First word, silly. As the tale of the incredibly incredible shrinking Honest Weight Board, the tale of the incredible shrinking governing body of the Honest Weight Corporation, shows the world of Honest Weight Food Corporation is silly. The Honest Weight Corporation Board, for those of you who don’t know, consists of nine people all ostensibly elected by working members of the Corporation. Over the last year, however, five of the nine members of the Board resigned. One Board member resigned right after the last Board election a year or so ago, another was purged for his supposed troublemaking, three more resigned more recently. Did the Board fill the two positions that have been open for months as they can and have done in the past via appointment? No. Why not? Who knows. Welcome to the kingdom of silly.
The fact that the Board has appointed rather than elected members of the Board brings us to our second word, undemocratic. Since 2014 three individuals have been appointed by the Board to serve on the Board. One of the appointees, one Leif Hartmark, was within a point of being elected to the Board. Fair cop. Two others, however, including current Board member Saul Rigberg, didn’t have the number of votes equal to another who ran for the Board on these two occasions. This other Board contender ended up being shunned by the Board during the appointment process for reasons that can be readily deduced. Undemocratic. Recent events at the Corporation have pointed up once again just how undemocratic Honest Weight’s political culture is. The current Board, despite not having the mandated five people to constitute a quorum mandated by the Corporation’s by-laws, recently appointed several new members to the Board. They did so in order to bring the Board into line with five-person quorum the Corporation’s by-laws mandate. This, by the way, for those paying attention and who don’t have ideologically clouded minds, shows that even this Board recognises the need to follow the by-laws even if they are doing it in an undemocratic way. That these recent appointees to the Board are going along with this charade is simply another nail in the Corporation is democratic coffin.
The illegal appointment of several new members to the Corporation Board brings us to our third word, absurd. Devotees of the current Board defend, in their apologetics and polemics, the democratic nature of Board actions by trying to explain away what they can’t explain away, namely, the violation of the Corporation’s by-laws. In one of these apologetics in the service of power the Board’s devotees claim that the Corporation’s by-laws are trumped by corporate law. Corporate law, they claim, doesn’t mandate a five-person quorum, and so, as a result, the actions of the Board are perfectly legal and perfectly democratic. In a topsy turvy world of the absurd perhaps. In another apologetic the Board’s devotees claim that the Board needed to do what it did in order to avoid problems with the Corporation’s moneylenders. These devotees apparently do not realise that this argument, since it implicitly calls for extra legal action to save the corpop, undermines the previous apologetic. Bring out your absurd.
It is not hard for the dispassionate observer to be amused and bemused by the silly, undemocratic, and absurd world of the Honest Weight Food Corporation. It is not hard for the dispassionate observer to appreciate the hypocrisies galore at the Honest Weight Food Corporation. It is not hard for the dispassionate observer to recognise the absurdity of all of this in relationship to what is happening in the broader world. After all, to paraphrase that most paraphrasable of films Casablanca, the troubles of a silly and absurd little bureaucracy masquerading as a cooperative doesn’t really amount to a hill of beans in a world that is as silly, absurd, and undemocratic as the world we all are forced to live in.
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