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Life After the Oil Crash
Deal With Reality or Reality Will Deal With You
Last week I heard a commercial on the radio for the film "Day Breakers" which is about a society of vampires that farms humans for blood. I thought "gee on a *metaphoric* level that's a pretty accurate description of the modern corporate state in that global corporations are farming all of *us*, not for blood, but for the wealth and intelligence that we're able to produce." (Even down to sites like the LATOC Forum which get "data farmed" by large companies, the data is then crunched by super computers and used to craft more effective economic warfare strategies.)
Well surprise, surprise, it turns out the loving hedge fund Cerberus - who owns Chrysler which *we* bailed out - is making money hand over fist from literally from sucking the blood of the middle class and poor Americans. Article from Mark Ames by way of Alternet:
Great survival and disaster preparedness books:
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To understand how Cerberus has profited from human blood and misery, here’s some background: the United States is one 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 US-Mexico border, which have mushroomed like Starbucks’ once did in the ‘90s. In the latter part of 2009 alone, Cerberus-owned Talecris opened four new plasma-milking factories. They and their oligopolist colleagues plaster the Mexican side of the border with advertisements promising easy cash, and they even have special plasma-farm buses waiting on the American side of the border to haul their human cargo to those milking dens not within walking distance of the Rio Grande.
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."
The article goes on to explain how Cerberus has bought many large American firearms companies (like Remington) so now they're profiting from everybody being pissed off about the taxpayer funded bailouts that they benefitted from.
To read the full Alternet article, click here.
To discuss this article at the LATOC Forum, click here.
