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!…
Category: National Parents Union
Forget Stop the Wait RI, It’s I Told You So RI!
Back on March 9 I posted Rhode Island: Dark Money Backs “Parents Group” for More Charter Schools about a new operation called Stop the Wait RI. Maybe I should incorporate as I Told You So RI. That’s because the new Stop the Wait Group RI has taken a familiar path for dark money operations. Recall…
The Marketing of National Parents Union
National Parents Union isn’t national, isn’t about parents, and isn’t a union—so what is it? It’s a corporate-type marketing front, and a successful one at that. Let’s take a look at the backgrounds of the leadership touted on NPU’s website from about January 2020 through sometime late in August when co-founder Alma Marquez vanished amidst…
Massachusetts Parents United, National Parents Union, and the Christian Right
Two of the important props of the far right in America are Christian conservatives and economic royalists like the Waltons and Charles Koch. Those ties are becoming evident in school privatization including in financial support the Massachusetts Parents United has offered to a Christian right group and in National Parents Union’s funding from a Koch-Walton…
National Parents Union: Turmoil at the Top
National Parents Union, funded by the Waltons, Charles Koch, and other oligarchs has churned its leadership in one year so much that it deepens questions about NPU’s legitimacy. Two sets of boards of directors and the departure of a co-founder and board member will do that. Two boards? Yep. When you visit the National Parents…
Charles Koch Buys into National Parents Union
There’s millions of dollars sloshing around Massachusetts Parents United and National Parents Union these days. Some of it is from Charles Koch. That’s the takeaway from a recent story in the Walton-funded online publication The74: The Koch connection was apparent when Charles Koch put a proxy on the board of National Parents Union….
A Response to Keri Rodrigues’s Accusation of Inaccurate Information
Since I got into following the dark money business with the 2016 school privatization ballot question in Massachusetts, I try to stay up on newly arising organizations that serve as fronts for the plans of billionaires. One such group is the National Parents Union, which is not national, not parents, and not a union. I…
National Parents Union, a Unit of the Billionaire Boys Club
Last week I explained how the National Parents Union is not a union, not national, and not about parents. Today we’ll go into more detail about what NPU is: a political unit of the Billionaire Boys Club. Education scholar Diane Ravitch popularized the term Billionaire Boys Club in her 2010 book The Death and Life…
National Parents Union: Not a Union, Not National, Not About Parents
One unsurprising characteristic of the Walton family sponsored National Parents Union is that it has so few parent members. Here is how NPU describes itself on its website: I wanted to look at two aspects of NPU’s claims, that it is a parent organization and that it has members in all 50 states. It seems…
The Growing Koch Presence in Massachusetts
There is an essential piece in today’s Washington Post about the ReOpen America campaign, Inside the conservative networks backing anti-quarantine protests and no quote is more important for Massachusetts than this one from Professor Robert Brulle, who exposed the Koch Brothers funding of the climate denial industry: “The involvement of the Koch institutional apparatus in…