From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world.

Our consumer society didn't just happen, it was planned. Not in the 20th or 21st centuries, but in the 19th century by the Skull and Bones secret society.

Skull and Bones, a branch of the Bavarian Illuminati, was founded by William Huntington Russell and fellow classmate Alphonso Taft at Yale University in 1832.

Members, known as “Bonesmen,” include Rockefeller, Kuhn, Loeb and Morgan all connected to the House of Rothschild's global financial empire. They are founders of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, France, and Germany or, for that matter, any central bank anywhere in the world.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, one of the most important domestic acts in the nation's history, took the power to create money from the people and gave it to the Bonesmen, in theory, for profit.

The process that the Federal Reserve, or any bank, uses to create money “consists of making an entry in a book, that is all,” says Graham Towers, governor of the Bank of Canada. “Each and every time a bank makes a loan (a debt) . . . new bank credit is created—brand new money.”

While a gold-backed currency and even greenbacks have their limits, the Bonesmen's manufactured bank money has no commoditization potential and therefore no limit . Making matters worse, the central banks are allowed to charge interest on borrowed money that never existed in the first place. The money we borrow from the Federal Reserve is money created out of thin air, which we use to buy stuff, but we have to pay interest on those loans, and this becomes what is known as the national debt .

How are the Bonesmen getting wealthy off this money that doesn't exist?

Is it a Ponzi scheme? Not likely.

Narrator Annie Leonard in “The Story of Stuff” stands in line to buy a radio for $4.99 and realizes that we aren't really paying for the stuff we buy. So if we aren't paying, who is?”

The Bonesmen, of course!

Those trees we chopped, mountains we blew up to get the metals inside, and the precious water we consumed all belonged to the Bonesmen at one time. In 1910 they owned or controlled one-sixth of the world's wealth, but their wealth was eventually “cut, mined and hauled away,” as “The Story of Stuff” tells us, so that Americans could have houses, second houses, cars, RVs, TVs and DVDs—the cheap stuff that is currently “trashing the planet”. Don't forget the world they owned and controlled in 1910 had a mostly balanced ecology.

Leonard is correct in saying, “The real costs of making our stuff aren't captured in the price.” But the costs are recorded. According to the Comptroller of the Currency, the books of U.S. banks now carry over $180 trillion in a form of speculative wager known as derivatives. The derivatives represent the money created world-wide since 1910—out of thin air.

About 40 percent of the $10.5-trillion U.S. national debt is owed to the Bonesmen. Warren Buffet and Marketwatch believe if the U.S. defaults on that debt, the loss to the Bonesmen and their derivatives wouldn't be $4.2 trillion or even $180 trillion, but about $500 trillion--money created out of thin air over the past 100 years to pay for our consumer society.

Although the false money that's been created has no limit, the planet's resources do. Consumption at the current rate would require five planets, and the Bonesmen only have one.

The Skull and Bones Federal Reserve became critical to our industrial and consumer society. Thank the Bonesmen for the unprecedented prosperity for the last 100 years, but also blame them for the unprecedented environmental damage and pollution that the planet has suffered.

The Rothschild Brothers of London observed, "The few who understand the (Federal Reserve) system will either be so interested from its profits or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class.”

Eustace Mullins, author of “Secrets of the Federal Reserve,” wrote, "As soon as Mr. Roosevelt took office, the Federal Reserve began to buy government securities at the rate of ten million dollars a week for 10 weeks, and created one hundred million dollars in new (checkbook) currency, which alleviated the critical famine of money and credit, and the factories started hiring people again."

The father of our current president said, "The American way of life is not negotiable," and following 9-11, Bush Jr. simply told Americans that they should go shopping!

At the G8 summit, George W. Bush said, "Goodbye, from the world's biggest polluter.” He proposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, which would trash America's last arctic wilderness. Sonar testing is about torturing whales and dolphins, and the border fence that keeps everything out but the illegals is disrupting an extraordinary source of biological diversity along a 2,000-mile-long region that includes deserts, mangrove forests, plains, mountains, river valleys and wetlands.

Inexorably, our consumption patterns are stretching the environment to its limits.

“ From changing climate to polluted air, land, water to declining happiness, it's just not working. But it's not like gravity, we don't gotta to live with it.” But don't try and take back the government from the Bonesmen, we don't have time. In the past three decades alone, one-third of the planet's natural resources have been consumed.

It's time to take action, get united and form “local living economies” that are smart and sustainable. Want to see how? Watch the documentary, “How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.”

It's time for Americans to address the things in life that really matter.