Major League Baseball’s (MLB) decision to move its All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver was a “slap in the face” to “black entrepreneurs and business owners,” Ken Blackwell, former secretary of state of Ohio and former mayor of Cincinnati, said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.
Blackwell, a minority owner of the Cincinnati Reds, recalled MLB Commissioner Robert Manfred’s decision to relocate the league’s All-Star Game from Atlanta, Georgia, to Denver, Colorado. The decision was made as a political statement against Georgia’s latest voting and election law, framed by Democrats and the broader left as a “voter suppression” effort to obstruct black and other non-white voters. President Joe Biden described it as “Jim Crow on steroids.”
“I thought this was stupid on its face,” said Blackwell of Manfred’s decision. “He was uninformed, and his misinformation and inadequacy led to a Major League Baseball decision that just didn’t make sense. Just think about it, if you do a side-by-side comparison of the election laws in Colorado versus the election laws in Georgia, it’s almost not a dime’s worth of difference between the two.”
He continued, “To take a $100 million dollars out of the economy of Atlanta that’s trying to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic is just a slap in the face to common sense-thinking Georgians and Americans, but particularly black entrepreneurs and business owners in Atlanta that will, in fact, be economically crushed as a consequence.”
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The MLB’s political calculations in its business operations are a violation of its fiduciary obligations to its shareholders, Blackwell noted.
“Directors of corporations and businesses have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the interests of their shareholders, and to position the company in a great position … among its consumers,” he remarked. “This was a violation of both. It was a violation of our fiduciary responsibilities and it was a smack in the face of a great number of our customers. We’re going to have to claw back of some respectability that was lost as a consequence of this decision.”
Marlow asked about left-wing charges of “racism” against Georgia’s election law.
Blackwell replied, “That’s a charge that is reflective of the desperation of the left. It is false. It is foolish, and it must be thrown into the ash bin of history. Satchel Page once said, ‘Don’t look back. You’re not going in that direction,’ and so America must understand that this year we’re celebrating our 245th year of existence as a constitutional republic. We haven’t always been perfect, but we in fact understood that we can make things better, and we have, and we’ve seen — particularly as it relates to race — we’ve seen things get better and better and better.”
Blackwell also described Democrats’ “For the People Act,” marketed partly as a response to Georgia’s election law, as an attempted “federal takeover of elections” with the intent “to transform America into a permanent one-party socialist nation.”
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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