If you have been reading a long, you might have noticed that many of my posts are critical of views that might be thought of as "Left Wing". Is this a sign that I am a conservative troll? Or a conservative anti-troll? No it is not. I am generally leftist, although not as much as I was in my youth.

But I have found, especially lately, that I am more and more opposed to populism, especially populism that gets passed around the intarwebs without critical thinking attached. And one of my main reasons for being weary of populism is that a lot of "Left Wing" populist messages can be subverted very quickly. Resentment against those in authority, or even just those who are successful, is something that can be used by people on any side of the political spectrum.

Such as in this ad. I actually had seen other ads about 'union bosses', and then I found this one as an exemplar. Its interesting that the resentment against 'bosses' is so universal, that it is applied to the leaders of unions as well as to the heads of corporations.

So we have some clip art of a skeezy looking guy, who is smoking a cigar while drinking some booze. With a pinkie ring. And a bad gold chain. And then we have some figures. Together with the image, the figures seem to suggest that leading a (presumably teachers') union is what glam rock stars do when they lose all sense of proportion.

$3,000,000+ for "casinos, resorts, hotels". It doesn't break this down. This might sound like a lot, especially the "casinos" and "resorts" part, but... well, 3 million dollars isn't that big of a conferencing budget. This three million dollars could include staying at the Motel 6. So basically this is just saying that unions have conventions. Wow.

$15,000 for limos. Well, that is not exactly a needed expense, but in the scheme of things, its not a whole lot of money.

$60,000,000 for "six figure salaries". Well, depending on where you are, and where exactly in those six figures that is, that isn't exactly a wild salary. And $60,00,000 sounds like a lot, but who is that spread amongst? For a national union with 100 branches, that doesn't turn out to be an outrageous sum of money.  There are some corporations where the CEO alone makes that much, or more.

So this seems to be a case of throwing together some numbers together with an image, all in the course of directing some popular resentment against people who are, on the whole, living at about the same standard of upper middle class living that you would see amongst typical corporate management. Is this a surprise?