Guerrilla News Network's Ford Foundation Connection

by Bob Feldman

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 Ford Foundation--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 www.corporatewatch.org 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; and
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