While many have accused the Biden administration of creeping toward socialism, Joe Biden’s nomination of Saule Omarova to comptroller of the currency demonstrates a sprint. The administration announced it would withdraw her nomination Tuesday, but that it was made at all indicates the administration’s priorities. Omarova expressed a desire to seize for the federal government sweeping powers over banking, including the politicized denial of services.
“Saule would have brought invaluable insight and perspective to our important work on behalf of the American people,” Biden said Tuesday in a statement about withdrawing her nomination. “But unfortunately, from the very beginning of her nomination, Saule was subjected to inappropriate personal attacks that were far beyond the pale.” That’s just plain false, and it’s frightening Biden would nominate and praise a woman with her record.
Saule Omarova is a radical who shares her Marxist views freely and in writing. She wants big-government bureaucrats to dictate the terms of America’s economy.
Putting her in charge of America’s banks would have been disastrous for American workers and families.
— John Kennedy (@SenJohnKennedy) December 7, 2021
Five less progressive Democrat senators voiced concerns about Omarova, effectively blocking her confirmation. According to Axios.com, the Biden administration was informed by Sens. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Mark Kelly of Arizona, Jon Tester of Montana, Mark Warner of Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona that they opposed this nominee, making it impossible for her confirmation to receive Senate approval.
Twenty-one state treasurers sent a letter to the Biden administration opposing Omorova’s nomination. One of those treasurers, Missouri’s Scott Fitzpatrick, wrote of the nominee, “As recently as last year, Ms. Omarova has written papers detailing ways she envisions restructuring America’s financial system by centralizing power and shifting consumer bank deposits from private banks to the Federal Reserve. These views are also evident on her social media accounts. This is not someone we want in charge of regulating America’s financial system.”
Omarova, currently a law professor at Cornell University, is a native of Kazakhstan while it fell under the control of the Soviet Union. There, she was a member of the Communist Party.
“Omarova has promoted radical – ‘radical’ is her description — nationalizing the banking system, imposing government price controls, espousing the idea that money is a public, not a private good, curtailing economic innovation, dramatically limiting economic freedom and choice, having the government seize seats on corporate boards,” noted Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pennsylvania in her hearing.
Educated in Communist Institutions
“The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is an independent bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury,” says the organization’s website. “The OCC charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks, federal savings associations, and federal branches and agencies of foreign banks.”
Omarova earned her B.A. at Moscow State University, graduating in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship prior to immigrating to the United States in 1991. Once in the United States, Omarova earned both her M.A. and Pd.D. at the University of Wisconsin, and her J.D. from the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.
While at Moscow State, Omarova wrote her thesis entitled, “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in ‘The Capital.’” When questioned about her thesis, she claimed to have forgotten about it, and testified she is unable to locate the document, even though it remained on her resume through 2017.
During Sen. John Kennedy’s, R-Louisiana, questioning of Omarova on Nov. 18, he pointed out that she joined a Marxist Facebook group discussing socialist and anti-capitalist views. He noted that Omarova, in a Canadian documentary, called the financial services industry, “a quintessential -sshole industry.” Omarova also wrote a paper calling for the federal government to set wages, food, and gas prices.
People Can Die Over Fear of Climate Change
In her 2020 paper “The Climate Case for National Divestment Authority,” Omarova supported having the federal government bankrupt the gas and oil industry over climate change, said Kennedy. Starve them at their source of capital; if they go bankrupt, that would be a good thing, Omarova has stated.
Joe Biden's nominee for the Comptroller of the Currency Saule Omarova on oil, coal and gas industries: "We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change."
Those industries are responsible for MILLIONS of Americans' paychecks.pic.twitter.com/37DYwoFw8m
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) November 9, 2021
Continuing with the theme of the gas and oil industry, Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tennessee, asked Omarova if higher gas prices are a good or bad thing for America. Omarova had difficulty answering the question. The senator then read this quote from Omarova: “A lot of the smaller players in coal and oil and gas ought to probably go bankrupt in short order – at least we want them to go bankrupt – if we want to tackle climate change.”
Millions of Americans’ livelihoods depend upon the gas and oil industry, while gas prices continue soaring, which makes the poor unable to heat their homes in winter, which leads to deaths, especially among the elderly.
Extremist Views about Money and Banking
Hagerty also noted that Omarova supported Operation Choke Point. That’s a strategy in which government officials intimidated banks to stop lending to lawful American businesses that Democrats didn’t like.
Omarova also wrote a 70-page article for the October 2021 Vanderbilt Law Review calling to abolish bank accounts in favor of mandatory accounts established with the Federal Reserve, where the Fed will have access to our personal data. Omarova’s goals include federalizing the American people’s personal bank accounts.
The paper “offers a blueprint for a comprehensive restructuring of the central bank balance sheet as the basis for redesigning the core architecture of modern finance. Focusing on the U.S. Federal Reserve System (‘the Fed’), the Article outlines a series of structural reforms that would radically redefine the role of a central bank as the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a democratic economy—the People’s Ledger,” Omarova writes.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, called Omarova an independent voice while referring to the banking industry as “their Republican buddies.” Warren should learn how Democrats rake in a small fortune from the banking industry in campaign contributions.
Using Banking as a Political Weapon
Omarova is deeply critical of the free enterprise system and allowing individuals to decide what to do with the money they work for. Toomey read quotes from Omarova during the Senate Banking Committee hearing. Here’s one: “I think that the government needs to step into private market operations. Right? In order to align the incentives of individual corporations with the interest of the public.”
Far too often throughout the hearing, Omarova would either deny the real meaning of her words or claim they were being taken out of context. Every quote? Every comment? Every 70-page article? Simply not plausible. This nominee is simply too dangerous to be installed into such an important position being able to make life-altering decisions for millions of Americans.
“You get to decide who gets to open a bank and who doesn’t. You get to decide what kind of loans get to be made, and which ones can’t. You could forbid a bank from a merger. You could forbid a bank from opening new branches. You could create or destroy a whole category of bank charters. You could decide which kinds of loans receive favorable regulatory treatment through the CRA eligibility. And every bank would know that their fate is, to a very large degree, in your hands, and they would know what your views are about the banking industry, about the private allocation of capital. This is what’s so chilling,” said Toomey.
Throughout her hearing, Omarova suggested that because she is an immigrant, a woman, and not white is why she is being challenged so vigorously. No, it’s because her ideas are dangerous to American freedoms. It’s a relief she will not serve as comptroller but ominous that she was nominated in the first place.
Source: The Federalist
