North American Indigenous Peoples Caucus Credibility Issue

WKOG editor: As a side note, Amazon Watch, like many NGOs are created as incubator projects by foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller in order to shape, manage and control movements, as well as dissent. According to Wikipedia: “Founded in 1996, Amazon Watch is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. It works to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin.” What Wikipedia does not tell you is the fact that Ford “gave a grant, beginning January 12, 1987, to the Brazilian Foundation for the Conservation of Nature (BFCN), the oldest, most establishment-connected conservation group in Brazil which had also gotten funds from WWF U.S. since 1983. The Ford Foundation said BFCN hired Mallas “as a member of the project staff.” She was listed as the co-ordinator of a meeting that was to plan an organization called “Amazon Watch”. The grant ($22,850) was later reduced to $16,000, which covered the actual expenditures: it came from Ford’s Rural Poverty and Resources Division, the section later run by Peter May who went on to work with Clay, Groeneveld, the Body Shop, et al. The BFCN was headed in 1987 by Admiral Ibsen De Gusmao Camara, who acted as the liaison with Ford Foundation on the Amazon Watch project. The admiral’s term as president of BFCN  ended in the fall of 1987. The new president fired everyone the admiral had hired.” [Source: Cloak of Green: The Links between Key Environmental Groups, Government and Big Business by Elaine Dewar (Jan 1 1995)] – Another example of a popular incubator project that operates under the guise of “grassroots” is Rockefellers’ 1Sky/350.org. 

Intercontinental Cry

May 3, 2013

By Jay Taber

On the NAIPC listserv this week, Robert Free Galvan asks some important questions of the North American Indigenous Peoples Caucus and the elite indigenous lobbyists who manipulate it to conform to the UN colonial model. He interestingly asks about the funding of such lobbying from notorious foundations as Ford. →

Foundation Funding: Tightening the Bonds of Our Own Oppression

February 15, 2013

Author/illustrator Stephanie McMillan of Minimum Security writes:

The awareness of capitalism’s core mechanisms (as opposed to its effects) is so crucial because the system has numerous methods of assimilating our struggles, and we have to make sure we don’t get sidetracked. It diverts discontent into forms that reinforce its own institutions. These are very sophisticated and persuasive – they make people feel that they are making a difference when in fact they’re tightening the bonds of their own oppression.

 

It seems that when one attempts to engage in a critical discussion regarding the political problems of working with these and other foundations, and especially when one is interested in naming them as the gently repressive “evil” cousins of the more prototypically evil right-wing foundations, the establishment Left becomes profoundly defensive of its financial patrons. I would argue that this is a liberal-progressive vision that marginalizes the radical, revolutionary, and proto-revolutionary forms of activism, insurrection, and resistance that refuse to participate in the Soros charade of “shared values”, and are uninterested in trying to “improve the imperfect.” The social truth of the existing society is that it is based on the production of massive, unequal, and hierarchically organized disenfranchisement, suffering, and death of these populations who are targeted for containment and political/social liquidation –a violent social order produced under the dictates of “democracy,” “peace,” “security,” and “justice” that form the historical and political foundations of the very same white civil society on which the NPIC Left is based.

 

If we take seriously, for the sake of argument, the political analysis articulated by Palestinians struggling against the Israeli occupation, or that of imprisoned radical intellectuals/activists and their free-world allies desperately fighting to dismantle and abolish the prison industrial complex, or that of Indigenous peoples worldwide who, to paraphrase Haunani-Kay Trask, are literally fighting against their own planned obsolescence, then it should become clear that the Soros philosophy of the Open Society, along with other liberal foundation social imaginaries, are at best philanthropic vanities. At worst, we can accuse the Soros, Ford, Mellon, and Rockefeller foundations, and their ilk of NGOs and non-profit organizations, of accompanying and facilitating these massive structures of human domination, which simply cannot be reformed or “reconciled” in a manner that legitimates anything approaching a vision of liberation or radical freedom.” –Dylan Rodriguez (The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex)