As a teenager, I was quite a fan of Lin Carter’s Thongor books: sword and sorcery novels mashing together the Conan and Barsoom mythos in the lost continent of Lemuria. In the first book the titular barbarian hero faces off against the vampire-king Xothun. The vampire-king is a disgusting, bloated horror who has feasted on the blood of the zombie-like inhabitants of the lost city of Omm for a thousand years.
If I were to tell you that there really are vampire-kings today, trying to live forever by consuming the blood of poor people — poor people who are turned into enervated, zombie-like creatures — you’d dismiss me as more delusional than a Democrat who thinks that Kamala Harris is a warm, appealing human being.
It sounds like the craziest conspiracy theory ever, right?
Except that it’s true.
For much of the world, donating blood is purely an act of solidarity; a civic duty that the healthy perform to aid others in need. The idea of being paid for such an action would be considered bizarre. But in the United States, it is big business. Indeed, in today’s wretched economy, where around 130 million Americans admit an inability to pay for basic needs like food, housing or healthcare, buying and selling blood is of the few booming industries America has left.
In fact, sucking up and selling the blood of America’s poor is a bigger cash crop that all the exported corn and soy beans of the Midwest.
The U.S. supplies fully 70 percent of the world’s plasma, mainly because most other countries have banned the practice on ethical and medical grounds. Exports increased by over 13 percent, to $28.6 billion, between 2016 and 2017, and the plasma market is projected to “grow radiantly,” according to one industry report. The majority goes to wealthy European countries; Germany, for example, buys 15 percent of all U.S. blood exports. China and Japan are also key customers.
Piping the blood of Americans overseas has made massive fortunes for literally bloodsucking corporations — and it’s become a desperate source of income for some of America’s worst-off.
One study found that the majority of donors in Cleveland generate more than a third of their income from “donating” blood. The money they receive, notes Professor Kathryn Edin of Princeton University, is literally “the lifeblood of the $2 a day poor” […]
Almost half of America is broke, and 58 percent of the country is living paycheck to paycheck, with savings of less than $1000. 37 million Americans go to bed hungry, including one-sixth of New Yorkers and almost half of South Bronx residents. And over half a million sleep on the streets on any given night, with many millions more in vehicles or relying on friends or family. It is in this context that millions in the red have turned to selling blood to make ends meet. In a very real sense then, these corporations are harvesting the blood of the poor, literally sucking the life out of them.
And when they say it’s literally sucking the life out of them — you better believe them.
Respondents all agreed that they were indeed being exploited, but in more ways than one. Desperate Americans are allowed to donate twice per week (104 times per year). But losing that much plasma could have serious health consequences, most of which have not been studied Professor H. Luke Schaefer warns, stressing that more research is necessary. Around 70 percent of donors experience health complications. Donors have a lower protein count in their blood, putting them at greater risk of infections and liver and kidney disorders. Many regulars suffer from near-permanent fatigue and are borderline anemic. All this for an average of $30 per visit […]
A common method of cheating in endurance sports is to inject extra blood into your system before a race, giving you a huge performance boost. But extracting it has the opposite effect, making you sluggish and tired for days. Thus, this debilitating practice is zombifying America’s poor.
To compound the misery, the donors are treated like cattle: they’re publicly weighed in and obese people are worth more, because they can be drained of more blood in a session — for they same flat fee. It’s battery vampirism: some centres are huge, with multiple rows of machines all pumping blood from impoverished veins. “Clinics” also cluster on the southern borders, where thousands cross every day from Mexico, where selling blood is banned.
But the horror doesn’t end there. Companies are not just harvesting blood for legitimate medical reasons. Like Xothun the vampire-king, or the real-life Countess Bathory, America’s wealthiest pay huge sums for the blood of children, in desperate vanity.
Teenager blood is in high demand in, of all places, Silicon Valley, where anti-aging technologies are the latest trend. One company, Ambrosia, charges $8,000 per treatment to aging tech executives, infusing them with the blood of the young, turning these individuals into bloodsuckers in more ways than one. Despite the fact that there is no clinical evidence that the practice has any beneficial effects, business is booming.
Mint Press News
One of the beliefs of the QAnon conspiracy theory is that the wealthy elite is harvesting the chemical adrenochrome from sacrificed children in order to stay young for as long as possible.
Suddenly, they don’t seem so crazy after all.