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Macomb, IL – Major League Baseball holds its annual All-Star Game Tuesday night in Phoenix, providing a reminder that people can make distinctions between ideas and their exploitation.
In some ways, such distinctions are like the difference between good-faith efforts by honest government officials and the campaign practices of candidates who'll play the worst kind of dishonest politics, or the real discrepancy between Wall Street and Main Street.
Unfortunately for voters, there's a decades-old court ruling that set the precedent for political candidates to get away with lying, whether New York Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner or former Republican President George W. Bush. Fortunately, there's another court decision that could help public-minded prosecutors hold Wall Street accountable, which two have started to do.
Appropriately, the National Pastime shows one way. (Um, that's baseball, not lying politicians.)
One of the legal precedents enabling politicians to fib without regret is "O'Reilly v. Mitchell," a 1914 New York Supreme Court decision on a suit brought by a voter against a politician who made campaign promises he didn't keep. The voter said that was a contract with the public that was breached, but the court - citing free speech protections - said politicians are free to say what they want, even if it misleads the electorate, and there's no legal recourse.
However, alleged lying on Wall Street is the target of newly elected New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, seeking information from top banks about mortgage operations and the financial crisis, and of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who subpoenaed material from Goldman Sachs on how the corporation failed to disclose information to clients and made billions of dollars at their expense.
Both efforts come despite an apparent move by state attorneys general and others to let "banksters" off the hook. Apart from apparent wrongdoing -- misleading clients, creating fraudulent foreclosures, etc. - state and national Republicans and Democrats seemed willing to help Wall Street but unwilling to aid its victims.
Since the crisis began, lawsuits were filed by government regulators and private stockholders, but in the works was a $5 billion settlement - a pittance the banksters approved - and the financial institutions would have escaped any further claims or even investigations by regulators.
Schneiderman resisted. Meanwhile, Vance's subpoena to Goldman Sachs was based on the Senate report, which, as I wrote a while back, said that Goldman duped its customers by advising them to buy high-risk products that the corporation itself was shedding.
As to baseball: In 2007, the Eighth Circuit ruling in "C.B.C. Distribution v. MLB Advanced Media" profoundly changed the nature of the federal judiciary's long-time deference to baseball, which was granted special status in ways such as Major League Baseball's exemption from anti-trust measures.
In a dispute about control of baseball statistics in online fantasy baseball games, the court once more conceded that baseball has an elevated place in the nation, but it differentiated between the concept of baseball - the National Pastime emblematic of traditional American values - and Major League Baseball as just one commercial incarnation controlled by a handful of owners.
Law professor Mitchell Nathanson of Villanova University said, "The court made a bold statement; that the interests of Major League Baseball may not inevitably be consistent with the more expansive public interest in our National Pastime."
Similarly, the interests of Wall Street may not inevitably be consistent with the more expansive public interest in the U.S. economy.
After all, Wall Street created and collected on more than a trillion dollars' worth of toxic mortgage-based securities at the heart of the economic meltdown. It left the nation with a 9% jobless rate, contributed to 50 million Americans losing their homes to foreclosure or barely getting by with bad mortgages, and has seen the national debt grow by 50%.
And now - thanks to taxpayer-funded bailouts - Wall Street has mostly recovered.
While Americans wait for the recovery to reach Main Street - passively watching like TV viewers watching the All-Star Game - we can at least witness two determined prosecutors defy a dishonest system that acts to protect lawbreaking political and financial elites while punishing regular people.
If they're willing to face down Wall Street, we should cheer: "Batter up!"
Bill Knight is a freelance writer who teaches at Western Illinois University. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of WIU or Tri States Public Radio