You already know things are not good for a lot of people in the United States.
As of two months ago, 64% of the country said they’re living paycheck to paycheck. Even if we exclude the million or so homeless across the U.S., recent data shows that approximately 5.3 million households are behind on their home mortgage payments.
Another report from 2018 showed that around 130 million people in the U.S. admitted an inability to pay for basic needs like food, health care, housing, or utilities. And those numbers are before the pandemic began, which is like saying it felt hot in here before a fire burned down the building.
The fine citizens of our late-stage empire have resorted to drastic means to make ends meet. Can you guess what it is? No, it’s not sex trafficking, or black market organ deals, or selling fake nuclear material that you pass off as real on Etsy. It’s none of those.
I mean, it is – it totally is – but that’s not what I’m talking about at the moment. No, I’m talking about blood. You have it, and corporate America wants to suck it.
The U.S. supplies fully 70% of the world’s plasma — the liquid portion of your blood. That accounts for over 2.5% of all U.S. exports, according to a mid-2022 CNBC report.
Harvesting the Blood of America’s Poor: The Latest Stage of Capitalism
LATE STAGE CAPITALISM
All this time, I thought U.S. exports just consisted of missiles, Beyonce’s line of male bikinis, and pride in ignorance. But no, it’s also blood sucked from the poor. Blood now represents more of the U.S. export market than corn or soybeans. The number of collection centers in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2005.
Selling your blood to try to survive in dystopia is a booming business! What says “well-functioning society” like scores of destitute struggling humans lining up outside vampire corporations aching to devour their internal juices?
The colloids (blood plasma) market is set to see even more growth by 2029, according to a recent industry report. As with most businesses, it’s dominated by just a few rotund parasitic corporations.
“Grifols, CSL Plasma, Takeda’s Biolife and Octapharma are huge players in the blood collection space, particularly plasma, and donors are compensated,” reported CNBC.
Yes! Donors are compensated. Don’t worry; we pay them as we drain their life force. Much like in the black market organ trade, people are paid cold, hard cash that makes the transaction totally cool and not anything disgusting or predatory. Not at all.
One of the reasons the U.S. represents over 70 percent of the market is that most countries have banned paying people for their blood. But the U.S. apparently has no such qualms.
One of the many ethical issues with our all-American vampiric behavior is that – only a certain type of person tends to be willing to sell their internal fluids for roughly $30 a bottle. I’ll give you a hint – it’s not rich people.
Rarely do you see Elon Musk or Hillary Clinton, or Patrick Mahomes stumbling into a blood bank to see if they can score a few bucks. No, it’s poor people. The blood banks are almost completely filled with very poor folks. And yes, part of that has to do with the economic conditions required for someone to take that step, but it also has to do with whom these corporations target.
Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of Behind The Headlines’ new series: The Most Censored News With Lee Camp. He is a former comedy writer for the Onion and the Huffington Post and has been a touring stand-up comic for 20 years.