President Joe Biden’s nomination for a crucial and high-powered financial sector regulatory body voluntarily withdrew her application after a number of centrist Democrats were said to be pushing opposition behind the scenes over the candidate’s pointedly Marxist background and ideology.
In a Dec. 7 statement by the President published to the White House website, Joe Biden said he accepted the withdrawal of Saule Omarova’s nomination to head the Office of the Comptroller (OCC) of the Currency.
Biden remarked, “I nominated Saule because of her deep expertise in financial regulation and her long-standing, respected career in the private sector, the public sector, and as a leading academic in the field.”
The OCC is a little-discussed branch of the Department of Treasury that manages all national banks and federally-licensed arms of foreign banks. Wikipedia estimates the OCC’s reach extends to two thirds of all assets owned by America’s banks, and puts the agency on par with the FDIC and Federal Reserve.
The President claimed that Omarova’s nomination was undermined by “inappropriate personal attacks that were far beyond the pale.”
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Omarova, a professor at Cornell Law School, began her fall from grace in late September when the Washington Free Beacon revealed she graduated from Moscow State University in 1989, was a recipient of a Marxist-themed scholarship titled the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship, and penned her thesis titled Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital [Das Kapital].
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The Beacon reported that Omarova scrubbed the thesis from the curriculum vitae provided to the U.S. Senate for her confirmation hearing despite its appearance in a version found available as recently as 2017.
Shortly afterwards, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), Ranking Member of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs wrote a letter to the nominee requesting a copy of the document, a request which Omarova never fulfilled.
Biden continued in his statement to laud Omarova as “a strong advocate for consumers and a staunch defender of the safety and soundness of our financial system,” and claimed the leftist would have “brought invaluable insight and perspective to our important work on behalf of the American people.”
Yet, the native of then-Soviet Kazakhstan was not under fire only for her openly communist leanings, but also for her expressed wishes to radically mutate the U.S. banking system and economy into a completely centralized and technocratic entity.
In October of 2020, Saule Omarova published a paper titled The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy where she advocated for “redesigning the core architecture of modern finance” by eliminating all personal and business bank accounts, replacing the existing monetary system with one centralized in the hands of the Federal Reserve.
She hailed the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as a pretext for “the issuance of central bank digital currency and the provision of retail deposit accounts by central banks”
In the paper, Omarova stated that “The People’s Ledger” was the term she coined to encompass a radical change that would “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 would have seen the existing banking system be replaced by “FedAccounts,” which Omarova painted lipstick on as “represent[ing] an explicitly political—and consciously progressive—take on the traditionally technocratic proposals to issue central bank digital currency.”
“Offering deposit accounts to individuals and entities will enable the Fed to modulate the aggregate supply of money and credit by directly crediting and debiting the accounts of all participants in economic activity, without interposing intermediary-banks,” stated the paper.
While Omarova’s nomination was ardently and vehemently challenged by a wide array of Republicans, behind the scenes, Democrats such as Jon Tester (MT), Krysten Sienma (AZ), John Hickenlooper (CO), Mark Kelly (AZ), and Mark Warner (VA) worked to jettison the candidate as the 2022 midterm elections loom large, according to insider reports from outlets such as Axios.
Omarova was unpopular even with the establishment media positioned center-left. A Sept. 29 article issued by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board characterized the now-former nominee’s “radical ideas” as views that “might make even Bernie Sanders blush.”
WSJ captured a 2019 tweet by Omarova lauding the former USSR, “Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’”
After drawing fire, the professor attempted feebly to defend a dubious position, “I never claimed women and men were treated absolutely equally in every facet of Soviet life. But people’s salaries were set (by the state) in a gender-blind manner. And all women got very generous maternity benefits. Both things are still a pipe dream in our society!”
The Editorial Board quipped in response, “Sure, there was a Gulag, and no private property, but maternity benefits!”
