The Walton Family’s fantasy of what a union should look like, the National Parents Union, is having its Virtual Convening on May 15, so what better time could there be to look back at a year plus of peeling the onion off of this fake progressive group? By popular demand, Your National Parents Union Reader!
The Marketing of National Parents Union. If you happen to be starting up a parents organization you may wonder, “Gee, I wonder how I could attract a board member who was communications director for a Cabinet official, another who ran PR for Bill Gates, a former radio host, the president of a PR firm, and an international public strategy firm, to help us get out newsletters and run the mimeo machine?” Here’s your answer, and the answer to why NPU manages to get such positive (if inaccurate) press coverage.
Massachusetts Parents United, National Parents Union, and the Christian Right. What do Massachusetts Parents United and National Parents Union have in common? Well yes, they were both “founded” by former Families for Excellent Schools Massachusetts state director Keri Rodrigues; and both are underwritten by the WalMart heirs, but I don’t mean that. No, it’s both have ties (they’d rather not emphasize) to the Christian Right.
National Parents Union: Turmoil at the Top. Back when I was an attorney I had some clients who kept two sets of books. But two sets of directors? No. National Parents Union keeps two sets of boards of directors, one for the website and another one on record with the Corporations Division of the Massachusetts secretary of State. Ms. Rodrigues, the co-founder and founding president, is serving a term of either three or six years, depending. The other co-founder, Alma Marquez, disappeared. And there’s more.
Charles Koch Buys into National Parents Union. Nothing says “progressive” quite like cashing a big fat check from Charles Koch.
National Parents Union, a Unit of the Billionaire Boys Club. Bake sale? We don’t need no stinkin’ bake sale! Not when you’re being underwritten not only by the Waltons and Koch, but Zuckerberg, Dell, John Arnold, Reed Hoffman, and on and on.
A Response to Keri Rodrigues’s Accusation of Inaccurate Information. I’ve written about Families for Excellent Schools, Massachusetts Parents United, and National Parents Union, all operations supposedly run by Ms. Rodrigues. Every so often she accuses me of inaccuracy, though she never specifies what is incorrect. So I showed my work on how I determined National Parents Union: Not a Union, Not National, Not About Parents (see next post down). News organizations being peddled the line (see The Marketing of National Parents Union above) that NPU is a parents’ organization should read these two posts first.
National Parents Union: Not a Union, Not National, Not About Parents. Those claims that National Parents Union has parent member organizations in 50 states? Not true. This May 2020 study showed the “members” were mostly corporations tied to the charter school and privatization industry, from 22 states plus DC. Whoops.
Got Democracy? National Parents Union Doesn’t. If you became a member of an organization wouldn’t you want to know what that meant and how you might affect the decision making of a “grassroots” organization? You’d be out of luck with National Parents Union. It does the Waltons bidding.
National Parents Union, the Anti-union Union. National Parents Union, I’m a member of a union. My mother was a member of a union. National Parents Union, you’re no union. Actually, National Parents Union is a device for the Waltons and Koch to attack teachers unions without showing their faces.
Waltons Dive into Democratic Primaries behind National Parents Union. NPU was pitched to the Waltons as a means to attack teachers unions under the guise of a parents’ organization during the Democratic primaries. Try to imagine the look on Alice Walton’s face when the courtiers came in and pleaded, “Your Highness! We have an idea to spend millions of your inheritance on a union!
Keri Rodrigues Goes Coastal with Plans for National Parents Union. If you’re pulling in $500,000 a year from the Waltons for one state with Massachusetts Parents United of Arkansas, well, as the McKinsey consultants say, why not bring it to scale? One problem, as I pointed out and so did Prof. Javier Vasquez Heilig at the Cloaking Inequality blog in Walton-Funded Reformers Stealing Union from Black Parents? The problem was, a National Parents Union was already in existence and the Waltons were stealing the name. And it wasn’t me that wrote “The president is supposed to be Keri Rodrigues Lorenzo, a White woman from Boston. She is not Latina although she purposely misleads everyone to think she is.” That was Professor Vasquez Heilig.
“Why wait for popular opinion to catch up when you could portray as ‘reform’ what was really slow-motion demolition through privatization?” – Professor Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Plan for America.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy.]