Agreed.
The best way is always simple.
The simple way is always difficult.
The easy path is always mined.
- US Marine Corps saying
Send all the names of your billionaire friends eager to finance chess events to US Chess c/o the executive director before you send them to FIDE please.
US Chess already has its billionaire. Still waiting for the trickle down effect…
What do you expect from someone who has made a career of saying, but not doing?
You make a fair point regarding Campomanes. Certainly, the Soviets had enormous influence in FIDE pre-1991. But under Rogard, the limit on Candidates from one country was established and the very format of the Candidates was switched after the Keres-Geller-Petrosian draw pact at Curaçao 1962 & Fischer’s rightful protest. It’s sufficient to visit the Wikipedia pages of Euwe and Ólafsson to see that their decisions were not those of Soviet puppets.
The past three decades make much of this history moot, but FIDE truly was a pretty good little organization for the first four decades after WWII. And it explains how US Chess came to be tied into FIDE.
Some non-chessplayers might (bizarrely to us) see the awarding of this event to KSA as pro-American & anti-Russian, given the bizarre alliances in the Mideast. As Allen notes, world politics is way above the pay grade of folks at US Chess.
Gens una sumus is not.
The rich will tend to get richer. It will happen due to simple math, sans greed, avarice or a number of other social ills often attributed to it.