Poor Jeff Plale.


Liberal bloggers like moi are piling on the South Milwaukee state senator  for sucking up to the special interests, Milwaukee News Buzz says, suggesting he's being attacked for being pro-business.


Actually, he's being criticized for selling out his constituents and doing the bidding of the corporate utilies while pocketing their campaign contributions, something I've described as Pay to Plale.


Gosh, how will poor Plale survive this onslaught from Zach Wisniewski at Blogging Blue and me? Could it be through a combination of all the money his campaign has raised from special interests and the many more dollars those same interests,including Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce,  will spend independently, with disgraced Republican Scott Jensen and a school choice group acting as the laundry?  That's his plan.


Joe Klein weighs in with an insightful comment on the Buzz site:


“Plale’s pro-business record on issues …” Your reporting has an odd tinge of rhetorical bias.

Supporting the electric power monopoly, or the cable/telephone company duopoly needs to be differentiated from “pro-business.” The telecommunications bills did not increase competition as their Orwellian titles suggest, they increased the power of incumbent firms like AT&T and TWC to kill off new competition.


Pro-business means open markets, which is the opposite of what the utilities want. Plale gets big money from the big utilities and supports legislation that closes markets to competition. To infer a connection is not out of line.


Limiting competition is only “pro-business” for the oligarchy who are already hogging all the business.


Markets work best when they have many buyers and many sellers. Opening markets up to increased competition is the only real way to be pro-business.