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Cerberus Capital, one of Wall Street’s most notoriously ruthless buyout-rapist firms recently made a $1.8 billion killing on human plasma collected at the Mexican border from poor people and sold for exorbitant prices to desperate U.S. patients.
Leading this blood-sucking company are former employees of Presidents Bush: Sec. of Treasury under Bush 43, John Snow, and infamous "Richie Rich" dimwit, Dan "Mr. Potato Head" Quayle (former US VP) with Bush 41.
The United States is one of a few nations in the world where companies can sell human plasma for a profit. Capitalism driven by "blood money" and lead by blood-suckers.
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Cerberus Capital, one of Wall Street’s most notoriously ruthless buyout-rapist firms recently made a $1.8 billion killing on its human plasma investment, a company called Talecris.
Talecris was purchased for a mere $82.5 million just four years earlier, meaning Cerberus made 23 times its investment on human plasma. This was accomplished by the most savage, heartless means possible: by paying peanuts to impoverished human plasma donors, who increasingly come from Mexican border towns to blood-pumping stations set up on the American side, jacking up the price of plasma by restricting supply (a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission accused Cerberus Plasma Holdings of “operat[ing] as an oligopoly”), and then selling the refined products to the most desperately ill—patients suffering from hemophilia, severe burns, multiple sclerosis and autoimmune deficiencies. The products cost so much—one, IVIG (intravenous immunoglobulin) cost twice the price of gold as of last summer—that American health insurance companies have been dropping or denying their policyholders in increasing numbers, endangering untold numbers of people.
who oversaw the destruction
of America’s economy while serving under Bush from 2003 to 2006, bragging
during his tenure, "We are the envy of the world."
Profiting from ruined American lives is nothing new to Cerberus. (The company takes its name from the legendary three-headed attack dog of Greek legend who guards the gates of Hell, making sure no condemned soul ever escapes. How appropriate.) Cerberus is the same shady fund that bought Chrysler and GMAC in 2007 and drove them into the ground, blamed everything on unions (even after firing 30,000 Chrysler employees), and dumped the companies onto American taxpayers—but only after lining up tens of billions in taxpayer-funded bailout funds. Cerberus is led by some of the most aggressive "free market" Republicans of our time.
Snow bragged again in 2007 after Cerberus acquired Chrysler, "Over 25 years ago, when Chrysler faced bankruptcy, it turned to the United States government for assistance. Today, Chrysler again faces new financial challenges. But it is private investment stepping in to inject much-needed support." A year later, Snow was running around Washington begging and screaming for government handouts.Joining Snow as international chairman for Cerberus is former Republican Vice President Dan Quayle, the pampered imbecile
who couldn’t spell “potato” correctly and was never "mis-underestimated."
Two more perfect vampires couldn’t have
been invented than Quayle and Snow for the America of the Bush
Era—peanut-brained, sleazy jerks.
The top vampire in Cerberus is the
fund’s founder, billionaire Stephen Feinberg, a major Republican Party campaign
donor with a hardcore fetish for Harleys and big guns. Supposedly Feinberg was
very uncomfortable with taking all those socialism-esque billions from American
taxpayers. The New York Times described
him as "a longtime free-market enthusiast and a Republican who never
envisioned himself needing the government for help.”
What Feinberg did envision was callously taking control of Chrysler,
stripping it down and making a killing off of it, as he coldly noted in an early
2008 memo to his investors: “We do not need to be heroes to earn a good return
on the investment in Chrysler," he wrote. "We do not need to transition the car
industry or even to return Chrysler to a much stronger relative position in the
U.S. car market in order to be successful."
After Feinberg siphoned away
billions of taxpayer dollars to pay off his bad investments, he
told reporters, "From the day we bought it, we worked hard to improve it."
Patriotism, not profit, he bleated: “I love this country. I feel it’s been great
to me. I had a great chance."
To understand how Cerberus has profited
from human blood and misery, here's some background: the United States is one of
just a handful of nations around the world where companies can legally pay
humans for their blood and then sell it for a profit. Human plasma is a
particularly valuable component of human blood—it’s harder to extract, and can
be used to manufacture all sorts of expensive therapeutic products. The market
for human plasma products has swelled from just $2 billion in 1988 to over $12
billion per year, and according to a recent Morgan Stanley
report, it’s a fast-growing business.
Despite all the billions that
Wall Street’s vampires earn from plasma, the hapless humans whose veins they
milk make barely a pittance—$30 dollars or so for spending an hour hooked up to
a pumping machine that sucks the blood, sifts out the valuable plasma through a
cold-filtering process and reverse-pumps the debased, icy blood back into the
plasma donor's veins.
It’s such a miserable way to make cash that
Cerberus and its fellow oligopolists have resorted to setting up plasma-sucking
franchises along the U.S.-Mexico border, which have mushroomed like Starbucks
Coffee did in the '90s. In the latter part of 2009 alone, Cerberus-owned
Talecris opened four new plasma-milking factories, plastering the Mexican side
of the border with advertisements promising easy cash, and parking special
plasma-farm buses on the American side of the border to haul their human cargo
to those milking dens not within walking distance of the Rio Grande.
Last
summer, a newspaper reporter followed an unemployed 46-year-old Mexican manager
from his border town to the pumping station in Brownsville, Texas, which has the
highest poverty rate of
any city in America:
"After entering the United States, Castillo
didn’t have to walk far to sell his plasma. A few hundred feet up International
Boulevard from the border, the IBR Plasma building sits on Washington Street,
across from a Duty Free shop. The plasma centre still looks very much like the
bulk second-hand clothing store it used to be, though long white vertical blinds
now hide what goes on behind its windows. Inside, the waiting room is divided
into two sections marked by sheets of paper taped to the wall: one for 'new
donors' and another for 'return donors.' This was Castillo’s first visit, which
meant he could make $30—about 400 Mexican pesos. Signs in Spanish and English
offered an additional $10 to those who recruited other donors.
"Castillo
lay in the big soft chair, he said, while they inserted the needle and his blood
started pumping out. It was cycled into a machine that spun the red cells from
the liquid, as if squeezing whey from curds. The whey, the watery plasma, was
stored in a big plastic bag, while the red blood cells were periodically
reinjected into his arm. While he laid there, he later told me, he wondered
about what his plasma was really worth—and where it would end up. Castillo is an
educated man with a degree in business administration; before coming to
Brownsville he had done some research and found, among other things, that in
Mexico donating plasma for money is illegal—as is the case in much of the rest
of the world."
You might think that America would be ashamed of being the
world’s top vampire nation. But actually, to the faux-market freaks like
Cerberus Capital’s honchos, it just means locking in profits and locking out
competition. Thomas Hecht, who heads a plasma products distribution company in
Montreal, quipped:
"The U.S.
is the OPEC of the plasma business. You know what that stands for: the
Organization of Plasma Exporting Countries."
But Cerberus is more than
just about sucking people’s blood and government handouts. Stephen Feinberg also
loves killing deer. In fact he loves shooting deer so much that, like the old
Gillette commercial, he bought America’s guns 'n’ ammo industry. Two years ago,
Cerberus bought Remington, America’s oldest firearms manufacturer, and since
then they’ve snapped up companies making everything from bullets to silencers,
which they’re combining into a new firearms monolith
called Freedom Group. The free-marketeers at Cerberus are all about freedom.
Luckily for Cerberus, weapons are “flying off the store shelves,” thanks
to all the paranoia about Obama "socialism," fed by all the bailout money that
rightwing billionaires like Cerberus have looted. Sales have also been boosted
by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—in other words, more government handouts for
the billionaires, now that they own the guns ‘n’ ammo business. It’s all going
so well that Cerberus is planning a huge IPO this year for Freedom Group, which
should net another massive payout.
So Cerberus profits on both ends: from
the bailouts, and from the backlash against bailouts; from the wars against
Muslim terrorists, and from the paranoia back home about an alleged
socialist-Muslim-terrorist president.
Either way, the vampires have us
where they want us.
See more stories tagged with: corporations, blood, vampires, cerberus capital, plasma
Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.
