By Jesse Rosenfeld
January 7, 2025
Voting on hybrid General Meetings is approaching. Blending online and in-person voting sounds nice until you realize it’s another opportunistic ploy by BDS to boycott Israel. An irresponsible and reckless minority faction uninvolved in the day-to-day complexities of running a business wants to force all of us to shop and vote for their violent ideology.
Why not just vote in person?
BDS knows that any future votes on Israel-related issues—both pro and anti—will result in a turnout too large for our regular General Meetings. Since BDS openly supports Hamas, and the internet is wallpapered with the weekly violence that the pro-Hamas movement perpetrates, larger spaces have already rejected PSFC because of BDS’ awful reputation.
How will hybrid affect PSFC?
BDS disingenuously cites the disabled or democracy or working families. But during COVID, when we had fully online voting, our democratically-minded, immuno-compromised and working families never pushed General Meeting attendance past 100. And BDS at PSFC have publicly connected hybrid with boycotting Israel.
What is their strategy to get hybrid meetings?
Change PSFC bylaws so that hybrid is allowed outside of emergency situations like COVID. This is akin to changing the U.S. Constitution over one single issue somewhere in foreign lands.
What do hybrid supporters overlook?
As per our last Treasurer’s Report, PSFC is presently operating at a net loss, so how will spending extra money on tech improve operations? Have we asked staff how officially supporting militancy could affect their livelihoods and families? Where is the official health emergency so that we need to go hybrid? How does hybrid resolve the imbalance between those who propose ideas and those who have 45 minutes to decide on its impact? If online voting helps even only one member who can’t physically make it to a meeting, why does ‘even only one’ not apply to protect the safety of those who fear being identified and recorded online by members who support violent extremists? Hybrid supporters have only offered slogans, never a blueprint for how hybrid helps everyone.
And if BDS harms our store, violates our rights, maligns our reputation, repels our distributors and eviscerates staff pensions, so what? BDS won’t admit responsibility. BDS apparently only sees how PSFC’s fragile trust-based governance can be toppled, leaving behind a turn-key storefront that exists to support anti-Jewish militant extremists like Hamas. See Assad’s Syria for how well that worked.
What can we do?
Watch for Jason Wiener’s proposal “A New Coop Meeting Format for True Democratic Participation” (unaffiliated with Unity) because he is correct that hybrid doesn’t fix any voting problems; show up to vote against hybrid if it ever is proposed; and contact me at Coop4Unity@gmail.com.
BDS needs the Coop. Not the other way around.