1. A March To Protest Boston Consulting Group's Killing Fields; 2. Is Soto DeBerry Running Interference for Newsom? 3. Two Teacher Victories Against the Israel Lobby Go Unreported by Marin I-J

4. Margoliash Back In Court; 5. A Church in Novato Is Allegedly Attacked by a Christian; 6. Supermob Arrives!

1. A March on the San Francisco Office of the Management Consulting Group That Created the Deadly "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation"

Due to Israel's bombing and blockades, Gaza's civilian population is now facing acute starvation, with many having already died due to a lack of even the most basic food items, such as flour. Since the inception of the US-designed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites in late May, starving Palestinians, including elderly men and young children, have tried to obtain scarce food supplies at the GHF sites.

In that time, a period of barely eight weeks, over 1,000 Palestinian civilians queuing for even the most meager quantities of food have been killed by IDF soldiers and US contractors. The "humanitarian sites" are little more than killing fields.

In protest of the GHF, there will be an organized march tonight at the San Francisco offices of the management consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which helped plan the GHF's killing fields. The flyer is pictured above. The march is organized with support from Jewish, Arab, and Muslim groups in Northern California, including CAIR and JVP.

BCG is one of the "top three" management consulting firms in the US, alongside McKinsey (the company that birthed Enron) and Bain. The march meets at 5:30 pm at Harry Bridges Plaza (adjacent to Embarcadero Center and the Ferry Building) in San Francisco.

BCG's role in the GHF was first exposed by The Financial Times; the story was reported in even greater detail in yesterday's Washington Post article. Both publications exposed the close connections between CIA officers, former US military special ops, Israeli officials, and US companies (including BCG) in constructing the GHF killing corridors. These were the people chosen to replace the much-targeted UNRWA group, and, per the Washington Post, they did so with the blessing of both Biden and Trump administration officials.

Necessary disclosure: For approximately 17 months starting in late 2006, I worked as an assistant in the healthcare division of Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in San Francisco. The pay for “admins” was low, the hours long, and the environment a toxic mix of misogyny and exploitation, particularly of the younger women I worked alongside.

But that was just the internal dynamics. My former BCG boss was later hired into a prominent position at UCSF Medical Center, demonstrating on a small scale the larger story of management consulting's infiltration of supposedly public institutions like UCSF. (McKinsey and BCG routinely contract for public tasks they're incapable of managing, such as the COVID vaccine rollout, as reported in this Washington Post article.)

Still, for all my internal criticism of BCG 18 years ago, even I could not have imagined a project as nightmarish as the GHF.

In the last five years, there has been substantial investigative reporting on the top three management consulting firms in the US, including BCG, detailing their work facilitating regulatory capture, and their work with authoritarian governments, including Saudi Arabia. Such reporting lays out just how likely it always was for BCG to create, eventually, the GHF.

The exposés of McKinsey and BCG in particular over the last few years were fair public warning to both firms that human beings were being tortured and/or killed as a result of the companies' work with authoritarian goverments. Instead of reforming its practices, BCG made a specific choice to help design the GHF, where at long last we can see in full view the real-life horror shows that management consulting creates.

Once outed in the press, BCG terminated the employment of some of the staff who helped coordinate the GHF. But it is a fantasy that the problem was just one managing director and a few advisors, and not the sector as a whole.

Meanwhile, Gaza starves with the consent of our electeds officials, including Governor Newsom, who made a point of visiting Israel early in the genocide. Newsom has made no apology for the trip, regardless of the toll Israel’s genocide has taken on his own Democratic party.

2. Is Cristine Soto DeBerry Running Interference for Her Old Boss Gavin Newsom?

Since late May, I have been following the story of two contracts for a Black student success program at Tam High, which garnered an unprecedented level of local media attention from local network news affiliates KRON, KTVU, KPIX and ABC-7, as well as the Marin Independent-Journal.

From the start, I have been skeptical about the supposed grassroots nature of the movement to renew the contracts, given local media's serial refusal to identify that both the much-featured "concerned mom" and the "Tam High teacher" were in fact established political figures in their own right. Both currently hold elected office in the County and have already filed papers for their next campaigns. This missing information was provided to all of the TV news crews and the Marin I-J reporter; all repeatedly declined to include the background in their reporting.

KPIX reporter Amanda Hari stated to me in a video recording during a TUHSD Board meeting that she wasn't aware that petition and rally organizer and “concerned mom” Cristine Soto DeBerry, who currently holds elected office, was formerly Gavin Newsom's Deputy Chief of Staff. When I explained to Hari that the information was obtainable through a simple internet search (and is included in Soto DeBerry's own bio), Hari quickly excused herself. Hari subsequently left the information out of the report she filed for KPIX. This was the pattern with local reporters, including Keri Brenner of the Marin I-J.

I was also struck by local media's refusal to even acknowledge a concern that many teachers had about the contracts' renewals: the contracts represent a further privatization of public school services. Soto DeBerry, the principal organizer of the movement (which so animated dozens of white Mill Valley homeowners to denounce the school board as racist for not renewing the private contracts), is married to a Silicon Valley VC founder with decidedly anti-regulatory, pro-privatization views. This context was never included in local news reports, despite Stephen DeBerry assuming a prominent, often dramatic, role in the movement to save the contracts.

Why Do Soto DeBerry’s Connections Matter?

In "declining" to report that Soto DeBerry has very powerful political and financial connections, local media robbed the public of seeing the critical financial aspect of the story: the DeBerrys, with their own cash (and more significantly their connections to billionaires including Mitch Kapor and the infamous Stewart and Lynda Resnick), could easily have accessed the funding for the contracts themselves.

Instead, they made a specific choice to stage a fight against the public school district. (A later claim by MV Free that the District had rejected the offer of private funding was false; the best that the DeBerry team would offer were pledges for a fraction of the total amount of the combined contracts.) The DeBerrys' efforts were joined by not a few white Marin residents who themselves had worked primarily in the private sector and had ties to, you guessed it, consulting firms which could "advise" on further privatization of services within the public high school district.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the dozen-plus reports by local media about the movement to renew the contracts did manage to serve as effective local cover for Soto DeBerry's former employer, Kentfield-resident-who-happens-to-be-Governor Gavin Newsom.

For the period that the media was focused on this relatively small issue of the Tam High contracts, supposedly deputized, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, facilitated by special powers granted to Los Angeles law enforcement by Governor Newsom, were terrorizing Los Angeles. The special powers Newsom granted to Los Angeles law enforcement created incredibly dangerous situations for Los Angeles residents, for which Newsom has taken no responsibility.

Worth noting that Governor Newson never contested ICE rounding up immigrants en masse during the Biden administration, even though deportations under Biden were far higher than under the first Trump administration. Thus, when Newsom granted Karen Bass' request for vastly increased powers for local law enforcement, powers which weren't even supposed to go into effect until the Olympics in 2028, Newsom knew exactly the cooperation that local law enforcement would provide to ICE.

Arguably, the movement to save the TUHSD contracts served as a convenient local media distraction from Governor Newsom's complicity with the Trump administration's immigration raids on largely Latino workers. Note that Soto DeBerry has utilized her identity as a Guatemalan immigrant — she offered a blonded dollop of "Latina" to the County's conflict-laden "Sheriff Civilian Oversight Working Group" that otherwise nakedly excluded Latinos from its 15-member body. Meanwhile, her former employer Gavin Newsom owes much of his net worth (estimated at $20M) to his exploitation of immigrant workers, mostly Latino, on his vineyards and in the kitchens of his restaurants.

I'm still in the process of interviewing parents and teachers about the TUHSD contracts and waiting on correspondence I requested through the California Public Records Act. The District has informed me that the earliest they will start to provide the requested correspondence regarding the matter is August 15, which may give you an idea of how carefully they need to filter the response.

3. The Marin I-J Continues To Miss So Often, It Has To Be Deliberate Bias

This month, the Marin Independent-Journal's education reporter, Keri Brenner, missed two of the biggest educational stories of the year, both involving serious setbacks for the Israel lobby. In both stories, Jewish anti-Zionist activists from Marin County had played a small but important role.

This failure to report is part of a pattern. In line with the pro-Israel politics of its owner, Alden Global Capital, the I-J has willfully painted the County's Jewish population as unanimously pro-Israel.

The first of the two bombshell education stories that the I-J refused to report is the July 3 vote by the California Teachers Association to reject the Legislative Jewish Caucus' pro-censorship, anti-teacher Assembly Bill 715. This was a tectonic shift, as the CTA, led by President David Goldberg, is one of the most powerful unions in the state, representing 300,000 workingclass teachers.

AB 715, while supposedly written to combat "antisemitism", would in reality establish a McCarthyesque hunt for "dissident" teachers who dared to criticize Israeli policy. Given the existing targeting of educators in colleges and high schools for even mild criticism of Israel, AB 715 was not well received by the rank and file members of the CTA, who were expected to show up in large numbers for the July 9 Senate Education Committee hearing.

The hearing was canceled with less than 24 hour notice, as the bill was not expected to survive the hearing. And so the pro-censorship bill amounted to a self-inflicted wound by the Israel lobby, as it galvanized and united its opposition.

But the CTA vote came only after grassroots organizers (including many Jewish residents from the Marin chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace), had repeatedly appeared in Sacramento to oppose the legislation. Until the vote, there had been a sense of dread amongst educators about the likelihood of AB 715 passing, as the bill had the support of the LJC and the federally funded Israel lobby. (See Jewish Insider article on the latest $94 million in federal grants provided to the ADL and other pro-Israel Jewish organizations, linked here.)

As many had previously reported, AB 715 was crafted as the Legislative Jewish Caucus' "fix" after the LJC's previous anti-teacher bill, AB 1468, had to be scrapped due to opposition from educators and civil rights organizations. And AB 1468 was itself written as a "fix" for yet an earlier failed LJC bill, AB 2918.

Note the pattern: Given a new infusion of federal funding to the Israel lobby, there is no incentive for the LJC to stop writing pro-censorship bills in an effort to exhaust the workingclass opposition made up of teachers and civil rights groups, most of whom cannot regularly appear in Sacramento.

The LJC is led by State Senator Scott Weiner and routinely garners great support from the ADL, JPAC, JCRC Bay Area, and SF JCF. At least some, if not all, of these pro-Israel groups just received hefty portions of a recent $94 million Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant to fight alleged "antisemitism", with the potential for another $120 million to be released later. Under the ADL definition of antisemitism, any mild criticism of Israeli policy, or even mild support of Palestinian rights to exist, can be considered "antisemitic".

All of the Legislative Jewish Caucus' censorship bills had been strenuously opposed by JVP Marin, whose members regularly rearranged their work schedules to carpool to Sacramento either to testify in opposition and/or to lobby legislators against the bills. In Sacramento, they were joined by CAIR and AROC; there is a close relationship between these and other activist groups in support of Palestinians.

But these Jewish Marinites — and this solidarity between Jews and Muslims on support for the right of educators to teach about Palestinian history — are never included in Keri Brenner's education reporting, or in any of the I-J reporting at all.

Bombshell Two: NEA breaks with ADL

Three days later came another bombshell, also disregarded by the I-J’s Keri Brenner: the National Education Association, a three-million-member organization, which includes public school teachers in Marin County, voted to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). This tectonic break was reported in considerable detail by Emmaia Gelman, whose earlier exposé of the ADL likely helped inform the NEA's 7,000-member representative body.

Gelman's reporting on the recent NEA vote includes the detail that the ADL and NEA membership have a history of conflict: "In 1982, when the NEA joined with the National Anti-Klan Committee to develop curriculum on white supremacy, the ADL denouced it as too critical of the U.S. state's role in racism. The NEA curriculum was never implemented, and the ADL's own 'tolerance" curriculum supplanted it."

Gelman also reports that it was Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza that compelled NEA members to create an Educators for Palestine caucus in 2024 that helped dispel old myths conflating Israel with Judaism.

Fighting AB 715 — and the ADL's counterattack:

Between the CTA and the NEA votes, a one-two punch was delivered from the working class to one of the most powerful lobbies in the country. By July 8, the hearing for AB 715 had been canceled and the bill does not look likely to be revived.

Gelman was careful to note that the vote was designated by the NEA legal team as a boycott. That allowed the ADL to counter-attack in a July 15 letter to the NEA, reported here by Marcy Winograd. Curiously, the JCRC Bay Area (SF JCRC), which has been in full support of AB 715 and is usually on board with all things ADL, is not a signatory to the ADL letter. Neither is SF JCRC's recently formed political action committee, Bay Area Jewish Action, about which little is publicly known. In fact, very few Bay Area Jewish institutions appear to have signed onto the ADL letter.

Is it a shift or just a temporary recalibration? Or is it a message from other pro-Israel Jewish groups that it's time for a change in ADL leadership? Are they signalling that Director Jonathan Greenblatt has served his purpose, and the ADL might fare better with a new face?

Nevertheless, the ADL was able to pressure NEA Director Becky Pringle to revoke the July 6 vote, a process that promises to get messy.

4. Hearing for David J. Margoliash, who Attacked Novato's Islamic Center of North Marin, Is Scheduled For This Wednesday

David Margoliash, whose brutal physical attack on members of the Islamic Center of North Marin was serially whitewashed by the Alden-Capital-owned Marin Independent-Journal, is scheduled to be back in court on Wednesday morning. It may once again be continued, but I plan to attend, anyway. The attack was never investigated as a hate crime by the Novato Police.

5. When a Church, Rather than a Mosque, Was Attacked in Novato Last Week, Hate Crimes Charges Were Immediately Added

The hearing for the woman alleged to have committed an act of arson on a Novato church property last week is scheduled for Thursday. I plan to attend. Worth pointing out that hate crimes charges were immediately added to her case, even though the defendant, a tiny 61-year-old white female, appears to share the same faith as the church where she is alleged to have committed the arson.

That is a stark contrast to how favorably Margoliash was treated by Novato Police (including the very unusual one-day "get-out-of-jail-free-card" Margoliash was granted to help Novato Police look for the gun he stashed) after his assault on the Islamic Center. The highly unusual nature of Judge Simmons' granting of the day pass, went largely unquestioned by the Marin Independent-Journal editorial board.

The same week of the apparently Christian-on-Christian attack on the Novato Church, Israel continued to bomb Gaza’s last remaining Christian churches, a reality ignored by most “Christian” supporters of Israel. Here's a clip showing parishioners at the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza barely flinching as Israeli bombs hit nearby due to the constancy of Israel's attacks. This occurred just days before three Christian Palestinians were killed by Israeli bombs that struck the same church, prompting an emergency visit by Cardinal Pizzaballa. Two of the Christians killed by Israel’s strike on the Church were Greek Orthodox Christians who were guests of the small Holy Family church when it was bombed. (Apologies for low quality video, I will rry to upload better quality tomorrow.)

6. Gus Russo's Supermob exposes links between Bazelon and Pritzker families' roles in WWII-era seizure and distribution of Japanese-American properties

Thanks to a generous fellow Californian, a rare copy of Gus Russo's deeply researched Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers arrived at my post office box. It's a fierce telling of Sidney Korshak's Chicago "outfit" and its impact on politics not just in Illinois and California, but at the national level.

Supermob is richly detailed, and especially favored by younger researchers. Two quick takeaways: I'm stunned by Russo's details of Korshak associate Jay Pritzker's role in the distribution of the improper seizures of Japanese-American properties, which factored into the Pritzker family's vastly increased wealth. And it looks like another Korshak associate, Henry Crown, was doing a Halliburton before there was Halliburton. More on that soon.

Thanks as always to patient readers for insights, inspiration, and generous support.

©️2025 Eva Chrysanthe