As the American Empire follows in the foot steps of the Soviet Empire, American versions of the Russian Urban Combat Vehicle are sure to be developed to allow Capitalists to travel from their gated communities to the ring city headquarters.

Posted by: Jim S | Mar 8 2005 17:08 utc | 4

Iraqi women’s problems are due to Patriachal Society and not to Islam. The Koran is a relatively woman-friendly text, and was ahead of its time (situated in a particular place.)
The US did try (genuinely or not) to impose ‘democratic values’ concerning women – e.g. Bremer’s constitution laying down quotas in parliament, and much more, quite admirable; British female kooks giving seminars on women in politics, proper dress code!, less thrilling – etc.
Women’s previous relatively good position in Iraq (care of Saddam) could not be fostered and encouraged because the US was rigorously determined to ignore, suppress or annihilate all movements or even institutions that were grass-roots or part of the landscape, traditional in civil society:
Baathism – women teachers sent home! as if all Baathists, such as sweet primary school teachers, were like top Nazi commanders..
Unions – the ultimate evil, but women, as child-minders, do need protective legislation and a space for negotiation and protest..
Women’s Associations – who were not keen on US destruction of existing structures…
Health Care – huge numbers of female employees who were deprived of work tools, status, and salaries, leading to the take-over of part of health care by fundamentalists with guns…
Destruction of the previous ministries and local Gvmt. which employed many women, even in positions of authority, etc.
Farming communities, families, took desperate hits; insecurity, lack of energy and necessities – electricity, petrol, water, seeds, fertiliser, spare parts – (The US made a deal with the Aussies, Iraq would stop producing and buy Australian..)
Basically, willfullly destroying what existed sent women back into the home for many reasons – plus, with men not employed, only women can keep the home going on a shoe-string.
Men, in such situations, need to recapture whatever shred of authority remains, by controlling those proximally around them, such as women and children. One can either see this as a symptom of inherent, nasty, male tendencies to domination or as a natural, even rational, reaction in the circumstances.
Result, women who wear trousers or shortish skirts are spat on and many women are kidnapped, sold back to their propietors, or worse. As slaves women become a commodity, controlled, bartered, exchanged.

Posted by: Blackie | Mar 8 2005 19:32 utc | 6

what i do know – almost categorically – women are the treasure of this site & of le speakeasy – their contribution has brought about a muccularisation of our discourses
so this day i will honour my sisters in struggle

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 8 2005 22:14 utc | 8

beq
i have the talent to be illiterate in three or four languages – & computer language i am its most illiterate student – as people for a long time i though ot was old testament – i though rofl was roll over fucking log or rareified ontologique fluent logique – i though imho was an acronym was a reference to the godfather – “in my house, oaf” & other elaborations
i had to reread my baudriallard’s ‘pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe’ to see if i was missing something
but in the end comrade beq – all my life & it has been such a long one for a short one – the comrades who have been there since the beginning are women, those whose staunchness has never diminished though they have become more tender, are women
& the ‘other’ (s) in my life have always been gifts even when their truths have not been easy for this old cultural bolshevik to live – i wrote a poem to the wome in the movement when i was 16 – & it was called sisters in struggle – & at that time it was for the vietnamese women i knew, or bernadine dohrn, kathy boudin, ulrike meinhof tho they were older then they are younger than that now

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Mar 8 2005 23:03 utc | 10

Not sure, but a “ring city” may be one with a vital downtown whose movers and shakers live in gated suburbs or faux-rural exurbs. They must traverse the inner-city wastelands – industrial barrens, project-housing, slums, etc during their commute.
Oklahoma City is an example of a city that had a downtown that used to die at 5:00, and has had somewhat of a “rebirth” – a large, trendy nightlife zone now exists in a converted warehouse area and the concert venues have been refurbished. It’s not big enough to really have a “ring”, but major cities that have gone through a downtown “renaissance” like Detroit or Cleveland are a different story.
My partner and I ritually flip off Hummers whenever we see them. They are a convenient receptacle for the accumulated hatred we feel for the privileged, resource-swallowing class that are determined to use up the planet’s remaining quality of life in the next generation.
I was especially horrified, last fall in Ohio, when I saw my first stretch-limousine Hummer. I about barfed on the spot.
Not too long ago, I was entering the grocery store. A lady was standing in the foyer with a cart and small child, cellphone glued to her ear, oblivious to the fact that I could not move around her to either enter the store or go fetch a shopping cart. I cursed her silently. Finally, she moved.
As I was driving away later, the exit to the main road had both lanes blocked by a Hummer waiting to turn left, preventing me from turning right. I finally decided there was barely room, and risked squeezing past. Of course, it was the same lady, with the cellphone once again glued to her ear. I flipped her off.
She didn’t notice. Proles are invisible.

Posted by: OkieByAccident | Mar 9 2005 0:06 utc | 12

Ring Cities are the clusters of 10 to 20 story buildings with vast parking lots that were build at interstate highway intersections. They ring the urban cores of US cities.
The Washington Post has an good article on the DC Metro which the federal government spent billions of dollars.

Commuters Like Metro More Than They Use It.
Only 10% of commuters use it. The problem is that it was designed and built as a hub and spoke system to bring commuters in and out of the DC city center. Today the job centers are the ring cities that Metro does not serve.

Posted by: Jim S | Mar 9 2005 0:51 utc | 14

Well here is my contribution to the March 8 thread…
my other contribution is anecdotal. at the bus station this morning an eccentric older guy with a heavy accent, possibly Eastern European — a bald, suntanned gnome of a fellow, wiry and strong, wearing an artificial lei, tank top, shorts and flipflops — was present with a shopping cart full of florists’ bouquets (day-old by the look of them). he was handing flowers to women at the bus station, declaiming loudly, “Today is International Women’s Day, March 8th, it is Women’s Day! Every year I give flowers to women on this day!”
what amused me was that he was then telling the women what they should do with the flowers — “And now you must give this to another woman, you see, and you must say to her, ‘Happy International Women’s Day!’ Take the flower, and then you give it to another woman!” … he would not take no for an answer, and was pressing flowers into the hands of confused undergraduates and alarmed elderly ladies whether they wanted one or not… “I was born of a woman,” he proclaimed at one point, “and I am grateful, no matter what else has happened to me since then! Here, I give you this flower, it is International Women’s Day, you know what this is? It is a very important day!”
I was thinking that it was rather an interesting comment on patriarchy, that even with what appeared to be the best of intentions our eccentric friend could not restrain himself from (a) accosting women who were made nervous by his presence, and (b) lecturing and telling women what to do 🙂
it has to be one of the less promising March 8ths I can remember. women’s basic human rights are under assault all over the world — swaggering masculine thuggism is back in fashion in more places than one likes to think about. and Ahnold the Gropenator is Governator of my state…
btw I have found that Aviva is a pretty good source of international women’s/feminist news.

Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 9 2005 5:38 utc | 16

And about 8 March…Yes we used to celebrate it in Serbia in the past (do not know about now).
Well I never really believed it’s about us -women, cause what happened regularly our male coworkers would get drank during those parties in our working place and then when woman comes home usually there she couldn’t find her husband cause he was celebrating in his company with his coworkers too…hahaha
I find that young women managed to make modern men a little bit more supportive at least at home…working place is a still man’s world…

Posted by: vbo | Mar 9 2005 6:00 utc | 18

city ring/green zone?

Posted by: lenin’s ghost | Mar 9 2005 7:21 utc | 20

Bush’s gift to Iraqi women!
Extremists: Iraq’s Hidden War – Extremists have shot women activists in the streets and killed them in private. Other threats are more insidious—and may be growing.

The twin messages, of her life and her death, were unmistakable. There are a lot of women in Iraq who are looking forward to the freedom that Iraq’s experiment with democracy promises them. And there are hard-liners who would kill them for it. Qushtaini was one of many prominent Iraqi women who have been slaughtered, apparently by Islamic extremists; 20 have been killed in Mosul alone, and a dozen more in Baghdad. Just last week the corpse of a female television presenter turned up with a bullet hole in her head. Raiedah Mohammed Wageh Wazan had been kidnapped by gunmen in Mosul on Feb. 20. Her husband decided not to hold a funeral procession after being warned against it by insurgents.
…
Prewar Iraq was a brutal dictatorship, but it had a good record on women’s rights, at least by the standards of the region. Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party professed equality and, on many social issues, practiced it. Women could divorce their husbands, inherit property, even keep their children after a breakup. Women commonly held professional jobs, even high-ranking ones. They had equal educational opportunities, and rarely wore head coverings in the cities, except in heavily Shia areas. But the Baath Party was largely a Sunni Arab institution, and the progressive status of women wasn’t shared in Shia areas to nearly the same degree. The Shia, though numerically greater, were largely disenfranchised under Saddam; now they’ll dominate the government. “The Baath regime, despite their thuggery and terror, they did well by women,” says Iraqi-American Amal Rassam of Freedom House, an advocacy group based in the United States.
…

Posted by: Fran | Mar 9 2005 8:05 utc | 22

De: I was thinking that it was rather an interesting comment on patriarchy, that even with what appeared to be the best of intentions our eccentric friend could not restrain himself from (a) accosting women who were made nervous by his presence, and (b) lecturing and telling women what to do 🙂
Ain’t that the truth… And your example seems also too well-indoctrinated to understand that on the happy Patriarchy Planet he could shout at the top of his lungs: Don’t Listen to me, and he would be listened to because of his male privilege. As long as the system is in place, it’s almost impossible to divest of it.
Women, me included, need to “take our eyes off the guys” … get our perspectives wrenched back inside our own five senses…

Posted by: Kate_Storm | Mar 9 2005 14:01 utc | 24

In a smallish liberal university town in my state there was someone who drove a hummer with a tag that in some combination of letters spelled “global warmer”. For awhile there was no end to the heartache that this guy stirred up in the free progressive newspaper. I wonder if someone finally got to him…

Posted by: beq | Mar 9 2005 14:24 utc | 26

Properly taxed?
Only in Bizarro World

Changes to Section 179 last year, commonly called the SUV Tax Deduction, expanded this popular tax break from $25,000 to $100,000 and lifted depreciation schedules. This combination of factors effectively allows anyone who uses a vehicle in their business at least 50% of the time to buy the biggest and most expensive SUV and write it off in one year. Here is the SUV Tax Deduction – Vehicle List. This created a huge incentive for anyone running their own business to purchase that luxury Escalade or BMW X5 and enjoy a hefty tax advantage for 2004.

Posted by: biklett | Mar 9 2005 16:29 utc | 28

Jerome, in CH (Geneva, it varies from canton to canton) Hummers (high horsepower, weight, etc. cars) are steeply taxed.
There is a list of about 30 or 40 enviro. friendly, so to speak, cars, that are tax exempt. Buyers are assured that the car they bought will stay on the no tax list. Etc.
Insurance / tax is steep steep when the horsepower and weight goes up. The difference between running (at say 10 000 kms a year) a VW Golf or Medium Fiat or your regular low range Honda (none of which are tax exempt) and a Hummer is enormous – about a 700 to a thousand dollars a month.
The effect? Hummers (or Hummer like cars) have become a status symbol that show that driver is rich, can afford what he or she wants, is unconcerned with Gov. regs, spits in the face of others, and can boast of feeling real safe in his/her car. They furnish thrills, power, and are selling like hot cakes.
The people who acquite them cannot buy yachts, you understand, nor can they afford villas on the lake, or three servants from Sri Lanka or Kosovo.
But on the road, and at dinner parties, they can be, at little cost (in their budgets), King. The Mercedes limousine is out – you can pick em up for little cost these days, second hand – though most go to the ex-USSR to be sold (Poland, etc.)
The reaction? The municipality of GE put to the vote the banning of Hummers in town. They lost this time round. Next time, they will win.

Posted by: Blackie | Mar 9 2005 20:05 utc | 30

International Women’s Day always has struck me as a foreign thing. The news stories are always about some women’s rally overseas. The only women who observe it in the US are feminist groups whose grass roots memberships are shrinking. I doubt most American women have ever even heard of International Women’s Day.

Posted by: gylangirl | Mar 9 2005 21:18 utc | 32

hehehe……kate…..sometimes i give the hummer drivers the sign of the tiny penis!;-)

Posted by: lenin’s ghost | Mar 10 2005 8:17 utc | 34

Yeah, LG… that sign too!! LOL

Posted by: Kate_Storm | Mar 10 2005 14:39 utc | 36