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.
Bob
Feldman is an investigative reporter.