“36 Facts Which Prove The American Dream Is Turning Into A Nightmare For The Middle Class” and other links…
Michael Snyder: “Every single month more American families fall out of the middle class. Today there are 18 million more Americans on food stamps than there were just four years ago. More than one out of every five U.S. children is living in poverty. Things are getting really, really bad out there.”
“Sleepwalking Into the Imperial Dark”
Tom Engelhardt: “It’s not hard to see why. A loss of faith in the American political system is palpable. For many Americans, it’s no longer ‘our government’ but ‘the bureaucracy.’ Washington is visibly in gridlock and incapable of doing much of significance, while state governments, facing the ‘steepest decline in state tax receipts on record,’ are, along with local governments, staggering under massive deficits and cutting back in areas—education, policing, firefighting—that matter to daily life.”
“Apple Is Tech’s ‘Least Clean’ Company: Greenpeace”
Amy Lee via @hannibaltabu: “North Carolina is the hub for what Greenpeace calls a ‘dirty data triangle,’ referring to a trio of giant data centers run by Apple, Google and Facebook. North Carolina provides an attractive set of tax incentives, as well as the promise low-cost energy, offered in an initiative by local economic development agencies to battle high unemployment and draw IT companies to the area. But the generation mix in the area is one of the dirtiest in the country, drawing only 4 percent from renewable sources, and 61 percent from coal.”
“Ethiopia—a Country for Sale”
Alemayehu G. Mariam via @hannibaltabu: “The Indian agribusiness giant Karuturi Global is today the proud owner of the Ethiopian land. Karuturi did not ask for the land and did not even see it when a signed 50-year ‘lease’ was delivered to its offices in Bangalore, India, on a golden platter by Meles Zenawi, the dictator-in-chief in Ethiopia.”
“Everyone hates wireless carriers. Everyone.”
Paul Thurrott: “As a backgrounder, it helps to be perhaps a bit too familiar with the Lady Gaga video for ‘Telephone.’ This is a (NSFW) parody of that video, one that rips on an Australian merger of two mobile operators. And for anyone who’s ever struggled with wireless reception—like I just did in Las Vegas, a notable AT&T sinkhole—this will be appreciated. Well done.”
“African Cabbie vs Juan Cole: ‘The French Cannot Be Trusted In Africa’ vs. ‘Libya 2011 Is Not Like Iraq 2003’”
Baratunde Thurston (Jack Turner): “In between this roundabout reasoning of mine, my driver gave me an update on the level of brutality taking place in Ivory Coast. ‘They are burning people alive in the streets! What Gaddafi is doing is bad, but it is nothing compared to this,’ my driver explained. ‘Also, you cannot trust the French,’ he added. ‘Believe me, if France says yes, you want to say no. They have been draining blood from Africa forever.’”
“How Japan’s Tsunami Massive Debris Plume Will Hit California and Hawaii”
Jesus Diaz: “The model—developed by Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner using data from drifting buoys that have been deployed over years through the Pacific Ocean—shows the unstoppable progress of the debris after the March 11 tsunami. The trash plume—formed by all kinds of junk, from pieces of houses and automobiles to consumer electronics—is now spreading eastward from Japan taken by the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.”