These are the inspiring words MLB used to explain its $5000 contribution to Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Confederacy-praising segregation academy graduate whose quips and wisecracks made her famous. MLB bravely asked her campaign to return the donation just hours after the politics newsletter Popular Information made it public. To be fair, it's not as if Commissioner Manfred's team did anything wrong, because "The contribution was made in connection with an event that MLB lobbyists were asked to attend" and were clearly helpless to decline.
The thing that fascinates me about this is the idea that MLB has anything to lobby FOR.
ReplyDeleteIt has been decades since anyone even talked about getting rid of its completely fraudulent anti-trust exemption.
(Based on a 1922 Supreme Court decision claiming that it wasn't a business but a sport. Brought to you by the same bright light who ruled that it was okay to jail people for saying we shouldn't go to war, and okay to sterilize people against their will if a state "expert" wanted it done.)
That "threat" was turned aside through the simple expedient of sticking yet another feeble team in the nation's capital. Huzzah!
So what's left? MLB is a fabulously profitable cartel with its own media networks, that does pretty much what it pleases.
Extorts floundering cities into regularly building it unneeded new stadiums? Check! Rips out thousands of seats for devoted fans to build luxury boxes for wealthy asses who barely follow the sport? Check! Makes games so long and so dull that it is probably digging its own grave? Check!
What is left? What could MLB conceivably want from the federal government that it has yet to deliver?
MLB has a checkered history of institutional racism...still alive and well...smh
ReplyDeleteHorace, there's always something to lobby for. Just this year, the Save America' Pastime Act went into law, ensuring that most minor leaguers will stay in poverty. Now they want a law that would give them a cut of casino bets on baseball.
ReplyDeletePreserving MLB's antitrust exemption is still the main reason that baseball has paid lobbyists. A few years ago the Supreme Court refused to hear a case relating to antitrust laws and the free movement of the teams from city-to-city. Circuit courts have been reluctant too. But that can always change on a dime, so they schmear the politicians. But collectively as a sport and individually as team owners, they are also very interested in labor law (as Mustang pointed to above) and tax laws that benefit them.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Carl! Of course, that makes perfect sense.
ReplyDelete"It's just Chinatown, Jake..."
ReplyDeleteHey, 13bit, we're gonna need a bigger bus...
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