Note: I posted this last night, but had to delete it and repost due to technical difficulties. A few comments were lost in the process. sorry about that.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Phone sex.
And pet psychics.
The two West Coast tech titans, along with the influential Washington financial firm, are investors in a small San Francisco company called Ingenio, which offers pay-per-minute telephone advice on a variety of topics.
Some of those topics, such as accounting and personal finance, will cause no eyebrows to be raised.
Others might seem, well, a bit unusual for respectable outfits like Microsoft and eBay, not to mention Carlyle, which in recent years has counted among its associates the likes of ex-President George H.W. Bush and former Secretary of State James Baker.
One Ingenio service, NiteFlirt, essentially serves as an online mall at which customers can choose from among hundreds of purveyors of pay-per-minute phone sex.
[snip] Ingenio says Microsoft and eBay each own less than 2 percent of the company. Both are passive investors, meaning that they have no say over Ingenio’s day-to-day operations.
Not so with Carlyle, which owns about 4 percent of Ingenio.
A Carlyle Group managing director, Robert Grady, sits on Ingenio’s board of directors and is knowledgeable about most aspects of the company’s operations, including the phone-sex and dial-a-psychic services.
“He’s a great board member,” said Marc Barach, Ingenio’s chief marketing officer. “He provides us guidance on a frequent basis.”
Grady couldn’t be reached for comment.
But Chris Ullman, a Carlyle spokesman, said Grady was named to the board after Ingenio’s 2003 purchase of a firm in which Carlyle owned a significant stake, a dot-com called InfoRocket.
He said Carlyle wasn’t aware of Ingenio’s phone-sex or psychic-hotline operations when the acquisition was announced but acknowledged that no effort has been made since that time to sell off the Ingenio holding.
“Our goal is to preserve our investors’ capital,” Ullman said. “Through this merger, we have succeeded in that.”
[snip] Whatever else, phone sex and Ingenio’s other offerings have been highly lucrative for all concerned. The privately held company posted about $67 million in revenue last year.
The bulk of these sales, said Barach, the chief marketing officer, come from the “advice” services of the NiteFlirt, Keen and Ingenio sites.
At NiteFlirt, for example, a listing for Greedy Gabriella says this “spoiled little princess” enjoys “many different fetishes.” She charges $2.69 a minute to discuss them.
Accompanying customer ratings give Greedy Gabriella five stars. One of the few comments printable here praises Gabriella for her “very nice attitude.”
Yikes!
A quick look through the Nite Flirt website (not work-safe) reveals that Greedy Gabriella enjoys “Many different fetishes. Sissy’s, cuckholds, moneyslaves, foot fetish, small penis humiliation, and basically anything that involves your cash in my pocket lolol!”
I wonder what James Dobson would say if he knew about this one. Where does Greedy Gabriella fall on the SpongeBob Squarepants scale of moral deviance?
And how much of her cash does the Bush family have in its pocket?
Given that a managing director of The Carlyle Group is an active board member at Ingenio, the political implications of this story — if there are any — seems to be the extent to which Bush 41 is still invested in The Carlyle Group.
4 Comments on "Ricky, Don’t Lose That Number"
an american:
Hmmm…I would have thought their revenues would be higher given their psychics are likely a major source for Fox News broadcasts.
Maybe Rupert is now using a few outsourced psychics for Vanity’s talking points. Or more likely they’ve put some limits on O’Reilly’s phone-sex perk after paying for his last lawsuit. Poor Greedy Gabriella, to make up for the lost income she’ll need to focus more on humiliating Dobson’s small penis.
Matt:
So, does anyone think that this story could have legs?
Carlyle’s defense will most likely be that they can’t possibly keep track of every investment made by every company they’re involved with.
But that argument is undercut by the fact that a Carlyle Group Managing Director sits on Ingenio’s board and is actively involved in their activities.
The question is whether CG will cut its ties with Ingenio now that this information is in the public domain — and what it will do with the money it has already made off of this investment.
And as I wrote in the post, I’m interested in knowing the depth of Bush 41’s current ties to CG…
Earl Bockenfeld:
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/ has this post;
And in All White Chick All the Time News…
this comment reminded me our talk last night and your post
Marquer said…
Probably the oddest single facet of life in contemporary Merka is the genial alliance between the Jeebocrats and the corporatists.
There is a big part of the GOP base which, “family values” aside, is firmly (pardon me) committed to the values embodied by tawdry “gentlemens’ clubs” and porn ranging from XXXX down to the corporate softcore of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.
I don’t hang out in gentlemens’ clubs for any of several reasons*, but prudish morality is certainly not one of those reasons. Nor is deference to political allies — it’s not my party which is daily kissing up to Dobson and Falwell and Robertson.
It really does appear that it would be possible to drive some deep cracks in between the Biblical fundamentalists and the no-taxes, no-regulations bidness community with a few well-placed strikes.
It’s rare for me to agree with religious-Reich policy suggestions, but I have heard recently some grassroots complaint emanating from that vector.
One fundie blog commentor said that he thought it was disgraceful that S&P 500 firms like Marriott are up to their elbows in porn money (that in-room pay-per-view adult fare being a big profit center for the corporate hospitality industry).
Agreed! Let’s take them up on it, and raise.
Call it the Pornography-Affiliated Corporate Disclosure Act of 2005. Force any publicly traded company which spends its funds on adult entertainment for its executives, or which distributes or allows to be distributed any form of adult materials, to include a prominent and harshly worded warning disclaimer in all of its corporate communications and advertisements.
The resulting squirming, wriggling, backing and filling would be pure bliss to behold.
(* On that topic of “gentlemens’ clubs”: having seen the overaged-dumb-teenager behavior of the typical habitue of such establishments, if this be gentlemanly deportment, count me a rogue. Moreover, I am in full agreement with an old friend of mine, who, upon being invited to such a club, said, “Great! Afterward, I hope you’ll take me to an excellent restaurant where they’ll wave plates of delicious food under my nose but won’t let me eat a bite.”)
I hope your post gets the attention you desire!
The Tattered Coat » Blog Archive » Keep Your Eye on the Balls:
[…] Perhaps the Porn Squad will look into this story, in which the San Francisco Examiner exposed the link between a phone sex company and a prominent conservative investment group that has links to the Bush family. […]
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