year old, and I cannot link directly to the article on the newspaper's website. The article's text comes from somebody else's site. And God knows there are more than enough fake things on the internet, this could be the Indian "Onion" for all I know.
Does anybody know how to verify this? And then, how to move this story out to the mainstream? This is like in 1992, Bush Sr's Brazilian flags or banners or whatever it was. I hope this turns into something.
And who is the US politician who used this service for an anti-abortion campaign?
Somebody who knows how to investigate! Go get 'em!
As an aside, how is it cheaper to make / take these calls from around the globe anyway? Do they use magic phones with no long-distance? ;-)