Joe Biden (or his puppet master) has a knack for choosing singularly inappropriate people for important government positions.  He put a woman with a long history of anti-Semitism into the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division and nominated as his preferred ATF head a man so fanatically anti-gun that even Democrats couldn't support him.  But with his nomination for comptroller of the currency, a position that involves overseeing banks, Biden has outdone himself.  Saule Omarova, who got her B.A. in the Soviet Union, is a Cornell law professor (i.e., an academic, which is already a problem) who hates banks, wants a Soviet-style financial system, and has a friend in Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is a very powerful position.  As the Wall Street Journal explains:

The OCC is an independent bureau of the Treasury Department. It oversees about 1,200 banks with total assets of $14 trillion, some two-thirds of the total in the U.S. banking system, making it one of the most powerful regulators alongside the Fed and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The powerful Comptroller of the Currency has a seat on the board of the FDIC as well as on the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a panel of senior regulators charged with detecting risks to the financial system. The bulk of the job revolves around supervising the day-to-day operations of the world's largest banks.

Omarova is an...um...interesting choice for this position.  She was born and raised in Kazakhstan, in the former Soviet Union.  She received her B.A. from Moscow State University — not Moscow in Idaho, but Moscow in the former Soviet Union.  She came to American in 1991, but, unlike many expatriates from a communist country, she doesn't seem to have a visceral animus toward a totalitarian social system or a command-and-control economy.

Omarova, who now teaches at Cornell Law School, wrote a wordy, jargon-filled law review article last October, "The People's Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy," in which she proposes doing away with private banking and putting everyone's money into the Federal Reserve system.  The goal is to "effectively end banking as we know it."  I am no friend of large banks, which are greedy and have obscenely embraced the openly racist Critical Race Theory.  Nevertheless, the thought of consolidating every American's money in an entirely federal banking system makes my blood run cold.

The whole idea of a managed money system appeals to Omarova.  In 2019, she gave a big cheer for the Soviet economy:

Omarova has been slammed in the past for appearing to praise and support Soviet Union ideals.

In 2019, she posted to Twitter in support of the "old USSR" where there was "no gender pay gap." She attempted to do damage control after being criticized for it, but failed to fully condemn the Soviet Union. 

"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!" she wrote.  

Strike one in her comments is that there was no "gender pay gap," a term meaning that men and women receive different salaries for the same work, in the USSR.  That doesn't happen in America because it's illegal.  Women tend to earn less because they want lower-paying jobs, either because they prefer childcare work (low-paying) to garbage collection (physically hard, often disgusting, sometimes dangerous, and higher pay) or because they actually have children and choose jobs that offer them part- or flex-time work, or that take them off the high-paying career track.  That Omarova believes the "gender pay gap" nonsense says she's dumb, ill-informed, or too fanatical to understand facts.

[Monica Showalter adds: The gender pay gap in the old Soviet Union was significant, and that's against a backdrop of likely false, non-transparent, or under-reported statistics, meaning the disparity was likely even higher than what was reported, according to this entry in Wikipedia.]

And then there's that praise for having the state set wages.  That ensures, as Winston Churchill understood, that all will share equally in the misery of a state-controlled economy, one heavy on favoritism and low on intelligence, initiative, hard work, creativity, or market forces.  Again, this is a dangerous type of ignorance that has no place in the American economy.

No wonder Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a hypocritical millionaire who wants government control over the economy, is so enthused:

"She is an excellent choice to oversee and regulate the activities of our nation's largest banks and I have no doubt she'll be a fearless champion for consumers," Warren said in a Facebook statement.

While I doubt Omarova will be a "fearless champion for consumers," you can bet that Biden's latest nominee will be a fearless champion for government's continued expansion at the expense of individual liberty and the free market.

Image: Saule Omarova (edited in BeFunky).  YouTube screen grab.

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