First they came for the arbiters, but I didn't say anything, because I wasn't an arbiter. (Plus their incompetence in properly operating DGT boards didn't really endear them to me.) And then they came for me....
I'm referring to the latest proposal by Turkish Chess Federation President Ali Nihat Yazaci, whose insane slash-and-burn attitudes make one long for the good old days of petty corruption and incompetence. A month or so ago Mr. Yazaci thought FIDE's motto of Gens Una Sumus would be best served by forbidding arbiters from seven countries - those countries who had filed lawsuits against FIDE pertaining to him and his patron, FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov - from working at the forthcoming Chess Olympiad in Istanbul Turkey (organized by Mr. Yazaci).
Apparently convinced that this mostly symbolic but still significant breach of protocol and ethics was insufficient, he has now decided that those seven countries - France, the USA, Ukraine, Germany, Switzerland, Georgia and England - must be suspended from FIDE until they pay damages for the lawsuits they filed and lost.
Now, if these countries could band together with some of the Russian-language superpowers like Russian, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, we could probably create a new and successful world chess federation. (Motto: Our President hasn't been visited by aliens.) Of course, that's assuming that these federations are themselves run by competent people. I can't speak for the other six countries or the hoped-for allies mentioned above, but my general impression of the United States Chess Federation (motto: kids count, but adults don't except as procreators and funders of new kids*) for most of the past 35 years is that the politicians are far more interested in junkets than promoting the game. (It's either that or they're utterly incompetent; I'll leave that determination to their apologists.) So if we're typical, then our alternative federation to the absurdity that is FIDE probably won't be any better. Too bad.
Anyway, you can read a bit more about the situation here.
* Read the last 200 issues of Chess Life and tell me I'm wrong.