Should the Perks Suggestion be Implemented?

Immediately after losing the election to Sam Sloan for the USCF
Executive Board in July 2006, Grant Perks proposed that the delegates
abolish the entire USCF Executive Board as a way to prevent Sam Sloan
from taking office.

As Perks pointed out, the delegates do not have the authority to
remove an individual board member, but they do have the legal
authority by a 2/3rds vote at the coming meeting in Dallas to abolish
the entire Executive Board.

One reason that the Perks suggestion never went anywhere was that Sam
Sloan was only elected to a one year term, whereas Randy Hough was
elected to a three year term. Had the 2006 election somehow been
invalidated, then Randy Hough, who has proven himself to be a lapdog
sycophant for Bill Goichberg, would not have been allowed to take
office either.

Currently, the entire board has been acting so badly and they all have
terms of more than one to three years remaining that it may become
necessary to think the unthinkable and to consider abolishing the
entire board.

This is unthinkable because nobody can know what would happen to the
USCF after that. On the other hand, is can be persuasively argued that
things could not possibly get worse, so they can only get better.

The most recent scandal is the refusal of USCF President Bill
Goichberg to release the "the preliminary end of the year results" for
the 2007-2008 fiscal year to two of the board members. Goichberg has
had the preliminary year-end results since June 18. Obviously, the
results must be very bad as otherwise why would he refuse to give the
results to the other board members.

Goichberg writes, “I haven't really thought about the report since
shortly after receiving it as its bottom line was off by so much”.

That is the smoking gun. When Goichberg writes "the bottom line was
off by so much", this must mean that the bottom line showed a big
loss. If the bottom line had showed a profit, then Goichberg would
gladly display it even if he knew it was wrong.

Next, Goichberg claims that any suggestions that he is keeping the
other board members from seeing the financials is a violation of the
AUG. The AUG is a series of guidelines imposed by the board on the
USCF Issues Forum which state among other things that you cannot
accuse any board member of doing anything that "may be an unethical
act" without "substantial proof". The terms "unethical act" and
"substantial proof" have been interpreted so broadly that it has
become almost impossible to say anything negative about the board.
Goichberg writes:

"The suggestion that any EB members were omitted from the alleged
distribution because they are "critical about management" is totally
without merit and appears to violate the AUG (accusation without
proof, alleging motives)."

So, Goichberg is calling for censorship. Do not be surprised that this
entire thread disappears soon.

However, this is only the most recent of a long series of bad acts by
the current board. It is now obvious that Susan Polgar is equally
guilty with Paul Truong of sending out 2464 "Fake Sam Sloan" newsgroup
postings, impersonating Sam Sloan and other chess personalities and
attacking other chess personalities in obscene and racist terms in
order to get Polgar and Truong elected and the other candidates
defeated. People have been dancing around that issue too, saying that
although it is proven that Paul Truong did this, the sweet innocent
Polgar must not have known what her husband was doing.

Now we have Goichberg and Bauer aggressively pushing through their
plans to turn Chess Life and Chess Life for Kids magazines into online
publications and to abolish the membership cards. In spite of the
outrage at these proposals and the threat of a lawsuit by the USCF
Books and Equipment Dealer, Goichberg and Bauer are pushing forward
with these plans. As Mike Goodall points out, with the history of
Goichberg, even if the delegates vote this down in Dallas, he will
probably do this anyway on the pretext of an emergency.

That leaves only two board members who are not entirely bad. However,
they have not said anything at all, so we do not know where they stand
on any issue.

I am yet advocating the abolition of the Executive Board. I am still
hoping that the board will learn the error of their ways and start
acting like adults. However, as a last resort, and this would indeed
be a very last resort, we may have to consider the possibility of just
retiring the entire Executive Board.

Sam Sloan

Here is a new Goichberg quote. He writes:

"Perhaps the Finance chair should copy the entire board on all
reports, even those that might mislead the public if publicized,"

So, Goichberg is saying either that certain board members "might
mislead the public" or that certain financial reports "might mislead
the public".

In either case, he is imposing censorship on his fellow board members.

Sam Sloan