L.A. BRONCOS FAN
01-11-2010, 12:23 AM
Wall Street vampire-billionaires really exist, literally. Like all vampires, they live in remote castles and feed themselves by luring poor, desperate humans into their dens, hooking them into blood-pumping machines and sucking out their plasma for mind-boggling profits.
Cerberus Capital, one of Wall Street's most notoriously ruthless leveraged-buyout firms (or "private equity firms" in PC-speak), recently made a $1.8 billion killing on their human plasma investment, a company called Talecris, which they bought for a mere $82.5 million just four years earlier. Meaning Cerberus made 23 times their investment on human plasma. They did it by the most savage, heartless means possible: by paying peanuts to their 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 "operating 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 policy holders in increasing numbers, endangering untold numbers.
Tomas Asher, chairman of a company that trades in plasma, described the business this way: "It's like selling hog bellies or wheat or beef. It gets sold all over."
Profiting from ruined American lives is nothing new to Cerberus -- which 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 too.
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.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/145044/cerberus_capital:_literally_blood-sucking_the_poor_to_make_their_billions/ <
Do read the whole article. These "private" equity firms are most amazing, Remember Dyncorp? Or Carlyle??
Our Ex-President G.H.W.Bush divested from Carlyle Group and then invested in Cerberus - that's why G.W. Bush stepped in and bailed out GM, because his Daddy was a large investor in Cerberus.
Cerberus Capital, one of Wall Street's most notoriously ruthless leveraged-buyout firms (or "private equity firms" in PC-speak), recently made a $1.8 billion killing on their human plasma investment, a company called Talecris, which they bought for a mere $82.5 million just four years earlier. Meaning Cerberus made 23 times their investment on human plasma. They did it by the most savage, heartless means possible: by paying peanuts to their 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 "operating 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 policy holders in increasing numbers, endangering untold numbers.
Tomas Asher, chairman of a company that trades in plasma, described the business this way: "It's like selling hog bellies or wheat or beef. It gets sold all over."
Profiting from ruined American lives is nothing new to Cerberus -- which 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 too.
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.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/145044/cerberus_capital:_literally_blood-sucking_the_poor_to_make_their_billions/ <
Do read the whole article. These "private" equity firms are most amazing, Remember Dyncorp? Or Carlyle??
Our Ex-President G.H.W.Bush divested from Carlyle Group and then invested in Cerberus - that's why G.W. Bush stepped in and bailed out GM, because his Daddy was a large investor in Cerberus.