Cerberus Capital: Literally Blood-Sucking the Poor to Make Their Billions


By Mark Ames
AlterNet
January 9, 2010


How one company made $1.8 billion by paying peanuts to human plasma donors, and then manipulated the market by restricting supply to the desperately ill.


Wall Street vampires. Lately, a lot of Americans, including myself, have used the bloodsucking monsters as a metaphor to describe the Wall Street billionaires who rule us, and who are ruining us. Like so many awful stories of the past few years, it turns out that these Wall Street vampire-billionaires really exist, literally. Like all vampires, they live in remote castles, and they 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 firmsâ€