When Humans and Reptiles Collide

The dressing down and the marginalization of Born by the financial kingpins continued until her resignation in 1999, nine years before her warning had become a reality. Thus, the five-year anniversary of the crash is also the fifteen-year anniversary of Born’s prophecy. If we had listened to her back then the worst of the collapse could have been avoided.

October 7^th, 2008. London.

Three weeks after the collapse of Lehman, an end of a career could never be as cinematically perfect. “In the time that you have been speaking your share price has fallen thirty-five percent. What is going on?” When Sir Frederick, Fred the Shred, Goodwin – then chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and the 2002 Forbes businessman of the year – was asked this question at the end of his presentation, the egomaniacal dynamism and the pathological aggression of his namesake was nowhere to be seen. In a couple of days the British government nationalized RBS and threw it £37 billion of tax dollars. £16.5 million of which went to Goodwin’s pension.

Earning his nickname through the mass shredding of jobs and his determination to cut costs, as RBS’s supreme manager Goodwin was the key figure in institutionalizing the culture of a quick buck and the fast deal. His managerial style could be best summarized in his 9:30 am ‘prayer meetings’, where he would review his lieutenants performance and publically humiliate them, as the other executives present looked down and prayed they wouldn’t be next this time. As his fame grew, he correspondingly began to embody the psychological flaws of an egotistic authoritarian personality. “The bullying is all I remember about him,” a former executive recalls. “He was just another angry guy.”

Paul Moore, the risk manager of the bank, not only had the legal duty to make sure his bank was conducting responsible lending, but he was also one of the few in RBS who saw a catastrophe coming. When he tried to persuade his coworkers, one manager told him that behaving ethically would never let him reach his sales target. Another manager simply leaned over the desk and said, “I warn you. Don’t make a fucking enemy out of me.” A month after he took his concerns to the board, he was fired for losing, “the confidence of key executives and nonexecutives.” He broke the omertà of hierarchical culture, rendering himself unemployable in banking as a whole.

March 13^th, 2013. Canada.

The bad feeling that Valerie felt on the first day of her run in student politics proved to be more than dead-on. To save what was still left of her soul, forfeiting her position on Election Day was the only way left to do good for her fellow students.

In mentally preparing his new team for his electoral crusade, Scooter, the student union president-to-be, seemed to believe that the best story to convey to the team on day one was his fight for the vegetarian purity of his pizza. When the ever-so-small strip of meat stuck to the tong had seemingly defiled the virgin purity of Scooter’s order, the minimum wage working pizza boy had to be purged for his sacrilege. With an undoubting and likely unfounded can-do-spirit, Scooter bragged of his victory for getting this random employee fired to his team. To the president-to-be, the pizza was worth saving while the pizza boy’s stream of income was not.

Scooter ran unopposed and won with five percent of the electoral vote, lower than the approval ratings of U.S. Congress or of Wall Street. By resigning from this electoral charade through a Facebook open letter, Valerie became the university’s new hero by speaking truth to power.