President Joe Biden’s nominee to head a key Treasury Department agency overseeing the nation’s banks appears to be about to go down in flames.
Axios reported three Democratic senators who serve on the Banking Committee — Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Jon Tester of Montana and Mark Warner of Virginia — told chairman Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio on a Wednesday call they oppose Saule Omarova’s appointment to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
Sens. John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Mark Kelly of Arizona also oppose the nomination, according to Axios.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency oversees nearly 1,200 national banks and related institutions that together are responsible for approximately 70 percent of the banking activity in the country, according to the agency’s website.
The comptroller also serves as a director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Omarova received some tough questioning during her confirmation hearing last week on her stated views about fundamentally transforming the banking industry and bankrupting the fossil-fuel industries.
The New York Post reported Omarova is a Cornell University law professor who was raised in the former Soviet Union and has advocated for an end to banking “as we know it” by moving Americans’ finances from private banks to the Federal Reserve.
This was a position she advocated in an October law review article, saying the new system created by the move would be known as “the People’s Ledger.”
First, it should be noted that many of the communist nations back in the day were “the People’s” this or that. In our own time, we have the “People’s Republic of China” and the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
Next, what could possibly go wrong with moving everybody’s bank accounts to the federal ledger, especially with the nation running multi-trillion deficits?
And why wouldn’t we want the feds to know and ultimately be able to control every financial transaction we as individuals and businesses make?
Thank God at least some Democratic senators seem to have some sanity left.
We would never want to cede that kind of control over the economy and our daily lives to the federal government.
Omarova, who attended Moscow State University and immigrated to the U.S. in 1991, denied she is a communist in a back-and-forth with Republican Banking Committee member Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana.
“I don’t mean any disrespect. I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade,” Kennedy said.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA): “I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.”
Someone off-camera: “Oh my goodness.”
Dr. Saule Omarova, Biden’s comptroller currency pick: “I’m not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.” pic.twitter.com/CEiCWNwx2N
— The Recount (@therecount) November 18, 2021
“I’m not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born,” answered Omarova, who is a native of Kazakhstan.
She added that her “family suffered under the communist regime” and the law professor is now “proud to be an American.”
Besides her desire to radically change how the American people bank, she also wants to tank the oil and coal industries.
While speaking to a “Social Wealth Seminar” in March at the Jain Family Institute, Omarova described them as “troubled.”
“We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change,” she said.
Biden nominee Saule Omarova saying the quiet part out loud. On the oil, coal and gas industries:
"We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change." pic.twitter.com/luMR2HEMK9
— BidenNoms, A Project of AAF (@bidennoms) November 9, 2021
Tester pressed Omarova on her desire to bankrupt oil companies.
“I do not intend to advocate that kind of position,” she said, according to the Post, adding she misspoke.
“That particular statement about oil and gas companies going bankrupt, as I said, that was taken out of context and I actually misspoke, it was not well framed. My intention was actually to say, exactly the opposite, that we need to help those companies to get restructured.”
So they can stay in business, as long as they no longer produce oil or coal. That’s a much better response … Not!
There is no way the country can quickly transition to an all-green energy economy. Trying to do so will result in a lot of unnecessary hardship.
Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, the top Republican member on the Banking Committee, summarized the danger of Omarova’s views, saying he’s “never seen a more radical nominee.”
“Taken in their totality, her ideas do amount to a socialist manifesto for American financial services,” he said.
“She wants to nationalize the banking system, put in place price controls, create a command and control economy where the government allocates resources explicitly, instead of free men and women making their own decisions about the goods and services they want to buy and sell in an open market,” Toomey continued.
“These are exactly the kind of socialist ideas that have failed everywhere in the world they’ve been tried.”
Toomey nailed it.
Omarova’s nomination needs to go down in defeat, and it looks like that’s about to happen.