Last week, the leaders of the Democratic majority in the United States Senate announced that they had agreed with George W. Bush to pass legislation that would give retroactive immunity to telecommunications corporations that broke federal law when they helped George W. Bush spy on the private electronic communications of millions of American citizens.

Almost as soon as the plan was announced, John Rockefeller, a Democratic U.S. Senator from West Virginia, announced that he was in favor of it.

Why? Why would a Democratic Senator help George W. Bush and telecommunications corporations spy on innocent Americans?

Well, part of the reason is that this particular Democratic Senator, John Rockefeller, isn’t much of a Democrat. In the Progressive Patriots legislative scorecard for the current session of Congress, Senator Rockefeller earns a progressive rating of only 20 percent. 80 percent of the time, John Rockefeller has failed to take the stand that Democratic voters elected him to take.

There’s another, more corrupt, part of the answer, though. It turns out that, when John Rockefeller became Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he started getting very large checks from executives working for the same telecommunications corporations that Rockefeller now says should receive special exemptions from the law.

Senator Rockefeller casts the giant telecommunications corporations as poor, vulnerable victims. He says that the corporations “should not be dragged through the courts”. Why not? Why shouldn’t they be dragged through the courts? They broke the law, and betrayed their customers and the Constitution of the United States of America. If you or I did that, we would be dragged through the courts.

Why does John Rockefeller want to give these giant corporations special breaks that you and I would never get?

Rockefeller has been paid to do it, that’s why.