Saule Omarova comptroller

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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/07/biden-withdraws-radical-banking-nominee-saule-omarova/

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Biden Withdraws Radical Banking Nominee Saule Omarova

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Saule Omarova of New York testifies before a Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington to examine her nomination to be the Comptroller of the Currency, November 18, 2021. ]

SEAN MORAN  7 Dec 2021

Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s nominee for the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, withdrew her nomination Tuesday after Democrats and Republicans opposed her controversial views to eliminate community banks and fossil fuel companies.

Breitbart News has extensively covered Omarova’s nomination to the Comptroller of the Currency position and her radical views as a Cornell Law professor.

If the Senate confirmed Omarova, she would have had the “most powerful, least accountable” position over the banking system, a former senior government official told Breitbart News in November.

Senators, including Democrats such as Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), became increasingly critical of the Biden nominee as Breitbart News and other organizations revealed her controversial vision for the American banking system.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) told Breitbart News in late October that Omarova’s support of “Communist ideals” disqualifies her for the position, a move that pressured Tester to oppose her nomination.

In her academic work, she has called to eliminate all bank accounts and to transfer all bank deposits to “FedAccounts” at the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank.

When talking about FedAccounts, the former senior government official said, “The Democratic Party over the last couple of administrations, they want the government to essentially take over a lot of financial functions from banks.”

Breitbart News Economics Editor John Carneynoted that Omarova would end community banking as we know it if the Senate were to confirm her.

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Omarova also called for the creation of a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, that would grant the federal government massive control over Americans’ financial activity.

She even complained once that the “massive digitization of finance,” which includes digital currencies such as Bitcoin, wrested control over Americans’ money from the government.

Omarova also came under fire after she said that she wanted to bankrupt fossil fuel companies to facilitate climate change policies.

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“A lot of the smaller players in that [coal, oil, and natural gas] industry are going to probably go bankrupt in short order – at least we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change, right?” Omarova added.

During her Senate nomination, she blamed her call to eliminate the fossil fuel industry on “poor phrasing.”

Omarova also enflamed controversy after refusing to pledge not to politicize lending in a manner similar to the Obama administration’s notorious Operation Choke Point.

Carney also wrote an op-ed for Breitbart News, noting that Democrats and establishment media outlets such as New York Magazine engaged in a cover-up of her views ahead of her Senate nomination hearing.

New York Magazine’s puff piece for Omarova said criticisms of her academic work were “ludicrous red-baiting.” The establishment outlet also allowed Omarova to mischaracterize her own views, including not quoting from her own papers.

Many Senate Democrats claimed that Republicans were “red-baiting” Omarova since she graduated from Moscow State University in 1989.

Omarova has refused to divulge her thesis, “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital,” to the Senate Banking Committee, as Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Pat Toomey has repeatedly requested.

Despite Senate Democrats’ defense of Omarova, many Democrats remained concerned about her radical views, leading to their opposition to Omarova’s confirmation.

Sens. Tester, Mark Warner (D-VA), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) called Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-OH) late Wednesday, announcing their opposition to the comptroller nominee. Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) also announced their opposition to her, effectively sinking her confirmation.

Despite bipartisan opposition to her nomination, Brown claimed in a statement Tuesday that Omarova was a victim of “red scare McCarthyism:”

Despite her unquestioned expertise and her bipartisan record, powerful interests distorted Professor Omarova’s views and writings. In a relentless smear campaign reminiscent of red scare McCarthyism, they have shamefully attacked her family, her heritage, and her commitment to American ideals. I am disappointed that these spurious attacks and misrepresentations of Professor Omarova’s views were not resoundingly rejected in a bipartisan manner.

One thing is clear: we need regulators at the OCC and beyond who are not in the pockets of Wall Street – public servants who will ensure the economy works for everyone, and who will protect our economic recovery from the risky activities of Wall Street and unregulated tech companies.

He added, “I will continue to work with the Biden Administration to fill these posts that are critical to our economy.”

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.

Economy Politics “Red Scare” Communist Joe Biden Jon Tester Office of Comptroller Saule Omarova Steve Daines

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five centrist Democratic senators have reportedly told the White House that they’ll oppose the nomination of Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s controversial lefty pick for head of the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The opposition from both Republicans and, now, some of Biden’s own party could kill the nomination of the Soviet-born academic to the critically important post, Axios reported.

In a Wednesday phone call, Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), all members of the Senate Banking Committee, told Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the panel’s chairman, that they oppose Omarova’s nomination to the post, according to Axios.

Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) also oppose her nomination, according to Axios. Biden’s Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has also objected to the pick, the Wall Street Journal previously reported.

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[edit bd unsigned: https://www.wsj.com/articles/comptroller-of-the-economy-saule-omarova-joe-biden-nominee-11632937029]

Omarova, a Cornell University law professor has courted controversy with eyebrow-raising academic writings on regulation, which include recently advocating for the end of banking “as we know it” by moving Americans’ finances from private banks to the Federal Reserve. ...

open ltr usual suspects

Conservatives strongly oppose the confirmation of Saule Omarova to Comptroller of the Currency.

Far from an academic critic of the U.S. banking system, Omarova is a radical activist, having made clear she wants to put an “end to banking’ as we know it.” Her vision involves transferring private banking functions to the Federal Reserve, which would also be tasked with controlling prices for fuel, food, raw materials, metals, natural resources, home prices and wages.

Omarova has spoken of transforming the Federal Reserve into a central platform for “generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy.” She has referred to the financial sector – the industry which she would purport to regulate – in derogatory and inflammatory terms and suggested changing the legal system to address so-called “self-serving behavior.”

Such ideas are straight out of the Soviet playbook,which Omarova has both studied and hailed. It should go without saying that such practices have no place in our U.S. monetary system. Particularly at a time whenmonetary services have become ideologically weaponized, decentralization of the financial sector remains critical to ensuring that all Americans have access to the basic levers of capitalism.

The Biden administration appears to have nominated an outright communist to a capital markets position – a contradiction both in terms, and in governing ideology. If confirmed, Saule Omarova would seek to expand political control over the private economy and further infuse our capital markets with ideological purpose. We urge the Senate to reject her nomination.

All organizations listed for IDENTIFICATION purposes only.

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...Brunet tweeted proudly that his critique had been promoted on Fox News by Tucker Carlson.

The A.A.F.’s treatment of Cook has been mild compared with what several other Biden nominees have gone through. Late last year, Saule Omarova—a leading academic in the field of financial regulation, who is a law professor at Cornell and holds doctorates in law and political science—withdrew her name from consideration as Biden’s Comptroller of the Currency. She did so, she told me, because an opposition-research campaign against her, which the A.A.F. took credit for, had, among other things, falsely portrayed her as a secret communist.

Born in Kazakhstan, in what was then the Soviet Union, Omarova received an undergraduate degree from Moscow State University, butshe became a naturalized American citizen in 2005.Yet, during her confirmation hearing, in a moment reminiscent of the Joseph McCarthy era, the Republican Senator John Kennedy, of Louisiana, declared that he didn’t know whether to call her .” Omarova replied, “Senator, I am not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.” Omarova’s résumé is hardly anti-capitalist: she worked at the corporate law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and served in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department.

Omarova told me, “There were so many accusations. A.A.F. was at the forefront of making my life extremely and unnecessarily difficult.” The group discovered that Omarova, after she’d read an article in The Economist about potatoes, had tweeted fondly about a time she helped farmers harvest potatoes outside Moscow. The A.A.F. proclaimed that the Biden Administration had “nominated a woman who waxes nostalgic for the good ole days of poverty, hunger, and forced labor in communist Russia.” Conservative outlets pounced on similar tweets about her past. “The A.A.F. made it into this big deal,” she told me. “They said, ‘She wants to make America into the Soviet Union.’ It was a complete absurdity. But people who have no idea who I am jumped in and said, ‘Go back to the Soviet Union!’ ”

Digging into a person’s past—especially someone who isn’t that well known—takes time and money. “Somebody must have paid them a lot,” Omarova said, of the A.A.F. “They went through all my public speeches and academic writings to find any kind of phrase they could use against me.” She’d been featured, along with other professors, in an obscure 2019 documentary based on “Assholes: A Theory,” a whimsical treatise by Aaron James, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine. The A.A.F., without acknowledging the film’s satirical tone, promoted a snippet of Omarova calling the financial-services industry “the quintessential asshole industry.” She told me, “They didn’t cite the film. It made me sound unhinged, nasty, and, like, a rude person.” A compilation of clips from the documentary had been taken off YouTube owing to copyright violations; during the pre-hearing process for Omarova’s nomination, Republican staffers insinuated that she’d personally concealed the footage. “I don’t know what kind of relationship those senators had with A.A.F.,” she told me. “But clearly they knew of that clip." Omarova told me that someone went to Moscow to “try to dig up” an undergraduate paper that she’d written on Karl Marx. Opponents also circulated an elementary-school photograph of her wearing the obligatory red kerchief of the Young Pioneers. “They used it to say ‘Look at her, she’s such a devout Communist!’ They were going through my whole life, looking for anything they could smear or frighten me with.” ...Omarova disclosed reams of personal information to the Senate, including her compensation as a law professor. Jones then e-mailed her colleagues at Cornell about what he portrayed as her annual salary—but the figure he cited represented nearly two years of pay. In the e-mail, which was obtained by The New Yorker, Jones asks, “Do you think it is appropriate for the university to provide such a large salary to Dr. Omarova?” He invited her colleagues “to share” their “thoughts” with him.

While the hearings were ongoing, the A.A.F. trumpeted a dismissed shoplifting charge against Omarova—omitting the fact that she’d disclosed it herself. She told me that the incident, which came about from a misunderstanding with a security guard, had occurred not long after she had emigrated from Russia—and had led her to become a lawyer. The A.A.F. also accused her of belonging to a Marxist group on Facebook that she was unaware of and had never participated in, and misleadingly edited a comment she’d made about the need to insure economic security for laid-off fossil-fuel workers so that it sounded like an attack on those workers and the industry.“They were saying that I wanted to kill oil-and-gas workers,” she told me. “That’s exactly the opposite of what I was saying.” Omarova had suggested that it would be good for the environment if America transitioned away from fossil fuels, even if some companies ended up going out of business. She had also called for tougher regulations on banks. These two points likely constituted the true motivation for the opposition she encountered from the Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee. 

Omarova was soon opposed by every Republican senator, and also five Democrats—led by Jon Tester, of Montana, who has been a major recipient of banking-industry donations.

 Omarova described the confirmation experience as “soul-crushing.” She went on, “You feel stripped down. You feel your house has been destroyed, and you are standing there in front of everyone looking at you, and they have distorted and twisted everything.” She expressed surprise that, in the United States, spurious controversies could be so easily “manufactured out of nothing.” She added, “I’m a naturalized citizen. I put so much effort to be here, and I embraced this country with all my heart. I came from a place that didn’t have freedom of speech or thought. But this made so personally clear to me how fragile our democracy is.”

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 Three months after Omarova withdrew her nomination, Sarah Bloom Raskin endured a similar character assassination. Bloom Raskin, a law professor at Duke University, was not a new or untested figure. After graduating from Harvard Law School, she worked as a staffer on the Senate Banking Committee, and she twice won confirmation from the Senate to top economic positions: between 2010 and 2014, she was a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, and during the Obama Administration she served as the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury—becoming, at the time, the highest-ranking woman in the department’s history.& Her husband, Representative Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, is a progressive firebrand, but Bloom Raskin is regarded as a moderate in business circles, and has wide support from the banking industry. But, like Omarova, Bloom Raskin offended fossil-fuel companies—in her case, by suggesting that climate change posed a potential economic risk that the Federal Reserve needed to consider.... 

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 If Sen. John Kennedy's line of questioning against Saule Omarova sounded familiar, it's probably because it echoed Joe McCarthy's tactics.

Nov. 19, 2021,

By Steve Benen

Senate fights over the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are not especially common, but the dispute over Saule Omarova's nomination is proving to be unusual.

At face value, Omarova's story reads like a classic American story. She was born in Kazakhstan, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. She immigrated to the United States, studied law and business, became an American citizen, took on a role in the Bush administration's Treasury Department, and ultimately became a law professor at Cornell University. see WITH pod]

President Joe Biden nominated her for a position in which she'd be responsible for regulating bank assets — she specializes in financial regulation — and yesterday, Omarova's nomination arrived at the Senate Finance Committee for a confirmation hearing.

Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana apparently thought it'd be entertaining to take aim at her personal background, starting with this question: "You used to be a member of a group called the Young Communists, didn't you?" The Washington Post took it from there:

But this isn't where Kennedy was headed. Instead, he spent his designated time suggesting that Omarova was a communist sympathizer, beginning with that loaded question. Omarova indicated that she wasn't sure what group he was referring to, a bit of caution that Kennedy wasn't interested in. Kennedy, reading from handwritten notes, identified the group by name: "the Leninist Communist Young Union of the Russian Federation," also known as the Komsomol.

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As a child in a USSR country, Omarova's participation in Komsomol was not optional. The professor patiently tried to explain this to the Republican senator, who didn't seem overly concerned about the relevant details.

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"I don't mean any disrespect — I don't know whether to call you professor or comrade," Kennedy said.

Of course, why would anyone find such nonsense disrespectful?

As part of the line of questioning, the Louisiana Republican sought proof that Omarova "resigned" from the school program as a child. She explained that participants didn't have to formally quit the group, since they simply "grow out of it with age."

Kennedy, either confused or willfully ignorant, wasn't satisfied, seeking some kind of letter of resignation. No such letter existed, because the question didn't make sense.

The Post's analysis added, "It's safe to assume that Kennedy, who attended Oxford University during the Cold War, is aware that Soviet youth were conscripted into party organizations and that socialist views are not communist ones. But he is a politician representing a deep-red state, and he clearly understands that it's easier to submarine a presidential nominee using old-school Red scare tactics than it is to challenge her actual belief systems one by one."

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It was notable in large part because contemporary examples of McCarthyism usually aren't this literal. Kennedy was, for all intents and purposes, on the lookout for communists. If that meant unfairly smearing a qualified nominee — who is not, in reality, a communist — so be it.]

"My family suffered under the communist regime. I grew up without knowing half of my family. My grandmother herself escaped death twice under the Stalin regime," Omarova explained. "This is what's seared in my mind. That's who I am. I remember that history. I came to this country. I'm proud to be an American, and this is why I'm here today, senator. I'm here today because I'm ready for public service."

It was a good answer to a bad question.

To be sure, Omarova's confirmation will be difficult for reasons that have nothing to do with her family history or experiences as a child in Kazakhstan. Some moderate Senate Democrats have expressed reservations about her nomination because of her opposition to a financial deregulation bill several years ago. Despite her qualifications, experience, and expertise, it's unfortunately easy to imagine her nomination coming up short in the evenly divided Senate.

But that doesn't make Kennedy's display and Joe-McCarthy-like tactics any less offensive.

And yet, visitors to the Louisiana Republican's website this morning were greeted with one prominent headline, splashed across the homepage near the top: "Kennedy questions Biden nominee on membership in communist organization."

It was cheap and ugly — and for Kennedy, a source of pride.