This weekend, over 200 thousand music fans converged near Palm Springs in the Coachella Valley (about 130 miles south of Los Angeles) for the annual Coachella Music Festival, considered one of the world’s premiere music festivals. Concert tickets range from $400 to $3,000 & the concert rakes in about $84 million a year. The western part of Coachella Valley–now one of the fastest growing areas in the country–has been a resort haven for millionaire movie stars & retired presidents since the 1920s & has become a haven for retired northerners during the winter months.

Only 25 miles away from the concert venue, Eastern Coachella Valley is one of the richest agricultural areas in the US drawing on the labor of up to 30,000 migrant farm workers during the growing season.They produce strawberries, mangoes, grapes, bell peppers, eggplants, seedless watermelons, & the majority of the dates grown in the US.

Homelessness is a major problem because no housing is provided for migrant workers so most are forced to live out of their cars, on the streets, or in makeshift housing using duct tape & cardboard. There are many illegal, unregulated trailer park rentals which provide squalid housing for the 30,000 permanent residents & some migrants. Built on county lands (called unincorporated communities), these trailer parks lack sewage systems, clean drinking water, storm drains, trash pickup, & even power. As a result, residents are plagued by contaminated water & raw sewage backing up in the shower, overflowing in the streets when it rains, stagnant, contaminated pools in their yards. Children play in this raw sewage with rat, mosquito, & cockroach infestations.

Residents attempt to treat these problems, which the state ignores, by flushing sewage into septic tanks & cesspools (which overflow regularly), by pouring bleach into sewage pools, by digging private sewage pits. But they suffer from many public health problems including gastrointestinal illness, respiratory disease, skin infections, & other health problems in an area not served by public health facilities. This racist neglect by the state means those strawberries, mangoes, grapes, peppers, eggplants, watermelons, & dates sold in supermarkets around the country are grown in the surrounding fields fertilized by untreated sewage.

Certainly the most disgusting of all the environmental outrages in the area is what has been termed “Mt. San Diego”, a 50-foot high mountain of human poop dumped by San Diego on nearby Indian tribal land from 1989 until 1994, when a federal court ordered an end to the racist practice. Particulates from the feces mound are dispersed by desert winds to the dozens of communities just a few miles away & emit a noxious stench impossible to shut out. The area is also surrounded by illegal dumps of toxic materials.

Although the labor of migrant workers generates the enormous agricultural wealth of California, their conditions of life have been in this bereft & squalid state for generations, existing right next door to lavish wealth. In Coachella Valley, one has to drive through upscale golf courses where celebrity tournaments are played to get to these impoverished hell holes where mostly Latino Californians & migrant workers live. If the stench was near enough to affect the golf games, that pile of human manure would be removed forthwith by the state.

(Top photo is a scene from Coachella 2016 by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images; bottom photo is 7-year-old child playing in raw sewage flowing from the trailer park where he lives to the adjoining farm fields by Max Whittaker)

This is just too hilarious not to share:

Anamika Siddiki wrote me, “I am an Asian Bangladeshi woman. When i read ur writings i need a dictionary always. I like ur writings very much but sometimes i don’t understand it completely.  Although i like ur thinkings & try to realize what r u trying to say. Thank u very much to be my friend.”  

Achmat Salie answered her, “Dear Ms Siddiki, Do what I do. Whenever I read an essay or comment by Mary Scully I have my trusty Concise Oxford dictionary handy. Since following Mary here are a few words I’ve added to my vocabulary. “Excoriate, Vituperation, Acolytes and Vestigial”. I’m waiting eagerly to use them in sentences. 🙂“

A hallmark of Israeli apartheid is the two separate legal systems operating in the occupied West Bank. Since the 1967 military occupation, the entire Palestinian population has been under Israeli military law while Israeli settlers moving in on Palestinian lands (in violation of umpteen international laws) are under the Israeli civilian & criminal legal system. If that doesn’t signify apartheid, nothing does.

That explains why Israel is one of the only countries in the world that kidnaps & arrests children (mostly for throwing stones); places them in military detention (notorious for abuse & torture of Palestinian children); interrogates them (without parental consent or legal advice) using bullying, abuse, & threats; & prosecutes them in military courts.

You have to hand it to public relations firms pumping out political propaganda to justify war & colonialism. They’re an imaginative, if not completely shameless, lot. Israel has them on overdrive & the US-NATO has them grasping at straws in Afghanistan.

This war propaganda piece in Reuters is recycled from last year when the Guardian-UK had a feature about the Afghan National Institute of Music (ANIM) in Kabul. ANIM, founded in 2010, is a project of the Afghan government with funding from the World Bank & German government. No mention if the US has given a dime.

The Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) legal team handling the defense of the young girl who was molested by an Indian soldier are reporting ongoing & ferocious intimidation not only of the girl & her family but of the JKCCS legal team. Their account of conduct by Indian occupying officials is absolutely Kafkaesque if not something out of the Stalinist gulag.

For so long there has been a news blackout about the occupation of Kashmir but the work of Kashmiri activists on social media has begun to change that. That’s why Indian officials so often blockade the internet in Kashmir. Activists are appealing for the big battalions of international solidarity to act now in their support.

https://www.change.org/p/un-human-rights-council-investigate-india-for-human-rights-violations-in-kashmir?recruiter=48473387&utm_campaign=signature_receipt&utm_medium=email&utm_source=share_petition

This is the third anniversary of the ceremonial funeral of Maggie Thatcher, the British version of Henry Kissinger. It’s a time of celebration, of dancing in the streets & pissing on her grave. Bring out the brass bands!

I’m reposting this from that glorious moment in 2013. Don’t ask me not to speak evil of the dead; I wasn’t much kinder when she was alive. Her crimes against humanity mark her eternally for damnation.

It sure took long enough to bury old Maggie but word is, it’s finally over. She got the military funeral she deserved since militarism was her middle name & destruction her only passion. It’s not hard to be an Iron Lady when you have an army & air force behind you. The real reason for the military send-off is they needed extra soldiers to supplement the 4,000 cops protecting her stinking corpse from English rebels lined up on the side lines of this funeral fiasco. If there were any actual mourners would they have needed the security barricades outside St. Paul’s Cathedral?