Mediaite Interviews Catherine Crier: ‘Politicians Want To Keep Us Divided’

That political campaign contribution idea pops up a few times in your book. You actually get pretty passionate about this marriage of big business and government.

My biggest beef in the whole book is the marriage of big business and big government — it’s producing some disastrous decision making. I actually think that I am a bigger defender of capitalism than many people in big business and big government today. But I go back to Adam Smith [and his] protest of the marriage of big business and big government in England, and what it did to broad-based economic opportunity. Not just to the working man, but small businesses, medium businesses, innovation, entrepreneurs. And we ignored that.

Right now, there are a lot of decisions that I think are being made not independently by evaluating what our needs are and what problems may be presented. They’re being made by politicians who oftentimes are essentially bought and paid for by industry and by agencies run by industry officials in that revolving door. So I have to question a lot of decision making, because I no longer trust the independent government.

So it’s basically just a big mess, no matter who you vote in.

It’s a system flaw, because the staffers, the core Washington system remains. You just change the name of the person who’s been elected and put into office.

When we send a representative or a senator to Washington, oftentimes they’re responding to the needs of some multinational corporation, or some big industry that has financed their campaign, rather than their constituents. And I think the decision-making would be very, very different if we saw them representing the people who voted for them, the people who sent them there.

Which leads us right to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

If you go back to my first book, The Case Against Lawyers, in the introductory chapter I scream about Americans being unwilling to put boots on the ground and take to the streets — and when I say that, I’m certainly not calling for any sort of violence. I meant citizen activism, to demand that politicians actually respond to the people who send them to Washington.

There is a side of me that certainly would denounce violence and a lot of the obvious problems with protests in the street, but I have to applaud the willingness of people to face discomfort and to face the ire and objection and criticism and cool weather and rain and say, ‘You know what? Our country is too important.’

A lot of people don’t like OWS. A lot of people don’t like the Tea Party. There’s a huge divide in this country.

People tend to gravitate to those who reinforce their own opinions. Right now, politicians know that ‘divide and conquer’ is always the best tactic. And when you have a domestic economic crisis, the way they solidify their power is to demonize the other half. So right now, we have half the people in this country thinking the other half are enemies. The other half of of the American citizenry are enemies. That’s insane.

Politicians want to keep us divided. Because if we ever get the fact that it’s the marriage, you actually might see the 99% of the country unifying to take responsible action to restore true capitalism and a true representative democracy in our government.

Do you see anyone out there, at all, who you’d be confident in to fix the way things are?

Henry Greenwald says, ‘Sometimes the followers must lead until the leaders follow.’ I’m not sure we should be thinking there’s a single savior. We should be thinking a lot more about the role of citizens in a representative democracy, and we need to learn about what’s going on and get involved.

Enough interviewing. Let’s get to the free books!
(Rules: The contest is now open. Submit your answers to bookgiveaway@mediaite.com. The first five people to correctly answer all five questions win an autographed copy of Patriot Acts. We’ll contact the winners for mailing information. )

The Catherine Crier Mini-Quiz:

1) Name the Founding Father that argued America should have a monarchy and hereditary senate and later called the Constitution a “frail and worthless fabric”

2) Who said “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide”?

3) In his farewell address to the nation, President Eisenhower warned of the “military-industrial complex”. What word did his staffers convince him to remove from the original phrase?

4) What beloved 1947 film starring Jimmy Stewart was labeled by the FBI as subversive, communist propaganda?

5) What economist, heralded by Reagan and Thatcher and still a favorite of the right, proclaimed “I am not a conservative”?