And so we wait and see the fallout from the US mid-term elections on business. As Tory Newmyer and Jennifer Liberto write in Fortune, big business is in for a shock because of the powerful protectionist policies of the Tea Party and the Republicans, caught between two worlds, are all over the place.
Writing in Salon, Andrew Leonard talks about the "unbearable stupidity of American voters", the ones who thought Obama had raised taxes when he had actually cut them.
"He was immediately blamed for a budget deficit that was largely constructed by Republicans and the result of recession-induced shortfalls in tax revenue. He is now saddled with responsibility for an unemployment rate that is the consequence of a crisis that occurred before he took power, and that would undoubtedly be higher if not for the stimulus."
But then, maybe the ignorance reflects a far bigger crisis, a crisis of profound ignorance in America that goes beyond politics. John Berthelsen in Asia Sentinel talks about the "perils of American stupidity" where 77 percent of the Republicans in the US House of Representatives refuse to believe in global warming, where only 44 percent of US respondents to a 2007 Gallup Poll stated that they accepted Darwin's theory of evolution, compared with 78 percent in Japan, 70 percent in Europe and 69 percent in China and where a scary 20 percent of Americans believe in witches and 29 percent believe in haunted houses.
As Berthelsen says, it's not a good sign for the future of American innovation and the American economy.
"Despite the massive challenge of global warming, there seems little chance that the United States will repeat the technological triumph that the Kennedy administration set off in space,'' Berthelsen writes. "And it is inevitably going to pay for what often seems a willful decision to turn away from scientific enquiry,'' Berthelsen says. "As Americans choose to turn away from scientific inquiry and intellectual curiosity in favor of superstition, half-truths and mythology, they may, unwittingly, be turning their own clock back toward a different version of Year Zero."
American business will regret not standing up to the Tea Party.
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