The money-changers and their greed have been stealing our money since forever

Julius Caesar took money back from the rich and used it for public works, creating a great civilization. Then he was assassinated, the money-changers were back in charge, the people lost faith in the government, and the Dark Ages happened.

In Jesus' time the money-changers cornered the market on the half-shekel used to pay taxes. We know what he thought about that!

Goldsmiths in England a thousand years ago started storing gold for people in their vaults and gave out receipts. The receipts were used as "paper money" because it was much easier to carry around! What did the goldsmiths do? They gave out receipts for more gold than they stored knowing that everyone wasn't going to come looking to get their gold back! Of course they charged interest on the fake money they were lending. That was the beginnings of "fractional reserve banking" which today is how banks create money out of thin air with nothing to back it up (other than knowing that if they over-speculate our government will bail them out with our tax money!).

"Interest" has been outlawed at various times throughout the ages by both the church and governments. Today it is the easiest way for those with money to make more money without adding any value to society. Imagine how many more people would be homeowners if their mortgage payment reflected only the actual cost of creating and maintaining the loan (plus a reasonable profit based on risk) instead of including compounding interest, adding up to more than twice the principal amount! Your payment would be cut in half!

When you factor in "fractional reserve banking" (being able to lend up to ten times the amount of money that the bank actually has), we start to understand how we've become completely at the mercy of our debt-based economic system. You give your money to the bankers, they give it back to you via mortgages, car loans, and credit cards balances, all with interest. No wonder that the financial industry makes the enormous profits that they do. And remember, it's all so that the people at the top can buy another yacht. They don't give a darn what the loans are used for as long as they make a profit.

The US officially turned over our economic system to the bankers in 1913 when the Federal Reserve System was created. There had been numerous attempts to establish a central bank before that, but foresighted politicians who did not trust the motives of the bankers were able to put down these attempts. Finally the money-changers were able to buy off the necessary politicians and Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, which Woodrow Wilson signed into law (and later regretted). Note that the Fed is a self-regulated group of privately held banks and has minimal government oversight (the SEC consists of bankers and usually looks the other way)! It creates money and sets interest rates primarily to help large corporations and Wall Street. It profits during economic booms as well as depressions. And when they screw up there are always bailouts from your tax dollars.

How much have they stolen? Some facts and figures...

The top 1% owned a record 32.3% of the nation’s wealth as of the end of 2021, data show. The share of wealth held by the bottom 90% of Americans, likewise, has declined slightly since before the pandemic, from 30.5% to 30.2%. The bottom 50% held 2.6%. (link)

A 2019 study by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that the average effective tax rate paid by the richest 400 families (0.003%) in the US was 23 percent, more than a percentage point lower than the 24.2 percent paid by the bottom half of American households (link)

Using Federal Reserve data, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth reported in August 2019 that "... we see that the bottom 50 percent of wealth owners experienced no net wealth growth since 1989. At the other end of the spectrum, the top 1 percent have seen their wealth grow by almost 300 percent since 1989" (link)

The total wealth of the 1% reached a record $45.9 trillion at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, said the Federal Reserve’s latest report on household wealth. Their fortunes increased by more than $12 trillion, or more than a third, during the course of the pandemic (link)

According to the annual Modern Wealth Survey from Charles Schwab, people believe that an average net worth of $774,000 is what it takes to be financially comfortable. ... The median net worth for U.S. households is $121,700, per the Fed. And as other reports have found, many U.S. households have very little or no savings at all (link)