The increasingly caustic brand of politics gripping the United States is acting as an anchor on its economy, according to a new Harvard University study.

"We believe that the nation's political system has now become America's greatest competitive weakness, and that the situation continues to deteriorate,' declares the report titled "Problems Unsolved and a Nation Divided".

The US tax code needs updating to meet the challenges of a globalized, digitized world.  Large corporations are flourishing, as long as they move operations to any country with a friendly tax environment and skilled workers.  Small businesses, once the country's most reliable job creators, can't pick up and move to cheaper countries, so they're being crushed by the larger corporations. 

Gridlock in Washington means no national investment in secondary education, infrastructure, and health care."

"What we find is that all the major data points that started moving in the wrong direction started in the late '90s and 2000s," said Michael Porter, a co-author and co-chair of Harvard's Competitiveness Project.  That coincides with the rise of ultra-rightwing Republicans in Congress who peddled conspiracy theories about then-President Bill Clinton, and refused to cooperate with rival Democrats.  In the 2000s, the Republicans adopted their own "Hastert Rule" that said they wouldn't consider any legislation that couldn't win a majority of Republican votes - in other words, no compromises with Democrats, ever.  The rule was named after then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert, now a convicted child molester. 

The well was already thoroughly poisoned by the time Barack Obama gave his famous 2008 Democratic National Convention speech when he declared there was "no red America, no blue America, but a United States of America" (red and blue denoting Republicans and Democrats respectively).  He was met with racism that was unprecendented in modern times when he took office.  That acrimony from the right is now being refocused at Hillary Clinton - no one has learned a damned thing.