As far as hyper-sexualized that shit is everywhere I was listening to a radio station and there was a 2 min ad. for Burger King, I think, that for about the first 2/3rd’s of it was a guy singing about how he likes flat buns. It was chalk full of sexual innuendo and then at the end an announcer goes on about some new sandwich or something.

It seems like sex is the last bastion for those marketing useless products.

As for what AA is “guilty of”, I would say hyper-sexualized marketing, pushing to the teen porn aesthetic, an image-based hiring process in its stores, and a work environment that fosters sexual harassment. To name a few.

The aforementioned Knowmore.org link provides a good overview of the company.

anyways, then i stopped reading it, i do find it quite disturbing. onions descriptions of AA are probably quite accurate in terms of real places in real life where these places do exist.

i’ve never supported AA, though i did buy a few things though g7 that might have been AA, i dont know. but i see these adds in the weekly i like to read and it just makes me sick.

And now to flog the deadest horse of all. I’m reading “the end of america: a letter of warning to a young patriot.” by naomi wolf (who btw was on the ubiquitous colbert) and she explains how …”Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not “coordinate”, in Goebbels’ term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically “coordinate” early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.”

http://www.guardian....y/0,,2064157,00.html

at least worth considering in regards to the Churchill case. I dont have the book here(its at school) but I’ll expand on what she says later.

I thought that Onion piece was a withering social critique on those wacko owners at AA. And funny as hell at the same time!

This Jena case is a truly distrubing manifestation of racism and a travesty of justice. Sad to see that bigotry is still alive & well in 2007.

Michael Vick and O.J. are still dead to me, however.

As for the Jena 6, I didn’t actually realise the story was so big! I heard about the rallies and stuff but there really is a *lot* of coverage there. I guess any story like this that penetrates the mainstream is a good thing. There’s an interesting interview with one of the campus organisers here: http://www.zmag.org/...=30&ItemID=13795