Sometimes I talk to reporters and I wonder what they would do if I asked to be identified as “Pope Maurice I.” That temptation arises when I see a story that identifies a billionaire created “parent” or “educators” group taken at face value. Like in this WCVB report accepting that the National Parents Union is, well, parents; instead of what it is, a front for billionaires like the Waltons, Charles Koch, and others.
Sharman Sacchetti’s story is about the opposing sides on the MCAS ballot question. On one side, the teachers union would like to get rid of MCAS as a determinant of high school graduation. The public has a fair idea of what unions are.
But then the report frames the opposition as “parents” represented by Keri Rodrigues of National Parents Union. But NPU is not national, not about parents, and not a union.
Rather NPU is front of the billionaires boys club including the Walton family, Reed Hastings, John Arnold, Reed Hoffman, Bill Gates, etc. Charles Koch dealt himself in, too.
The billionaires have put millions of dollars into NPU. No Waltons, Koch, etc, no NPU. But these people are not gullible. They knew naming this thing the National Billionaires Union would not be helpful with legislators, governors, or the public.
WCVB (and the Globe’s, and most other Boston media’s) “typical parent” is Keri Rodrigues, quoted in the WCVB story. Scroll down NPU’s most recent publicly available Form 990 for 2022 tax return and you will find typical parents Rodrigues and her husband, NPU’s treasurer, paid themselves $661,775. NPU is supposed to be about building ‘parent power’ nationally but it spent only $31,616 on organizing in 2022. Just like a real union, Rodrigues was reportedly “elected” president in 2020 for a three-year term, but unlike a real union there has never been another election. Whoops.
The billionaire money behind all this is almost never reported in the Boston media, and there are no signs that will change. Instead, the MCAS ballot question will be framed in the media sometimes as unions v. parents, or sometimes, unions vs. ‘the Boston business community.’ It is more accurately between capital and labor. The billionaire boys club gets off free.
As Pope Maurice I, I am here to tell you: that is bull.
*For those who do not know, a papal bull is a formal written declaration by the pope.
Imagine movie critics who either did not know, or did not care to know, that movies have producers, script writers, directors, financiers, or casting directors, and so based their reviews on the premise that it was the actors alone who created the storyline, dialogue and mise en scene, and that the most successful actors were those who best understood the audience. That is essentially how all politics is covered in 21st century America.—Michael Podhorzer.
Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, is in print.]