PLACHIMADA -- Whizzing along the road in the little Tata Indica, driven prestissimo by the imperturbable Sudhi, we crossed the state line from Tamil Nadu into Kerala, branched off the main road and ended up in the settlement of Plachimada, mostly inhabited by extremely poor people. There on one side of the street was the Coca-Cola plant, among the company's largest in Asia, and on the other, a shack filled with locals eager to impart the news that they were now, as of April 2, in Day 1,076 of their struggle against the plant.

Coca-Cola came to India in 1993, looking for water and markets in a country where one-third of all villages are without water and shortages are growing every day. The bloom was on neoliberalism back then, with central and state authorities falling over themselves to lease, sell or simply hand over India's assets to multinationals in the name of economic "reform."

Summary: Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney adressed the closing of the National Election Reform Conference Saturday, April 9th in Nashville. Congresswoman McKinney is the first black female elected to Congress from the state of Georgia. Elected in 1992, she served five consecutive terms. In 2002 she was the subject of an intense campaign by the Republicans to run her out of office for questions she asked about Bush Administration knowledge of events surrounding September 11th. After a two year hiatus she returned to the public arena and successfully regained her seat. She addressed the National Conference on Election Reform regarding the historical suppression of the black vote and modern attempts at gerrymandering and voter suppression.

How lion-like the Democrats sound as they circle around Social Security, bellowing their defiance! After years of servility, some of them even presume to shake their fists at Alan Greenspan and hurl insults at the man.

When the chairman of the Federal Reserve put in a decorous word for Social Security "reform" last month, House Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada called Greenspan a "hack." Paul Krugman, who primly chastised Ralph Nader back in 2000 for disrespecting Greenspan, now pelts the chairman with rotten cabbages on an almost weekly basis in his New York Times column.

Presumably enough Democrats realize that if they can't put up a fight on Social Security, then the last supposed major reason for anyone to support their party will have disappeared. (To anyone claiming choice is as powerful a reason, I will offer the obvious, which is that the Republicans will never formally move to rescind the legality of abortions. They will merely continue in the enterprise, in which countless Democrats have colluded, of making it harder and harder for poor women to get one.)

I was glad to open the New York Times last Monday and see the headline: “In Steinbeck’s Birthplace, a Fight to Keep the Libraries Open.” After visiting Salinas, Calif., over the weekend, I was eager to find out whether the disturbing and uplifting events there would gain any significant national coverage.

It was a close call. Other than the medium-length Times article, accompanied by a photo of an 8-year-old girl standing next to an endangered library, the media coverage was sparse. And the Times piece -- while doing a good job of focusing on the danger that all three public libraries in Salinas might close by midyear -- bypassed the connections that many participants in a 24-hour “read-in” had made between lavish spending on war overseas and a funding crisis for libraries at home.

Through the night’s darkness, on an outer wall of the Cesar Chavez Library, a projection showed the mounting revenues from Salinas taxpayers that have helped to pay for the war in Iraq -- already more than $80 million. The odometer image kept spinning while authors read into the night as part of the protest against the planned closure of the public libraries