How can the Democratic Party effectively oppose Trump and get back into power after they’ve lost over a thousand seats nation-wide since 2008?

Oh, I know. Maybe former Vice-President Joe Biden, a Democrat, can show up at a swanky Deer Valley con-fab and urge Republican Mitt Romney to run for the Utah Senate seat that may or may not be vacated by Republican Orrin Hatch.

Jesus-fucking-Christ, Mitt Romney, the rapacious Bain Capital executive who made a fortune by loading up American manufacturing companies with debt then firing the workers and off-shoring the jobs to some third-world hellhole, while Mittens and his pals walked off with millions?

Romney’s behavior, enabled by US tax law and encouraged by a cheerleading business press, was directly responsible for millions of Americans losing their previous middle/class status. These sorts of policies were not the result of technological or economic forces beyond our control but were political and economic decisions made by the US elite–people like Joe Biden and Mitt Romney.

Rolling Stone, gonzo-journalist–Matt Taibbi–well describes the morality of Romney when he was running for President in 2012 against Barak Obama, and his running mate–Joe Biden.

“The unlikeliness of Romney’s gambit isn’t simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it’s dusted itself off, it’s had a shave and a shoeshine, and it’s back out there running for president.”

The dirty little secret is that under the guidance of looters like Mittens, the American economy has become extractive rather than productive, switching from making stuff and providing services to engaging in complex financial shenanigans, as Taibbi relates.

“Romney’s been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let’s-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let’s-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of “creative destruction,” and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America’s rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.”

Think about it–if an economy stops providing real wealth by making products and providing services, the only way for the top 10% to continue to become “wealthier” is by cannibalizing the bottom 90%, and extracting their wealth through the misery of others. This arrangement is the “New Economy” that the business press breathlessly reports on.

The whole edifice is built on debt. Many Americans are trapped in debt with virtually no possibility of paying it off.

And, guess what?

This sort of economic arrangement has consequences. While American may not understand all the details, they do understand that something is rotten. Trust in government, corporations and the press is at all time lows. The American people have also grasped the fact that the two major political parties do not promote the public interest, preferring instead to serve political/economic elites.

The Democrats are currently casting about for why they lost the Presidential election to an orange-haired freak. The fact that Biden would support a Romney Senate run well summarizes the abject corruption of US politics by an utterly selfish and hypocritical oligarchy.

If the Democrats were a real opposition party, Biden wouldn’t have been there glad-handing with Mittens and his greed-head friends. He’s have been there with a phalanx of workers protesting Mitten’s swanky affair while offering a different version of what America could be.

Update: From Black Agenda Report:

“Any real “resistance” to the Trump Administration’s policies in this period must be equally opposed to the machinations of the Clinton camp of the state. Anything less should warrant suspicion from resistance forces. One cannot separate the rise of Trump from the failures of the Democratic Party. It was the Democratic Party, not Trump, that pushed the political trajectory of the US even further rightward through its incessant collaboration with capital. Since the 1980s, the Democrats have led the way in the projects of austerity, mass incarceration, and war. These policies have understandably bred a high degree of cynicism among more left-leaning Democrats, requiring the intervention of the first Black President to keep “hope” for the party alive.”