Skujk’s Clues Part I

Torbert Fahey

Let us put our ear to the keyhole of a drawing room in the citadel of woke. Phenomenal World is a wonky publication about logistics, geopolitics and political economy whose urgent tone on ‘climate’ and immigration enforcement betrays an unmistakably leftist bent. Study of their writers also shows a cross-pollination with haught-leftie sites like LRB and NewLeftReview. PW is the banner project of something called the Jain Family Institute, an NGO set up by Bobby Jain, an Indian-American who spent 20 years as a banker with Credit Suisse before setting up his own firm, Jain Global. Wherever immense wealth intersects with cerebral leftist practitioners, disaster is sure to follow. So what has Phenomenal World to tell us about the next Great Reset? What’s the next cultural revolution which the mandarins of woke are sure to hatch on us whenever they can scrabble back power from The Lion and his merry band?

It will almost certainly be framed first as an attempt to tackle and restrain the world of offshore banking. As it happens, Phenomenal World is an excellent spot to learn about the structure of political economy which upholds the battleground on which woke and restrictionist meet. In conducting follow-up research on the topics raised by the book under review, I have found PW’s explainers and reviews invaluable. From PW one can learn about the Eurodollar, the distortive effects of dollar dominance on the American economy, the global network of elites who benefit from the hollowing out of America’s real economy, and what practical steps might be taken in response to all of these financial issues. They are laying the groundwork, explicitly if you listen to their appearances on podcasts like Odd Lots where they bemoan the lack of a functional anti-deflationary political coalition, for a resurgent, economically-oriented Left.

Remember how identity issues were supposed to have suborned and deflated the class politics of Occupy Wall Street? Leftist economic analysts are still here, as it turns out, quiet but as potent as ever. Early in the Biden administration, China Joe himself raised a small uproar when he attempted to make a law professor named Saule Omarova comptroller of the currency. Professor Omarova has a comprehensive understanding of the global economy and a revolutionary plan for managing it. She collaborated with AOC and Green New Deal adviser Robert Hockett on The Finance Franchise, which argues that America’s great private banks are in fact public institutions irrationally permitted to act as private, for-profit ones. Hockett’s Making Capital Democratic lays out the steps by which The People might take back control of their proper banking authority. It has all the makings of an extraordinary and exciting political fight, one for which our side is completely unprepared. Where, in the conflict between a resurgent movement of workers of the world against the world network of Mossack Fonsecas, is a Western Patriot meant to find himself?

Enter Thom Van Skujk. Van Skujk’s contemporary political sympathies are unknown to me. All we know of him is that he writes a substack and wrote the extraordinary two-volume economic history under review today. He calls himself “an independent researcher and long-time poster in the Northeast.” He’s something of a man-out-of-time, his clearest political allegiance is to a defunct American political movement which went by names like Populism, Greenbackism, “The Ohio Idea,” and The Farmer’s Alliance. Van Skujk is an opponent of both the global financial system as presently structured, as well as its strongest opponents, the lefty wonks around publications like Phenomenal World, whom he calls “Revisionist Pseudo-Greenbackers.”

They are Pseudo-Greenbackers for the reason that they adopt a Greenbacker political economy (i.e. endorsement of a monetary-fiscal policy and rescission of money-creation powers from commercial banks), while ignoring or rejecting the historical legacy and culture of the Greenbackers themselves, and then pretending that they stumbled on this marvelous discovery, when in fact, this has all been known for decades but intellectually suppressed and marginalized by exactly the same people that gave them their Rhodes scholarships.

Van Skujk’s work is written with an eye towards developing a better appreciation for this lost movement, as well as educating a potential core of people who could resurrect it in the present day. It is a serious examination of the monetary history of the United States and by extension, since the American monetary system undergirds the global economy, the monetary history of the world post-1945. Elsewhere on his blog he expands on his motivation:

While this topic has been positively beaten to death in the world of conspira-tainment and samizdat pamphleteering, with the occasional academic treatment, not nearly enough has been done to treat it like a serious topic deserving of academic rigor. If we think it’s actually true, then why don’t we act like it by disciplining our analyses with macroeconomic theory?

The post from which that excerpt is taken is exceptionally good and I urge you to read it in full, as I will not summarize it here. I offer that excerpt only to show why I immediately ordered this book. Failure to take our own analyses seriously is a perennial frustration of anyone on our side of things. In Van Skujk I found a fellow aspirant towards a rigorous application of uncovered facts towards reexaminations of modern history. Not only that, but here was a fellow anonymous poster from the Northeast. I am compelled to read and review.

Before delving into the historical significance of Money in America, our chief concern, we should mention its structure. As I previously alluded, MiA is not strictly a history book, it is also a detailed introduction to certain economic theories and thinkers, for this reason it takes on a grand and complicated scale. In one of the book’s numerous charts (pg.8) Van Skujk explains his book’s structure thusly: his history of economic thought complements his discussion of macroeconomics, which is necessary for his thesis expressed in his two history sections, “the struggle for restoration in American history,” and “the eurodollar system, dollar world order, and a Restorationist perspective.” Neither J’Accuse nor myself cater to detailed economic thinking (though maybe this could change) so I confined my reading and review to Skujk’s historical thesis.

As a history book alone Money in America is extraordinarily ambitious, in telling the story of the American economy from 1776 to the present day Van Skujk advances a number of fascinating revisionist theories of both history and economics. While few of these theories are entirely original– Money in America is thoroughly foot-noted– their welding together in a single narrative gives them a force which they lacked seperately. In historiographical terms Money in America serves as something of a resurrection of Charles Beard and Stephen Zarlenga, a revisiting of C. Vann Woodward, and a celebration of more contemporary heterodox economists and economic theorists like Perry Mehrling, Charles Kindleberger, Saule Omarova and Robert Hockett (more on these last two later!). Its political heroes are, among others, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Tom Watson and Wright Patman.

Let us briefly summarize Van Skujk’s retelling of American history with some stops at points of interest along the way. Van Skujk’s first history section is titled “The Jeffersonian Age” and focuses specifically on the competing political economic visions of Jefferson and Hamilton. The current trend in both mainstream as well as what dissident historiography of America currently exists is staunchly Hamiltonian. Commentators of all stripes rubbish Jefferson for his slave-owning, his Francophile utopianism, his purported hostility to development and centralization, a hobbit vision, a peasant vision, a woke SJW vision.

Van Skujk clears away all this conceptual dross by focusing on the details of monetary policy and the machinations of Hamilton’s Bank of the United States, a singularly odd national financial organization. The Bank was not a National Bank or a public developmental finance scheme allocating credit to build up infant industries, it was a private company with private shareholders granted a privileged position in the American economy by virtue of its exclusive relationship with the Treasury and its exclusive right to open branches in multiple states. Van Skujk’s Hamilton is something of a straightforward proponent of oligarchy and of covert power, fighting a Jefferson whose most salient feature is his interest in the sovereignty of the American people as opposed to the sovereignty of Transatlantic financiers.

Hamilton’s burgeoning industrial power could not comfortably coexist with Jefferson’s agrarian yeoman democracy. In a country where any man could make a good living as an independent farmer, why would anyone become a factory worker? Why, additionally, would an independent farmer want to be chiefly governed not from his state capital, but from a more distant and powerfully centralized national capital? The Hamiltonian answer, echoed later to an extent by Constant’s comparison of modern and ancient liberty, is that citizens are only so free as their nations, and that a nation with a paltry industrial base and weak central government is easily made the prey of strong, unified empires like Britain. All of which may be true, but the Hamiltonian answer is complicated by the knowledge that the core of the Hamiltonian project, the Bank of the United States, was capitalized by Dutch and British bankers.

Now none of this is particularly new, but it is helpful, and it happens to be out of step with current historiography which, thanks to biographers like Ron Chernow, tend toward presenting Hamilton as an intellectually robust realist and Jefferson as a mushy-headed utopian. The ‘Jefferson’ section of MiA, like the rest of the book, is richly footnoted and thoroughly argued to present a pro-Jefferson and anti-Hamilton line. Van Skujk calls on Charles Beard for this, but supports the Beardian argument with additional research of his own. Historians referenced in this section include Bradford Perkins, James Wettereau, Stanley Rose, Claude Bower, William Appleman Williams, and John Thom Holdsworth. For primary sources Van Skujk offers extended extracts from the writings of Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, and Hamilton.

The Jacksonian Era, which followed the Jeffersonian, presents the first serious challenge to the developing northeastern financial power and the first inkling of an alternative, sovereign monetary system. The Bank War, which Jackson inaugurated when he vetoed a congressional bill to re-charter the Bank of the United States, was an extended civil conflict between Jackson’s administration and the Democratic Republicans on one side and the Bank and its allies in the Whig party on the other. Contemporary American historiography of this period cannot deny the blatant corruption with which the Bank, a public-private institution, waged covert political war on its own administration under the guidance of Nicholas Biddle, nonetheless mainstream American historians are loath to give too much credit to a populist like Andrew Jackson. Thus, the Whigs and the Bank tend to be treated as Impressive but Dark, shady but correct, while Jackson and his democratic tendencies are admirable but mistaken, because Jackson’s success in the Bank War resulted in the Panic of 1837.

Van Skujk takes pains to present a Jacksonian movement, in the persons of Andrew Jackson and his successor Martin Van Buren, far more sophisticated than its popular image. He also convincingly traces the origins of the Panic of 1837 to global financial dynamics exogenous to American economic policy. The climax of the Bank War was President Van Buren’s attempt to replace the Bank of the US with an independent Treasury Department. National banking power from 1847 to 1861 was thus shared between the Treasury Department and various regional banks, an unstable and haphazard system but one which was less drastically favorable to the accumulation of financial power in Philadelphia and New York.

This unstable system could not meet the needs of the Civil War. The Independent Treasury and state banks issued currency based on specie, but specie was nowhere near in enough supply to allow the federal government to pay and equip the army required to subdue the south. In the name of military efficacy, the Republican administration introduced Greenback currency, taxable, legal tender incontrovertible to gold or silver, currency by government fiat. At the war’s close, the national government was presented with essentially multiple variations on two options: to establish greenbacks as a permanent national currency, doing away with the need for gold and silver as currency, or to slowly retire greenbacks and re-solidify a specie-based system. Small farmers and some industrial interests in the south and midwest were largely pro-greenback, as beneficiaries of an expansionary monetary policy, while established banking interests in the northeast were resolutely opposed.

In 1868, advocates of the Greenback managed to partially take over the Democratic Party, and run their candidate for president on a pro-Greenback platform. Van Skujk’s able retelling of this forgotten period in American political and economic history will make many a contemporary reader’s ears twitch. The 1968 Democratic convention was the setting of an insurgency conducted by small businessmen and farmers in league with a flock of newspapermen and independent pamphleteers against the wealthy sponsors and established politicians running the party. Against these established interests, the Greenbackers brought to bear popular legitimacy and pure zeal for ideas. While unable to put their preferred candidate up for the Democratic party’s Presidential nomination, they were able to secure a Greenback plank in the platform, as well as a Greenback vice presidential candidate. Their insurgency and hard work was undone in the general election, though, as their party was defeated by Ulysses Grant’s Republicans, banishing the Greenback to the political wilderness.

It is here that Van Skujk engages in some bold but convincing revisionism. The Democratic National Committee chairman during this period was August Belmont, a wealthy New York banker and representative of the British branch of the Rothschild family in America. Belmont was, naturally, staunchly anti-Greenback, and it was through his hard work that the Greenback candidate, George Pendleton, was kept off the Democratic presidential nomination. Belmont and his allies were immensely disappointed by the pro-Greenback party platform and vice presidential candidate, but made a public show of conceding to the convention result and diligently campaigning for their party in the general election. Nonetheless, just days before the election, a paper edited by the close Belmont ally Manton Marble announced that the Democratic party was certain to lose with its current nominees, and needed to switch them immediately to have any chance of success. This initiated a mad scramble among higher and lower Democrat grandees to coordinate and confirm Belmont’s views. A group of lower level Democrats endorsed a rival Democratic ticket. Belmont responded with a noncommittal telegram assuring the party of his confidence in the current ticket, then retired to his Newport estate.

The Greenback movement in the Democrat party was thus delivered a “great defeat to bring it to its senses,” as had been hoped for by a New York Times editorial shortly after their convention. No one who spent the 2020 avidly following the Great Steal can fail to notice the parallels, as an embattled insurgent populist group saw its legs cut out from beneath it by a feckless party establishment. Van Skujk’s narrative in this first volume is filled with such compelling moments, effectively establishing a very long and underappreciated line of descent for American populism. By the close of this volume, Van Skujk has set the stage for his discussion of early twenty first century populism in Volume II, as well as the development of offshore banking and the global financial order. This discussion, and its implications, we shall examine in detail in the second part of this review.