$am $loan for USCF Executive Board

$am $loan for USCF Executive Board

This year, the voters are faced with a question which has never faced
them before, at least not to this extent.

The question is: To what extent should present or former employees of
the USCF be allowed to run for the Executive Board? At present, of the
five members on the board, two are former full time employees of the
USCF. A third does paid work for the USCF, although he has never been
on the full time office staff. Only two board members have never been
paid by the USCF.

In addition, of the five candidates, three are present or former full
time employees of the USCF staff. Only I and Mike Goodall (a retired
publishing executive) have never worked in the USCF office.

Former employees can bring valuable assets to the board. Their
detailed knowledge of the insides and workings of the USCF are
certainly valuable and useful.

However, if two more former employees are elected in this election,
there will be a majority of four on the board and, once they have
completely taken over and constituted a majority of the board, there
will be serious problems. The Board is supposed to be completely
independent of the staff. Section 4 of the USCF by-laws says: "An
employee of the USCF may not be nominated for election to the
Executive Board".

This provision is based upon the applicable law. The USCF is
incorporated in Illinois and a brochure written by Neil F. Harrigan,
Attorney General of the State of Illinois, states that board members
may "Receive no material profit".
http://www.cqc.state.ny.us/counsels_corner/cc38.htm

The previous USCF President, who had herself appointed Chief Operating
Officer and then paid herself more than $11,000 in expenses from
January through March 2005, was acting illegally. I believe that the
reason two recent employees are running in this election is they feel
that if the past president can get away with it, they can too. I think
they are wrong.

Another provision of the USCF by-laws says that a member of the board
may not direct more than one national tournament per year.

One member of the current board has directed three national
tournaments in just the last nine months since he was elected. He is
clearly in violation of the by-laws and may be called upon to resign.
A current candidate has no other job except working for the USCF. Yet
another candidate is a CPA who does seasonal accounting work for the
USCF. All of these candidates are claiming that they do not receive
W-2 Forms from the USCF. They only receive 1099 Forms and therefore
they are not employees, they claim. However, I believe that they are
employees.

Certainly you are asking: What is the real objection? Two objections
are that because of the work they do for the USCF, they are in contact
with the membership and have an advantage over truly independent
candidates and, more importantly, they tend not to have any real world
experience business experience and therefore they do not have the
qualifications and capabilities we need to have among board members.

Take a look at the qualifications presented by other candidates in
this election. I know what they will say. They present a long list of
other chess players who endorse them for election. They will list many
qualifications they have, including the many chess tournaments they
have directed. However, they will provide little or no information
about the issues facing the USCF or what they will do or change if
elected. They will give no indication of any qualifications they have
outside of chess and some of them have none.

James Eade, a former board member, recently wrote about this:

"The USCF needs board members who have established a
successful track record outside of chess, and who love chess. People
like Joel Channing and Eric Anderson should be who we're voting for or
against, not TD's or ex-USCF staffers. . . . He doesn't have the
experience a board member requires. . . . The USCF has two enormous
problems to overcome: 1: Thinking OTB players are the core members. 2:
Thinking TD's should be board members. It drives me CRAZY! If the USCF
is an organization of TDs voting for other TDs, there is no future."

Significantly, these candidates have been employees of the USCF during
a period when the USCF LOST TWO MILLION DOLLARS. Their experience
would not seem to be a good qualification to be a board member.

People ask me why I keep running for the board, in spite of having
lost several elections. This is a legitimate question and I believe
that I have a good answer.

Take a look at where the USCF was when I first ran in 1996. The USCF
had a reserve fund called the LMA or Life Membership Assets with cash
and equivalents of nearly two million dollars in the fund. The big
debate was whether or not this fund should be increased to five
million dollars and at what the rate of increase should be. Should it
increase at the rate of 4% or at the rate of 6%? Those were the great
questions of the day.

The successive boards came to the rescue and found an ingenious
solution to these problems. They lost the money. Now, there is no LMA
Fund any more. It is all gone, Gone With the Wind. So, we do not have
to worry about whether the LMA is increasing at the 4% rate or at the
6% rate.

I have been a member of the USCF for 50 years since 1956. For 40
years, I had been satisfied just to play in chess tournaments and read
the magazine, just like most other members. It had never even crossed
my mind in 40 years to run for election.

However, in 1996 I looked at the situation and realized that disasters
seemed about to happen. This galvanized me into action. I lost the
election but I proved to be right. Every one of the bad things I
predicted was going to happen did in fact to happen. Check my website
and you will see that that is true. Ever since, the USCF has been
sliding along a zigzag course into the abyss. The two million dollars
that used to be in the LMA Fund no longer exists. The money is gone.
More than that, the USCF has just finished building a white elephant
which has zoning and other restrictions which make it unsalable.

So, among the questions a How did the USCF get the two million
dollars in the first place, how did it lose it and what could or would
Sam Sloan have done to stop this from happening if he had been
elected? More importantly, what will Sam Sloan do or try to get the
board to do if elected now?

The USCF got the two million dollars because it had successful
businessmen on the board, men like Fred Gruenberg. It also had a hard
driving and ruthless Executive Director, who was paid performance
bonuses for increasing membership and sales.

After 1996, when that Executive Director was forced out, the USCF
broke almost even for three years, although a big deal was made over a
loss of $20,000 in one year.

The big downward slide began when a college professor with no business
experience took over the USCF in 1999. It became obvious that he could
not read a balance sheet and did not even know what one was. He
reported profits when in reality the USCF was suffering huge losses,
which should have been obvious because sales of books and equipment
fell from $3.5 million to $1.8 million, while at the same time payroll
expenses and staff were increasing.

Another problem was that the Executive Board did not take the obvious
precautionary step of doing background checks on key employees it was
hiring. One and possibly two Executive Directors were hired on the
basis of resumes which were entirely fraudulent. The qualifications
they claimed to have did not exist. The boards should have realized
that when an applicant seems to have a dream resume and to have every
desirable qualification a man could possibly have, that, if he was so
great, why would he want to work for the USCF.

At least one board member ran for election claiming qualifications
which were purely imaginary. Turns out that the only business
experience he had was bring fired from his many jobs. He eventually
disappeared while still in office and has not been seen or heard from
since.

Turning to the current situation, of the five board members, only one
has had actual experience operating a successful business unrelated to
chess. Another is a retired corporate executive. The remaining three
board members have no non-chess business qualifications.

Now if, in the current election, the voters elect any two of the three
candidates who are former employees of the USCF, then, five of the
seven board members will be strictly chess people.

To avoid the consequences of this, the voters have to elect Sam Sloan
and Mike Goodall, because we are the only candidates who have never
worked for the USCF.

Here are my qualifications:

I am 61 years old, born in Richmond, Virginia. I am a happily married
man with a wife and eight children. My eldest son, Peter Aravena
Sloan, is a rated chess master, with a current rating of 2201.

I am a well known person, indeed one of the best known persons in the
entire world and that is not an exaggeration. I won the World
Championship of Chinese Chess for Non-Chinese in Beijing China in
1988. My picture was on Chinese television. There were numerous
articles about me in Chinese newspapers and magazines. There are
articles about me in Chinese on the Internet which you can find and
read now if you know Chinese. My book, Chinese Chess for Beginners,
sells well in the Chinese community. From this alone, my name is known
by one billion people.

I was one of the leaders of the student revolution that overthrew the
University of California at Berkeley in 1964-1966. This is in the
history books. Every student who was on the Berkeley campus at that
time will remember this once they realize that I am the same person.

I have a website which averages 20,000 unique visitors and 100,000
hits per day.

I am universally known in the world of chess. Ask any tournament chess
player and he or she will have heard of me.

I am known in the legal community for being the only pro se non-lawyer
ever to argue orally in this century before the Supreme Court of the
United States, and I won the case. I am also known for the case I won
against the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission. Recently,
there were articles in the New York Daily News regarding my complaints
against the Chief Clerk of the Brooklyn Board of Elections.

I was a math major at the University of California at Berkeley. I
scored 800 on my Math College Boards. I was a winner in the Virginia
Science Talent Search. I established my own Wall Street Securities
firm in 1970, Samuel H. Sloan & Co. I passed the New York Stock
Exchange Exam and the SEC and NASD Principals Exam. I took securities
analysis courses at the New York Institute of Finance, so I can read
and interpret financial statements. I can speak 15 languages, although
I am only really fluent in three of them. I have written five
published books. I am also a book publisher. I own a company that has
published one hundred books.

I helped found and establish a corporate proxy solicitation firm on
Wall Street, Shareholder Communications Corporation. Recently, the
company I helped establish was sold for $120 million dollars.
Unfortunately, I was no longer with the company when it was sold.
Nobody will doubt my qualifications in the corporate field.

I have written three books which are very suitable for students. One
is The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson which is popular in the
Black Community. Another is Chinese Chess for Beginners which is
popular in the Chinese Community. A third is How to Take Over an
American Public Company, which explains the securities markets. All of
these books are being reprinted right now.

What I will do, if elected

There are a lot of complaints that the USCF is doing too much in
scholastic chess. I will rectify that by doing a major expansion in
scholastic chess. The USCF will establish a program to certify chess
teachers. The requirement will be a chess rating of at least 1600 (or
perhaps only 1500). Then, the USCF will help local teachers and groups
of chess teachers set up corporations so that they can get state and
federal funding to teach chess. There is a tremendous demand for chess
teachers right now. Most chess teachers do not know the corporate
forms necessary to create a successful and profitable chess program.
We will teach them how to do this, or even do it for them. I plan to
have a million scholastic members of the USCF by 2010.

A big issue now is the Chess Life magazine. Several of the regular
monthly columnists have been fired. By the time you read this you may
know the answer, but as I am writing this, I do not know. I am
concerned that Grandmaster Larry Evans has been fired. Grandmaster
Evans is unpopular with the politicians but popular with the
membership. He has been fired several times in the past but always
reinstated by reader demand.

This June issue is a major improvement in Chess Life. The question is:
Can it be kept up? I strongly oppose the efforts of the board to
micromanage the contents of the magazine. The editor should be given
editorial freedom.

An example of what can go wrong occurred at the March 2006 meeting of
the Executive Board that I attended. A well known chess politician and
former USCF President came to the board and proposed that Chess Life
carry a monthly column on his favorite subject. It seemed like a good
idea so, without devoting any real thought to the matter, the board
approved it, 5-0. Then, Paul Hoffman appeared and asked to be paid
$50,000 to reorganize and revamp both Chess Life magazine and the
website. Sounded like a good idea too, so the board approved the
$50,000, again 5-0.

Some time the following day, it was pointed out that the board had
made a booboo. The guy who wanted the $50,000 wanted to kick the
regular columnists out of Chess Life. But the politician had just been
awarded a new column in Chess Life. These two resolutions were
incompatible.

So, a few days later there was a re-vote and the column by the
politician was kicked out. The other guy got the $50,000.

Somebody should tell these clowns that serving on a board is serious
business. This is not a game for children.

A beautiful young girl, who has written an excellent book and several
magazine articles on sex related issues, was hired at $40,000 per year
to write content for the USCF website. Nobody has bothered to ask what
qualifications she has as a webmaster or what capabilities she has to
write interesting articles about chess that have nothing to do with
sex. Nothing by her has appeared on uschess.org thus far. I do not
know whether she has started receiving the $40,000 yet.

Another issue: Until 1999, annual USCF sales of books and equipment
were $3.5 million. In 2004, the board voted to outsource the books and
equipment business for $350,000 per year. A contract was signed.
However, before long, the vender with whom we had made the deal
started falling behind in payments. Our current president kept saying
"Don?ft worry. He will pay. He will pay."

By the meeting in Phoenix in August, 2005 the bombshell was dropped
that he was $180,00 behind in payments.

What did the new board do? They told the vendor, no need to pay the
$350,000. Just pay a minimum of $150,000.

Of course, the board should have sued him and stopped doing business
with him. One simply does not do business with someone who breaks
contracts.

The most terrible decision in the history of the USCF was and will be
the decision to move to Crossville, Tennessee. We made the move
because the City Fathers of Crossville threatened to sue the board if
they did not agree to the move. I feel that if a board member is
afraid of suit and will allow the threat of a lawsuit to affect his
decisions, he should resign from the board. Capitulation to the threat
of a suit is simply wrong. If anybody threatens to sue me while I am
on the board, I will ignore it.

I am witness to the fact that at the August meeting of the new USCF
Executive Board, an attorney from Crossville threatened to sue if the
mew board did not complete the move to Crossville. The new board
capitulated, as did the old board.

Now that the building has been completed, the attorney representing
Crossville still has failed to provide us with a letter certifying
that we have the right to sell the building. In other words, we have
paid at least $650,000 for a building to which we do not have clear
title. If I am elected, I will propose to put the building up for sale
for the same price we paid for it. Let us see if they try to stop us
from selling it. If they do try to stop us, we will have to go to
court. Otherwise, we will be stranded forever in Crossville.

Here is where my legal capabilities will be useful. I am the only
non-lawyer who has argued orally before the United States Supreme
Court in the last century. And, I won the case. You can look it up.
SEC v. Samuel H. Sloan, 436 US 103 (1978).

I do not think our current president is up for the job. He knows chess
very well, but this situation is over his head. We have one, and only
one, truly outstanding and qualified board member. That is Joel
Channing and I will vote for him to be USCF president.

Sam Sloan

* A big issue now is the Chess Life magazine. Several of the regular
monthly columnists have been fired. By the time you read this you may
know the answer, but as I am writing this, I do not know. I am
concerned that Grandmaster Larry Evans has been fired. Grandmaster
Evans is unpopular with the politicians but popular with the
membership. He has been fired several times in the past but always
reinstated by reader demand. * (Sam Sloan)

As predicted in another thread, this plank probably
will win you a seat on the board.

My last act before my membership expires will be voting for Sam
Sloan.
Hey, Bill Brock, you can like it or lump it!

Be it known that I have nothing whatsoever to do with Sam Sloan. While
he is an expensive friend, there is no political association between
us, and he is doing me a grave disservice by mentioning my name.
Mike Goodall

My last act before my membership expires will be voting for Sam
Sloan. Hey, Bill Brock, you can like it or lump it!

You're being consistent by letting your membership lapse. If Sloan
were to win, I wouldn't want to be a member, either.

* Be it known that I have nothing whatsoever to do with Sam Sloan.
While he is an expensive friend, there is no political association
between us, and he is doing me a grave disservice by mentioning
my name. * (Mike Goodall)

I know nothing about you, sir.

Since you are also running for the board, what is your plank
and where do you disagree with Sam?

On 30 Apr 2006 21:42:44 -0700, wrote:

Be it known that I have nothing whatsoever to do with Sam Sloan. While
he is an expensive friend, there is no political association between
us, and he is doing me a grave disservice by mentioning my name.
Mike Goodall

I did not intend in any way to imply that Mike Goodall is an ally of
mine.

I was merely trying to explain to the voters that there are three
candidates for Executive Board who are present or former employees of
the USCF, without mentioning them by name.

By saying that I and Mike Goodall have never worked for the USCF, but
all of the other candidates have worked full time for the USCF, I
enable the readers and voters to determine who those other three
candidates are.

On a somewhat related subject, I imagine that every reader of this
group will realize who the "ruthless Executive Director" was and who
the other personalities I mention are, even though I have not provided
their names.

My apologies if Mike Goodall or anybody else feels that by mentioning
his name (almost the only name I mentioned in my entire statement) I
have implied that we are politically connected.

Sam Sloan

* My apologies if Mike Goodall or anybody else feels that by mentioning

his name (almost the only name I mentioned in my entire statement) I
have implied that we are politically connected.* (Sam Sloan)

So when can we expect an answer from Mike Goodall to my question?

"Since you are also running for the board, what is your plank
and where do you disagree with Sam?"

So far Sloan and Goodall are the only two of the five candidates
who have posted to this forum, which sways me to vote for both of them.

Sam is incorrect. I did once work for the USCF out of my home as
Scholastic Chess Director for the USCF. I agree with Sam that Ernie
Schlich should not be running, but that is such a self-serving position
I'm embarrassed to make it an issue. In my past dealings with Ernie
I've always found him to be extremely competent and knowledgible.
Mike Goodall

My dear friend Grant Perks has written to me to say that my statement
is 2946 words long. My word counter reported a lesser number but I
will take his word for it. (No pun intended.)

I have to cut this down to 750 words by 4:00 PM today, so any
suggestions would be appreciated.

I have already decided to cut out Jennifer Shahade and most of Beatriz
Marinello. I am cutting out Mike Goodall too, because he objects to
any implication that he is my political ally. However, I will leave in
Jim Eade, because he really is my close friend and political ally.

I will try to leave in the ruthless Executive Director and the inept
college professor

I will cut the board member who has directed three national
tournaments.

Also, I will cut out the fact that I personally overthrew the
University of California at Berkeley. No need for the membership to
know about that.

Any suggestions on what else to cut? A lot still has to go out to get
down to 750 words.

I would like to leave in the board member who had qualifications that
were purely imaginary, but I am afraid that there is no space for him.

I have not decided whether or not to cut out the USCF president who is
in water over his head.

Incidentally, typing my name $am $loan instead of Sam Sloan was
initially just a typographical error. My finger just hit the wrong
key. However, after I saw it, I kind of liked it. I am surprised that
in all my life, I never even thought of doing that before.

Sam Sloan

"Sam Sloan" wrote in message
...
$am $loan for USCF Executive Board

This year, the voters are faced with a question which has never faced
them before, at least not to this extent.

snip

At least one board member ran for election claiming qualifications
which were purely imaginary. Turns out that the only business
experience he had was bring fired from his many jobs. He eventually
disappeared while still in office and has not been seen or heard from
since.

who was that?

snip