There is a lot of talk of getting Paul Krugman as Treasury Secretary. As Dean Baker points out - ain't gonna happen.

If Krugman were Treasury Secretary we could envision a policy that was focused on creating jobs rather than reducing a deficit that exists almost entirely because of the downturn in the economy.We could also envision a policy that sought to tame the bloated financial sector with a speculation tax that would make much of the creative finance on Wall Street unprofitable. And, we would not have to worry that cutting Social Security and Medicare is the top priority for the Obama administration.

But, Krugman is not on the short list for Treasury Secretary. This list has the names of people who are much more acceptable to Wall Street who, by the way, have been wrong on almost everything important about the economy in the last decade. As a result, we should be very very afraid.

And there is also talk of minting some damn coin to pay off the debt. That ain't gonna happen either. Just like they keep hoping some bankers and Wall Street executives will do a perp walk. But liberals and progressives hold onto to such hopes like a late stage cancer patient does laetrile and massive doses of vitamin C.

You see none of this was the intention or agenda of Washington from the beginning. We can see that now with the re-inflating of the housing bubble. This time in the rental sector.

Some readers have been asking how one can reconcile positive signs in the housing market with declining rates of homeownership. Indeed, homeownership is falling at an even faster pace than during the 08-10 period….The explanation is that so far a great deal of net demand growth in housing has been in rental units. …This demand for rentals is in fact one of the factors supporting the housing market – for every renter there is a landlord who buys a home.

And as Matt Taibbi points out in his current column in Rolling Stone, it was all one gigantic scam. A lie of biblical proportions.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

It was never the intention of Washington to temporarily save the banks. The whole point was to continue on as if noting had happened. A giant reset button as it were. No fixes, no regulations, nothing. But everything back the way it was and continue this fascist, fraud that has been perpetrated on the American people. The whole thing was a scam. They lied about the health of the banks. They lied about the bail outs being temporary. They lied about the bonuses. Everything.

But this should not surprise anyone. As Oliver Stone points out in his series Untold History of the United States - and as anyone who has read anything by Howard Zinn would know - Washington has been lying to us all along. From the beginning of the industrial revolution at least.

All to keep Wall Street and corporate America in the green. The same fine folks who were supporting Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Franko's Spanish armies with oil, weapons, steel and vehicles prior to and even after our entry into WWII.

There are those who think we have become fascist. Personally I think we always were. It's just more obvious now and the propaganda more intense.