The Bank's and our American Dream

We all know the story of the American Dream:  work hard, and with a little luck, you have the opportunity to make it big, get rich, and live a happy, healthy, and successful life.  That's all people in America have ever truly wanted: that freedom to pursue what they want to lead a "successful life" (whatever that means to them).  In order to do that, however, you need money.  And money is the basis for the American economy.  That's because money is the basis of capitalism, America's credo.  In order for capitalism to thrive, though, people need to have a constant flow of money, or the ability to spend when they want on what they want.  That's why loans exist, because people don't have a constant flow of money at all times.  The problem arises when people start to either take out loans or give loans when they can't afford to do so as this posted YouTube video outlines.

The cartoon video starts off with a quintessential American-dream setting: a suburban, beautiful neighborhood, and our main character takes out a loan to purchase a house there.  But only soon thereafter, his home is foreclosed upon, and he embarks on a journey with an old grade-school friend to figure out why he is no longer with a home (and apparently no longer with an American dream either).  The journey ensues and ends up being an attack on the Federal Bank and how everyday Americans are being cheated out of their hard-earned money in the "biggest theft in human history".  

Some of the language, despite the video's comical cartoon style, is a bit difficult for the layperson to understand, especially if said layperson were only in high school (me).  But the gist of it is that the Federal Reserve (aka "The Fed") is not a government-owned bank, but rather a private bank that grew to a huge size.  According to the video, "it's about as federal as Federal Express."  It now lends money to smaller banks who lend money to regular people, and in all of this lending the banks end up making money off each other's debt because when you pay back a loan, you pay it back with the added interest.  The crux of all of this, however, is that the Federal Reserve is a privately owned bank that doesn't have a never-ending flow of cash.  So, it gets the U.S. Mint to print money for it so it can lend money to smaller banks and even the U.S. government, who in turn needs to pay back their debt.  They do this through taxes, and the IRS to gives some tax dollars to The Fed.  The video mentions how all of this is unconstitutional due to how a private bank does not have the authority to print money for itself, and that our tax dollars aren't being spent on the best of things, but rather, on our country's debt to a private bank.  

The whole video was a bit of an eye-opener for me, and I naturally had trouble believing all of it thinking perhaps the source wasn't credible.  But it doesn't seem to be lying, and the truth of the matter is that the system described makes sense logically.  But at the same time it does feel as though we are being cheated out of our money for purposes not directly behooving us.  Do you think this is true or do you think it necessary that a centralized bank keeps the other banks in check?  How else do you think money can be regulated in the U.S.?