Corporate Confession
Two chairs were placed in the center of the room, and a tape recorder sat on a table to the side. A man and a woman sat in the chairs facing each other. The woman, Cameron, was dressed in a business suit. The man was wearing a leather jacket and jeans. He had a tattoo of a snake on his neck.
Cameron shifted in her seat, uncomfortable under the man’s gaze. She was not used to being in the spotlight. She was used to being the one in control, the one who asked the questions. But now she was the one being interrogated. And she didn’t like it one bit.
The man leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “So, Cameron, what do you do?”
“I’m a lawyer,” she said.
“And what kind of law do you practice?”
“I’m a corporate lawyer. I represent companies.”
“And what kind of companies do you represent?”
“I represent all sorts of companies. But mostly I represent banks.”
“So you’re a bank lawyer.”
“Yes.”
“And you help banks do what?”
“I help them with all sorts of legal matters. I help them hide the fact that they’ve been stealing money from the government.”
The man nodded and leaned back in his chair. Cameron was pleased with her answer, but continued squirming under the man’s gaze.
“So you feel good about your job,” he said. “It doesn’t bother you that your life is a waste?”
“I never said that my life was a waste,” she said. “I said it was fun to manipulate laws that are. Besides, I get to keep it out of the public eye. Thanks to me and the tax loopholes I find, the banks don’t make it obvious they’re stealing money. See, the US subprime loan crisis didn’t happen because the loans were too much for Americans to repay. It happened because the banks kept buying bad mortgages, repackaging them, and selling them as if they were safe investments.”
“Okay,” the man scoffed. A hint of a smile crept up his face. “You’re aware that this is being taped, right? There’s a camera filming this interview. And you’re also aware that your name and face will be written into the script in whatever language we broadcast this documentary in.”
“Yes,” she said.
“But that doesn’t bother you?”
“Not at all.”
They sat for a moment in silence.
“Now that we’ve covered what you do,” he said, “maybe we can get into why you do it.
(Parts of this writing were generated by OpenAI and EleutherAI, curated and edited by the Author)
