You have always wanted to understand this.  Always.  Since you were a child.  And now you can.

"This is a staggering thought.  We are completely dependent on the Commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit.  If the Banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve.  We are, absolutely, without a permanent money system.  When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is."

~ Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager, Federal Reserve Bank, Atlanta, Georgia.

"I am a most unhappy man.  I have unwittingly ruined my country.  A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.  Our system of credit is concentrated.  The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.  We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world, no long a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

~ Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States 1913-1921

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy-fD78zyvI

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfXavRTM4Fg

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yvRZoM-2r8

Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0p8LepIuVM

Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzXZ_Hs1g6U

"Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is the absolute master of all industry and commerce... and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate."

~ James A. Garfield, assassinated President of the United States

"The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers.  By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest.  The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government's greatest creative opportunity."

~ Abraham Lincoln, assassinated President of the United States

"Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile...  Once a nation parts with control of its credit, it matters not who makes the nation's laws...  Usury once in control will wreck any nation.

~ William Lyon Mackenzie King, former Prime Minister of Canada (who nationalized the Bank of Canada)

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years.  It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years.  But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government.  The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

~ David Rockefeller in an address to Trilateral Commission meeting, 1991