Edinburgh Anarchists

Quick-quiz: How many of you out there think that “non-executive” means the same as “doesn’t do anything”? As in “non-executive director”?

I thought that being a NED meant to turn up to the meeting, eat the biscuits, read the minutes, send texts to your mistress and nod through pay rises. Their performance at scrutinising RBS, among others, says I’m right.

But maybe I’m wrong. They must be working awfy hard, because according to this story, they’ve been given a payrise of more than 5% across big companies. Meanwhile, workers are seeing pay freezes (always a cut in real-terms, remember) if they’ve not been put on short hours to “save” their jobs.

What happened to “fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay?” Seems like that was only ever meant to work one way. Fuck the wages system.

Further to recent post. I really don’t want this to fall into Bell-Pottinger’s memory hole. The multi-million-profit oil trading business is getting away with “compensation” worth less than the cost of medications. Justice is too important to be left to lawyers.

The local contractor, the bottom end of the Trafigura poisoning-for-profit venture? He got 20 years jail. Probably deserved. But not as richly as the traders deserve it. Instead they get time to apply their “creative” techniques to molecular biochemistry:

It also denies that the waste – gasoline residues mixed with caustic washings – could have led to the serious illnesses the residents claim, which include skin burns, bleeding and breathing problems

This, folks, is why science is good. They’re putting forward a bold new theory, we now need to carry out a simple, controlled experiment to see whether this is actually the case:

1. Mix petrol and quicklime
2. Apply to skin
3. Observe effect

All we need are some volunteers to test the hypothesis. Perhaps Tim Bell, Peter Carter-Ruck and Claude Dauphin would oblige? After all there’s no proof…