I. Marin Clean Energy Response to Moss Landing Fire; II. CPRA’d docs show “California Jewish Democrats” VP Bruce Raful Asking For Commission on $2M State Holocaust Ed Funds
III. San Anselmo Town Councilmember Is Fed Up; IV. Your Recommendations; V. Glimpsed In Court
Over the last 48 hours, we’ve witnessed what appears to be an alarming capture of the US government by the “Boer-Silicon Valley hybrid” Elon Musk; a Trump executive order that pissed away at least 1.6 billion gallons of precious California water; and the announcement of tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, all of which threaten to plunge the US into economic chaos. And, that’s not the half of it. (And yet not everything is so bleak. Mexico’s dynamic new President, Claudia Sheinbaum, is giving lessons on how to stand up to a toxic US President. If we’re lucky, maybe we can get our timid Democratic representatives to learn from her.)
Amid that bewildering backdrop, what’s the point of reporting anything from Marin? Maybe only because many of the under-reported stories about local corruption and mismanagement here in Marin are knitted into the larger theme of Trump’s narrow margin of victory in 2024. And so here we are:
I. Marin Clean Energy Provides Sparse Response to Questions About Moss Landing Fire; Goes Silent When The Question Extends To Its Relationship With Vistra Energy
On January 16, 2025, a massive fire broke out at Vistra Energy’s massive lithium battery storage facility at Moss Landing, which was built in 2020 and adjoins the environmentally sensitive Elkhorn Slough. Due to the unusual volatility of the facility, firefighters were unable to do anything but let the fire burn out. In the aftermath, Vistra Energy and the EPA tried to reassure residents (many of whom had opposed the facility) that the fire had been contained and that air monitoring had not detected anything of concern.
But subsequent soil testing conducted by research scientists at San Jose State University detected high concentrations of heavy-metal nanoparticles at Elkhorn Slough Reserve.
Per KSBW News reporter Ricardo Tovar, “a dramatic increase in marsh soil surface concentration of three heavy metals, Nickel, Manganese and Cobalt, was found.” Tovar quoted an SJSU rep as follows: “These heavy metals will chemically transform as they move through the environments and potentially through the food web, affecting local aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.”
The emergency meeting held by the Monterey County Board of Supervisors on January 21 was impressive, with critical insights from local officials and residents. Officials and residents both expressed concern not only about potential health impacts, but about how toxic materials from the fire might impact vital farmlands nearby. One perspective from a longtime Silicon Valley worker stood out, I extracted her comment here.
On Tuesday, I reached out to Marin Clean Energy and asked whether MCE would be impacted by the Vistra Energy battery fire at Moss Landing. Jared Blanton, MCE’s VP of Public Affairs answered that “MCE is not counterparty to the Moss Landing facility and our operations are not impacted.” But when I asked Blanton what MCE’s relationship was with Vistra Energy, Blanton did not respond. (I have since been informed that MCE likely does have relationships with Vistra Energy, just not with the Vistra facility at Moss Landing.)
Vistra Energy is not without issues. According to the Political Economy Research Institute at UMass Amherst, Texas-based Vistra ranked as the Number 1 polluter in the US in a 2024 report. A corporate violation tracker based in DC (“Good Jobs First”) claims Vistra has been fined total penalties of at least $882 million since 2000. That amount was calculated before the most recent fire at Moss Landing.
The Vistra facility at Moss Landing had experienced four prior fires since it was built in 2020. Visitors to the site expressed their surprise at how little space there was between the facility’s lithium storage batteries, with the lack of spacing considered a factor in the fire.
Senate Bill 38 was supposed to at least minimize damage at such facilities, but it doesn’t appear to regulate distance between battery units. The bill was introduced in 2023 by Senator Laird (D-Santa Cruz) after a smaller fire broke out in 2022 at a different battery storage fire at Moss Landing, and signed into law by Gov. Newsom. As weak as SB 38 appears to be, we don’t yet know whether Vistra was in full compliance with it, and if not, if there were any efforts to bring it into compliance.
Since the fire, State Assemblymember Dawn Addis (AD-30, which includes Moss Landing) has reassured constituents that she takes the matter seriously. She stated that she wants Vistra to withdraw its proposal for an additional battery storage facility in Morro Bay. And on January 23, 2025, it was reported that she had just introduced new legislation to limit where battery storage facilities can be located. Among the places she specified as being worthy of protection in her own January 24 press release: “sensitive areas, including schools, hospitals, and natural habitats.” (The actual bill is more expansive, including “Prime Farmland” or “Farmland of State Importance” and many other areas.)
For those who have followed Dawn Addis’ work as Vice Chair of California’s Jewish Legislative Caucus, this delayed attention to such “trivial” matters as protecting wetlands, coastal areas, farmland, humans, wildlife and livestock, is sadly not a surprise. For much of the last 15 months, Addis has been more visible as a pro-Israel lobbyist concerned about “guardrails on ethnic studies” than as a legislator who attended to reasonable concerns about the ongoing fires at the Moss Landing facility. It remains to be seen whether constituents will be able to refocus Addis on local matters.
(Ironically, an earlier attempt bolstered by Addis’ caucus to undermine ethnic studies in her district failed in part because the hardworking demographic that performs much of the labor to harvest the state’s lettuces, strawberries and artichokes showed up to demand that ethnic studies be protected.)
II. Bruce Raful Asks For His Commission on Holocaust Education Funds
It brings me no pleasure to report that I am still the only local news reporter covering the total of $8.5 million in state education monies being transferred through Marin County’s Office of Education to the Bay Area’s “Jewish Family and Children’s Services” to write “Holocaust and Genocide” curricula that already existed.
The grant to the JFCS is particularly craven given how well-funded the JFCS is: its most recent Form 990 shows the nonprofit held $147 million in total assets, and received $85.2 million in revenues in 2023 alone. Of that $85.2 million in 2023 revenues, the JFCS spent $46.8 million, giving the “nonprofit” a net 2023 income of $38.4 million.
For months, Bay Area educators, attorneys, and reporters have generously provided their insights into the JFCS program and the questionable report that JFCS provided to the State Budget office regarding the initial $1.9 million it received for the program. (JFCS officials and partners have declined to respond to questions.)
Then, last Friday, in response to a CPRA request I filed in November, I received close to an additional 200 documents from MCOE regarding the JFCS program. I have so far reviewed approximately half of those documents.
I anticipate releasing the full article next weekend. In the meantime, I am releasing just one short email thread from the MCOE’s latest delivery.
In the thread, real estate appraiser and Vice President of the pro-Israel “California Jewish Democrats” (which appears to operate under the sponsorship of “Democrats for Israel State PAC”), contacted Marin County Superintendent of Schools John Carroll on June 10, 2024, and asked:
“John, I’m told your office is getting $2M for Holocaust and Genocide Education. What’s your plan for it?”
Carroll waited until the following day to respond, and his response indicates he thought that Raful was referring to the previous $1.9 million state grant already handed to the JFCS through the MCOE.
Raful corrected Carroll in a reply later the same day: “I don’t think so – Damon Connolly’s office told me the following is from the 2024-5 budget bill.” Raful then cited the bill.
Carroll waited another day before thanking Raful and conveying that one of the MCOE staffers was looking into it.
Raful’s response came approximately 15 minutes later.
“Maybe I just found you $2M you didn’t know about – would I get a commission?:)”
Even as a joke, Raful’s response is disturbing. The subject was millions of dollars for a supposedly serious educational project about the Holocaust (which Raful’s pro-Israel crowd has always insisted should be a matter of regular pieties by public officials and institutions), and a very select few other genocides that delicately manage not to implicate the US too much, or Israel at all.
Raful’s “joke” exposes the hypocrisy of the local pro-Israel lobby and its demand for more and more funding for “Holocaust and genocide education”. It’s not about those Jews, Poles, Roma, Communists, and LGBTQ people who were interned, tortured, brutalized and/or killed during the Holocaust; it’s about the trading of political favors centered around fidelity to the US-Israel relationship.
And it is about transferring public monies, desperately needed by the poorest students in California, to already politically powerful pro-Israel institutions. Those institutions in turn perform critical fundraising for the politicians who vote for the legislation to approve even more millions for “Holocaust and Genocide Education.” (A recent report commissioned by the State implies the possibility that this funding will be increased beyond the $8.5 million I identified as moving through MCOE.)
Left out of the equation are the same groups left out of the nearly all-white Marin County Office of Education Board meetings, or derided when they dare to show up. Among them: workingclass and poor people of all races; Palestinians and other Arab and Muslim students, and very specifically: the workingclass Black and Latino families most impacted by the MCOE’s decisions regarding everything from dress codes to cooperation with ICE and other law enforcement agencies.
This is an ongoing and developing story, which I will continue next week. (The report for the State budget office submitted by the JFCS, paltry as it is, warrants its own article.)
III. San Anselmo Town Councilmember Eileen Burke Is Fed Up
When I tuned in to the latest San Anselmo Town Council meeting, I did not expect to hear residents voice concerns about the Moss Landing fire, but at least two of them did during non-agenda public comment. And shortly after that, Town Councilmember and former Mayor Eileen Burke made her own comments during the Councilmember reports. Among her comments was her claim that the other town council members have coordinated to exclude her from specific committee assignments over a period of five years. The skilled trial attorney later stated in a Facebook post “Their collusion is an illegal Brown Act violation.”
Despite having sat through what feels like endless local council meetings, I admit I had never witnessed anything quite like Burke’s comment in Marin. I believe the next San Anselmo Town Council Meeting is February 11, and it should be an interesting one.
IV. Your Recommendations
A few recent recommendations from subscribers and others:
Soundtrack to A Coup d’Etat: Documentary covers the protest by US jazz musicians after the assassination of Patrice Lubumba. Reportedly includes Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crashing the UN Security Council in protest.
Greg Grandin’s new book “America, América” sounds as amazing as his best work, it rethinks our relationship to Latin America, and how Latin America has influenced our own US institutions.
Isabeau Doucet has a very thorough article on the challenges faced by Palestinians seeking asylum for The Guardian; she has previously written about displaced people in Haiti and the Bay Area.
Some of you have expressed an interest in reading or rereading W.E.B. Du Bois’ landmark/revolutionary Black Reconstruction in America — maybe this fraught era is the right time to read that in a group?
Reporter Joe Sacco has a new graphic novel, and if you can’t afford it, he does a riveting interview with Chris Hedges here.
There is an excellent new article on Incarcerated California Firefighters in The New Republic by Shaanth Nanguneri
The much-loved reporter Sam Husseini was recently ejected by force from a State Department briefing, it was a dramatic incident during which time he managed to continue asking the relevant questions that so few of the other reporters in that briefing room have asked. Husseini has written about the incident here.
V. Glimpsed In Court:
Amid the understandable panic induced by a new President’s flurry of executive orders, two thin, baby-faced Latino men were led in shackles into a Bay Area Superior Court in late January by a trio of correctional officers, and were soon flanked by several County deputies.
None of that was unusual, except for one detail. One of the law enforcement officers, a middle-aged man with a particularly sober demeanor, wore around his neck a traditional Palestinian scarf, or keffiyeh, clearly visible above the collar of his uniformed jacket.
To paraphrase Philip K. Dick, do prison guards dream of electronic intifadas? It shouldn’t surprise anyone that such sympathies exist within law enforcement; the same sympathies have existed in some measure within the US military, whose soldiers pick neither their battles nor deployments. What was surprising was the public display of the traditional Palestinian cloth. It was the first time I had noticed any US member of law enforcement sport a keffiyeh, or any symbol of solidarity with Palestinian people. It implied that the expression of solidarity had some acceptance or support from his law enforcement colleagues.
But it was also striking because so much of US law enforcement has been trained by Israeli military and/or police. This training not only hasn’t improved police relations with communities, but it likely hasn’t bonded law enforcement as closely to Israel as might have been expected. And this even as arrests, abuse and related targeting by law enforcement of pro-Palestinian activists and reporters continues.
Several high-profile individual reporters critical of Israel who have been targeted by law enforcement in the last half year come to mind: British reporter Sarah Wilkinson whose home was raided by UK police last September; the previously mentioned American reporter Sam Husseini who was improperly (and quite dramatically) removed from a State Department briefing last month; British reporter Asa Winstanley whose home was raided by UK police in October; American reporter Ali Abunimah, who was improperly arrested in Switzerland a week ago. And I am hoping to get an interview with a former Peace Corps member, reporter and activist once based in Marin, whose home was raided by the FBI last fall.
Thanks as always to readers for all their insights and ideas.
©️2025 Eva Chrysanthe