Because understanding it is so crucial to people gaining freedom, there have been multiple attempts here at Thundering Heard to explain key aspects of the financial system. If anyone still feels at all mystified by this topic, the latest video by Mike Maloney does a good job of clearly explaining the true basis of the current system:
Thundering Heard
Toward Clarity in this Time of Major Transition
Thundering Heard 
So the Tea Party folks really are the true Patriots they claim themselves to be?
As far as I can tell, the Tea Party started out supporting ideas with some distant links to those in the video, but that lasted a few weeks at which point it was rapidly infected with the politics of hatred and exclusion. That type of divisiveness seems to me the opposite of patriotism.
wow…that was something to watch…thank you for sending…that system has clearly forgotten who we are and why we are here!
That last sentence may be the understatement of the millennium.