Claims that the Florida suspension was a result of leaders protesting the Clorox deal are an absurd attempt to portray chapter leaders as martyred dissidents and gloss over a huge number of real complaints.  The timing doesnt even make sense, as the Florida investigation was well in progress long before the marketing agreement.  If the Sierra Club Board suspended everybody who blasted Board decisions, they'd have to suspend a whole lot more leaders than the Florida Chapter.  Whatever flaws the Club has, it does tolerate dissent -- far more than any other nonprofit orgnanization I can think of.  This leaders-as-martyrs story line is a result of self-serving comments from the ousted leaders themselves and a remarkably poor article by Peter Montague.  And the comments about the Board action being like Bush and Iraq speak for themselves -- there's a lack of grasp on reality there.

The suspension is for the betterment of the Florida Chapter.  It was an awful situation, and national deserves much credit for stepping in, knowing these people would go after them with anything they could use, like the ridiculous Clorox issue--as if working with a company to clean up its act is something wrong.  But to the ones who were in chapter leadership, everything was either good or bad, black or white--no shades of gray.  You could never disagree with them.  If you ever did, you got on the enemies list, got shut out of leadership, and villified.  It was a very repressive atmosphere, and I'm glad it's gone.

I don't know anything about the Florida matter, but I have personal experience with how the national portion of Sierra Club operates.

Those who run the Sierra Club are strongly aligned with the Democratic Party and act like Clintonian Democrats.  For example, in national board elections they get the club to pay for ads in chapter newsletters that advocate for the candidates they support, without any funding for ads for candidates who are not anointed by the board majority.  They then claim that these are fair elections, even though members only get one point of view.

And let's talk about some of the real issues here, as opposed to whether some members of the executive committee of the Florida chapter were fighting with each other.  The majority of the national board represent a more conservative view, such as supporting the deal with Clorox, than many of the dissidents.

Sierra Club was a $95 million/year organization the last time I looked, and it's far too big and rich to be anywhere near "grassroots."  Whoring for money from evil pigs like Clorox shows where the national leadership is at, which is getting money first and foremost, and advocating for the Earth, to the extent allowed, afterward.  Regardless of the facts of this specific dispute, Sierra Club's national leadership has a lot to answer for and has shown itself to be untrustworthy.

The Florida Chapter of Sierra Club has become one of the largest and most successful activist chapters in the country with more lawsuits, more political endorsements and more conservation
committees than in any other locations.

The recent election of Florida Chapter leaders was fair; it was conducted according to the rules of the Club. The election was observed and approved by a National representative.  The  National Bylaws Committee ruled the election was valid. All of our elections have been fair.

Robert Cox, president of Sierra Club, must stop spreading his continuous stream of false and slanderous accusations.

Secret trials and secret testimony are unfair and unAmerican.

Cox owes an apology to 27 fairly elected volunteer members in Florida.

Cox must retract his slanderous statements and the retractions must made in a public forum.  

Prior to the suspension, I represented my Group (the Broward County Group) at many Florida Chapter meetings, and served as Co-Chair of the Florida Chapter Legal Committee.  Also, I was an observer throughout the vote counting process for the last Florida Chapter election.  

It is irresponsible of Robert Cox to make comments to the effect that "Floridians reported that factionalism ... had led to ... fixed elections."  The vote counting process I observed followed a protocol directed by National Sierra Club staff, and National Sierra itself investigated the election based upon a complaint submitted afterward, and upheld the results.  All ballots included in the final tally conformed to the election rules.  For Cox to repeat the lies of disgruntled members whose candidates did not win is simply slanderous, and that statement should be retracted.

While I have not undertaken the statistical analysis that former Chapter Secretary Pedro Monteiro did regarding voting patterns at Chapter meetings, his statistics are consistent with my own personal observations.  When Legal Committee items came up for a vote at Chapter meetings, they uniformly received unanimous support.   Likewise, with very few exceptions, there was no dissension at Chapter meetings on political endorsements.  On numerous conservation issues that came up for a vote, there was broad consensus within the Chapter.  The claims of severe factionalism are highly contrived.  

I do believe that this suspension is in part attributable to a series of disagreements between the Chapter and National, in which the Chapter advocated stronger environmental positions than National, such as on biofuels. The suspension is equally the result of the Florida Chapter's opposition to the growing corporatization of the Club and the diminished power of the grassroots activists in internal Club decisions.   The Clorox debacle is the latest episode, and exemplifies both the corporatization of the Club and the weaker environmental stances that result from that corporatization.  

The full truth of the November election is that the National Bylaws and Standing Rules committee, while not willing to declare the results invalid, did, after looking at the ballots, inform the Chapter Chair that it found the use of photocopied ballots in November (and from anecdotal evidence it received also in previous years) was contrary to the Standing Rules of the Chapter and that if procedures weren't put in place to correct the situation, the results of future elections might be in jeopardy.  
Elections are fair when everyone follows the rules, not when some people follow them and others don't.

This `analysis' of votes of the Florida Chapter Executive Committee is a feeble attempt to argue that we all got along and there was no factionalism.  
How about conducting an analysis of the votes of the Chapter's hand-picked Emergency Committee, where most of the important and controversial stuff was decided (in many cases in violation of the Chapter Bylaws) and presented to the full Excom as a fait accompli, thus avoiding any of those uncomfortable differences of opinion?
How about conducting an analysis of the appointments to committees over the past several years, particularly the self-appointment of the Chapter Chair to be Chair of the Nominating Committee for 2007, in direct violation of the Florida Chapter bylaws?
These attempts to convince the outside world that the Florida Chapter is full of a bunch of people who got along fine and it was just Nasty National that moved in because of  Chlorox or any other issue are just bogus.