And I am not one of those who thinks fascism is remotely likely in the United States. Fascism as an actual social and political movement requires lots of outdoors activity and apoplectic political behavior. As such, it is simply not compatible with market totalitarianism, one core requirement of which is that the vast majority be kept in the softened, amused, apolitical, lightly entranced and addicted audience-state that is most conducive to successful commercial media/advertising/sales/”politics” operations. I also believe that, despite the existence of a quarter or so of the population who do seem to hold proto-fascist views, ordinary Americans are way to the left of not just Nazism but their own “leaders,” and will not stand by and permit fascists to take over, even if the overclass were to permit it.

Nevertheless, this, which I happened to catch last night while cooking dinner and momentarily tuned (to avoid the political ads on my usual channel at dinner hour) to a bad-ass crime show that was running a soft-pedaling “expose” of a Nazi prison gang, just might be the single most racist thing I’ve seen on American television in my lifetime:

Crass and childish and uninformed and just damned dangerous. Truly, a fascist, Hitlerian ad.

If you wonder how much violence gets done to reality by not only swallowing the notion that “consumer” is a fair-minded label for product-users, but by the accompanying habit of treating the steeply stratified and deeply divided world of actual off-the-job humans as a pool of undifferentiated “consumers,” take a look at this recent report by Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad.

Watch this appalling shit here and here.

As the white baby controls all aspects of the situation and voices all the reasoned thoughts, the black baby sings, trips out, echoes white logic, and makes a sexual come-on.  Can you imagine these ads getting made and aired if the skin colors were reversed?  No chance in hell.

I guarantee you that all of this was carefully planned by E-Trade’s marketing team.  As I documented in my book, The Consumer Trap, big business marketers are extremely sensitive to racial stereotypes, and are driven by the logic of their enterprise to exploit and perpetuate, not challenge, them.

The other important aspect of this blatant neo-racism is that it is targeted at elite audiences, who absolutely eat it up, not least because they think it’s a great thing for they themselves to be willing even to look at and possibly, maybe interact with a black person (both acts they have only recently begun to contemplate).

The truth, of course, is that contrary to long-running claims that Joe Sixpack is the source of all benightedness, our lovely overclass has always held by far the worst and least accurate view of human beings and human affairs.

Contrast this sense of where boondoggles come from with the excellent recent reportage of New Yorker critic Tad Friend on the workings of the corporate capitalist movie studios — where $50 million, by the way, is less than half of what gets spent there on a single movie, a.k.a. “property,” according to Friend.

As Friend reports:

“Studios now are pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates,” one studio’s president of production says. “So at green-light meetings it’s a bunch of marketing and sales guys giving you educated guesses about what a property might gross.

This, of course, means that:

Marketing considerations shape not only the kind of films studios make but who’s in them—gone are lavish adult dramas with no stars, like the 1982 “Gandhi.”

Even within this situation, which is well-known to industry insiders, if not the general public, there is no doubt what corporate capitalist movies are:

Marketers and filmmakers are often quietly at war. “The most common comment you hear from filmmakers after we’ve done our work is ‘This is not my movie,’ ” Terry Press, a consultant who used to run marketing at Dreamworks SKG, says. “I’d always say, ‘You’re right—this is the movie America wants to see.’ ”

Friend finds the resulting imperatives “unexpected,” but nonetheless does a great job listing them. Note how they all express the standard tactics from big business marketing — flattery of the audience, racist restriction of non-white persons from centrality in portrayals, pandering to gender stereotypes, general searching for emotional weaknesses and button-pushing, etc. (And Friend doesn’t even directly address things like the restriction of subject matter by ideology and the desire not to spoil corporate markets, or the metastasis of product placement.)

An unexpected corollary of the modern marketing-and-distribution model is that films no longer have time to find their audience; that audience has to be identified and solicited well in advance. Marketers segment the audience in a variety of ways, but the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women. A studio rarely makes a film that it doesn’t expect will succeed with at least two quadrants, and a film’s budget is usually directly related to the number of quadrants it is anticipated to reach. The most expensive tent-pole movies, such as the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, are aimed at all four quadrants.

The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it). They go to horror films as much as young men, but they hate gore; you lure them by having the ingénue take her time walking down the dark hall.

Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most “review-sensitive”: a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them, but they’re hard to motivate. “Guys only get off their couches twice a year, to go to ‘Wild Hogs’ or ‘3:10 to Yuma,’ ” the marketing consultant Terry Press says. “If all you have is older males, it’s time to take a pill.”

Studio marketers have a few rules for making their films seem broadly “relatable”:

Can’t we all get along? In “Stomp the Yard,” which was about an urban street dancer who goes to college, the poster showed the African-American hero with his back turned, leaving his race indeterminate. The campaign for “Bring It On” portrayed the story as a rivalry between white and black cheerleading squads, even though more than eighty per cent of the film was about the white squad. The first marketing materials for Fox’s X-Men franchise showed only an “X.” Why exclude half your audience?

If the poster shows a poster child, the movie is for kids. Posters are intended to tell you the film’s genre at a glance, then make you look more closely. Horror posters, for instance, have dark backgrounds; comedies have white backgrounds with the title and copy line in red. Because stars are supposed to open the film, and because they have contractual approval of how they appear on the poster, the final image is often a so-called “big head” or “floating head” of the star. Every poster for a Will Smith movie features his head, and for good reason: he is the only true movie star left, the only one who could open even a film about beekeeping monks.

Everybody’s a comedian. Any drama with at least three funny moments in it will be portrayed, in the trailer and TV spots, as a comedy. The trailer for the 2005 film “The Squid and the Whale” conveyed a measure of the film’s delicate unease, but it was basically a series of wry exchanges. A joke, particularly a pratfall, is self-contained, whereas a sad or anxious moment is hard to convey briefly and out of context.

If it’s called “The Squid and the Whale,” it’s somebody else’s problem. That movie was produced by Samuel Goldwyn Films, an independent studio, and grossed seven million dollars—quite good for a small film, but not for a studio release. If a movie’s title and stars don’t tell you almost everything you need to know about a film—“Get Smart,” starring Steve Carell, say—marketers worry. Fox had to spend a little extra to sell “The Devil Wears Prada,” because casual moviegoers wondered what Meryl Streep was doing in a horror film. When a movie underperforms, an awkward title is often seen as the culprit.

Always cheat death. People die in movies; they almost never die in trailers. They are courageous (“The Express”) or missing (“Changeling”) or profoundly alive (“Revolutionary Road”). “If a movie is completely, one hundred per cent about death, then it’s also about life, right?” Fox’s co-head of marketing, Tony Sella, told me. The only thing marketers can’t pull off, Sella acknowledged, is “selling old to young”—persuading kids to see a movie like “Driving Miss Daisy.” “You can try with”—he adopted a baritone voice-over—“ ‘You don’t know where you’re going, but here’s what it’s going to look like when you arrive.’ But they usually say, ‘Screw you, I’ll wait.’ ”

The only difference is in the roles portrayed. African-Americans almost always appear in advertising and sponsored shows as athletes, musicians, buffoons, and/or sidekicks. Women appear as mothers, wives, servants, and/or carbon-based blow-up-doll life forms.

The effects on the culture are the same: Subtle and light, yet widely dominant suppression of the chances for further progress in deflating sexist ideology.

I think there are more loopholes and exceptions to sexism than to racism within the marketing juggernaut. Nonetheless, I am convinced that further vanquishment of our legacy of racism and sexism (and also of other bio-fictitious fibs like nationalism) will not occur until we also begin to assail big business marketing and the overclass its serves.

The mainstream excuse for big business marketing is that it is simply a mirror that reflects pre-existing popular thoughts and desires. That, of course, is hogwash. Big business marketing is, in fact, a branch of “scientific management,” a.k.a. Taylorism. It is a conscious effort to study and profitably modify people’s off-the-job behaviors. In it, existing thoughts and desires are merely the problematic raw material, the animal habits to be molded in favor of the bottom line. In this endeavor, capitalist profit-seeking, not popular sovereignty, is the prime mover and the one true organizing principle.

Now, successful marketing campaigns have a great many logical requirements. Among them is the need to avoid upsetting the lowest common denominators in the target audience, as an upset “consumer” is not a money-spending “consumer.” Business success demands keeping as many “eyeballs” and “eardrums” quiescent as possible. Blissed-out folks shop; irritated folks switch you off or call the complaint line.

Among other things, this capitalist premium on non-controversy in salesmanship means that, to its very core, corporate marketing is racist.

Here’s why:

White people remain the largest racial group in the society. 400 years of white supremacy ideology continues to exert influence on their minds. Meanwhile, at least half of whites remain deeply ignorant and unconcerned with this problem. All this means that big business marketing campaigns must avoid poking the racial dog with its sticks. The result? Systematic and intentional stereotyping of non-whites — and especially blacks — in advertising.

Do you doubt this admittedly inflammatory claim? If so, I invite you to seek out the evidence, rare and closely-held as it is. Consider, for instance, what Ed Vorkapich, a long-time Pepsi-Cola advertising director, told a Smithsonian Institution interviewer about the rules of ad-making:

“You’ve got to be careful that the white guys don’t relate too much to the black girl and that the black guy doesn’t relate too much to the white girls.”

That, my friends, is behind-the-scenes corporate marketing in action. And, though inside information about big business marketing is top secret, it is a dead certainty that this premium on racist dramatic conventions continues to govern the making of corporate sales communications, not to mention the “content” of the shows they sponsor in order to attract audiences. In order to sell corporate products, blacks must be kept “in their place.”

This explains why African-Americans continue to be almost exclusively portrayed as athletes, musicians, buffoons, or (at best) sidekicks in advertisements and commercial TV shows and movies.

The impact of this reality is certainly subtler than white supremacy’s most infamous practices. Nonetheless, it is a huge mistake to dismiss this institutional problem as small potatoes. In a re-segregated society that has barely begun to face the profound legacy of its racist history, commercial-media viewing and listening is far and away the #1 leisure-time activity. As such, it is the chief source of both information and cognitive habits and in the nation. And the driving force behind it — big business marketing — relies on carefully managed racial stereotyping for its success.

This is smaller, lighter, thinner stuff than before, but I think its reach and its chilling effects on democracy and human dialogue are hard to overstate. It certainly ought to make us rethink the claims of our corporate overlords and their admirers and would-be emulators. With their annual (superbland) MLK Day advertisements and their increasing emphasis on “ethnic marketing,” they have painted themselves as part and parcel of the post-Civil Rights Movement national acknowledgment that racism is a bad thing that everybody should leave behind. Not quite.