Congress was taken for a ride, and the American people’s wealth went with it.

So now you have a system of checks and balances. The Treasury writes all the checks, and Congress doesn’t know what the balance is.

Trillions of dollars are being taken both from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, which is printing money, which you, the American taxpayer, have to back up.

We need to begin to have a serious discussion of monetary reform because what’s been allowed to happen is that banks have been permitted to create money out of nothing, and they have not held sufficient reserves against their investments that could go sour. This caused the collapse of a financial system that’s being shored up with U.S. tax dollars and with trillions of dollars printed by the Fed as backup.

This is a moment in American history that should not escape us. This is a massive theft that goes far beyond anything that’s ever occurred in the history of this country. What’s happening is they’re using government to accelerate the wealth upward and they’re using the Treasury to grab the resources of the public and to enable the banks to get extraordinary amounts of resources and they’re still not loaning money to let people save their homes.

We desperately need monetary reform.

(This was excerpted from Dennis Kucinich’s article, “Our Progressive Vision,” which appears in the July issue of The Progressive. To read the article in its entirety, and to get articles in that issue by Howard Zinn, Representative Keith Ellison, Dolores Huerta, Jim Hightower, Dave Zirin, and Eduardo Galeano, subscribe now by clicking here.)