Bob Feldman
Online
Journal
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Although the Guerrilla News Network [GNN] may claim to be an
anti-corporate media group, it was given a grant of $62,500 in
2006 by the multi-billion dollar (and CIA-connected) Ford
Foundation, (also see "Alternative
Media Censorship") whose board of trustees chairperson,
Kathryn Fuller, has also been sitting on ALCOA's corporate board
since 2002.
Anti-corporate environmentalists in Iceland have been fighting
against ALCOA's plan to have the Bechtel Group build a $1.1 billion
aluminum smelting plant in Reydarfjordur that will likely produce
a great deal of environmental destruction in northeastern Iceland.
As Corporate Watch’s
site observed: "ALCOA is the company which, in the face of
unprecedented local opposition, is building an aluminum smelting
plant in Iceland powered by a hydro-electric dam which will flood
vast swathes of Western Europe's last pristine wilderness."
GNN was not the only alternative media or social change group
to be given a grant by the ALCOA-linked Ford Foundation in 2006.
Other 2006 recipients of Ford Foundation grants included the following:
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) -- $100,000.
Independent Television Service -- $300,000.
Unity: Journalists of Color, Inc. -- $200,000.
Youth Speaks, Inc. -- $175,000.
United for a Fair Economy -- $600,000.
Progressive magazine -- $150,000.
A grant of $500,000 was also given to Columbia University in 2006
by the Ford Foundation to subsidize Nation magazine co-owner Victor
Navasky's Columbia Journalism Review.
The Ford Foundation apparently also gave a $50,000 grant in 2006
to the dance company of the domestic partner of the Radio Nation/Air
America show producer/talk-show host "to launch an emerging
commissioning program and to create a new, full-evening dance/theatre
work."
In addition, the Ford Foundation also gave a grant of $550,000
in 2006 to Columbia University to subsidize the "Columbia
Workshop on Journalism, Race and Ethnicity."
The ALCOA-linked Ford Foundation board of trustees also gave
a lot of money to the Ms. Foundation for Women in 2006. A grant
of $1.5 million, for instance, was given to the Ms. Foundation
for Women "to launch the New Women's Movement initiative
to increase the size, impact, power and diversity of the women's
movement and implement its grant-making and leadership development
program." So don't expect many of the Ms. Foundation for
Women-subsidized feminist activists to be very eager to criticize
ALCOA for destroying the earth in Iceland or the Ford Foundation
for its apparent profiteering from investments in weapons manufacturing
corporations.
The ALCOA-linked Ford Foundation also gave a grant of $300,000
in 2006 to the Jewish Fund for Justice "to enable the Social
Justice Leadership Collaborative to strengthen the development
of and networking among social justice organizers" and a
$400,000 grant to one of the U.S. groups that still lobbies in
support of continued U.S. military aid to the militaristic Israeli
government: the American Jewish Committee.
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