RUTHFULLY YOURS

Joe Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency in the U.S. Treasury Department is Saule Omarova, a native of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and graduate of Moscow State University, which she attended on a “Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship.” In a May 9, 2020 interview with Chris Hayes of NBC, Omarova explained how she arrived in America.

“I was an undergraduate student at Moscow State University and there was at the very end of the Gorbachev era an exchange program between Moscow State and University of Wisconsin Madison. I got lucky against all odds, and I came for that one semester in 1991 to Madison, Wisconsin. While I was there in December of 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart. So there I was, a student without anywhere to go back. I was very worried about what was going to happen. So I stayed to do my Ph.D. in political science, but frankly, I’m just, to this day, I feel guilty for having left the country at such a momentous time, because obviously they couldn’t hold it together without me.”

“Your departure and it all falls apart,” Hayes said. “That’s amazing timing.” As it turned out, unlike many other émigrés, Omarova remained a fan of the USSR.

In 2019, nearly 30 years after the USSR collapsed, Omarova was on record that “say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’” In the old USSR, the all-male Dictatorship of the Proletariat always knew best, but Hayes didn’t get into that.

As F.A. Hayek outlined in The Road to Serfdom way back in 1944, economic knowledge is fragmented and dispersed, so no group of people, is able to plan an economy that will thrive for the benefit of all. That’s why Omarova’s beloved “old USSR” was an economic basket case.

Countries barren of liberties are also barren of groceries. The biggest country in the world, with abundant energy and natural resources, could not even feed itself. This was a matter of record, but Hayes failed to press the issue. Omarova knew that in the old USSR consumers waited in line to select, pay, and pick up the goods. That is how an economy planned by Communist Party bosses functions in practice, but there’s more to it.

In a Communist state like the old USSR, the rulers must be willing to take drastic measures, so as Hayek put it, the worst get on top. In the old USSR, those less than worshipful of the collectivization plan must be “liquidated as a class,” as with the kulaks of Ukraine in the 1930s, Stalin deployed a planned famine that claimed the lives of millions.

Hayes might have asked if Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev et al ever did anything with which Saule Omarova disagreed, but he never popped the question. The USSR also herded people into the forced labor camps that Solzhenitsyn wrote about in The Gulag Archipelago, and Anne Applebaum charted in the 2003 Gulag: A History. Hayes didn’t ask about those books, and Omarova failed to explain what she knew, when she knew it, and what she thought about it.

The Kazakhstan native earned a PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin and a law degree from Northwestern. During the administration of George W. Bush, Omarova served in the treasury department as a special advisor on regulatory policy to the undersecretary for domestic finance. The Lenin scholar now holds forth as a law professor at Cornell.

In The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy, released in 2020, Omarova sets forth the vision of  “how democratizing access to central bank money would—and should—transform and democratize the entire financial system.” 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.”

Her focus is the Federal Reserve and her proposed reforms “would make the financial system less complex, more stable, and more efficient in serving the long-term needs of the American people.” Making independent banks “non-depository lenders” would change banking “as we know it.”

Saule Omarova wants to eliminate private banks as a class, a government takeover similar to the “old USSR,” where the Communist dictatorship set people’s salaries, as the Lenin scholar explained, “in a gender-blind manner and all women got very generous maternity benefits. Both things are still a pipe dream in our society!”

Many Republicans oppose Omarova, and Federal Reserve boss Janet Yellen reportedly has reservations. The Lenin scholar’s biggest booster is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose entire career is based on her false claim to be Cherokee. Warren is the prime mover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which blamed the financial crisis on private institutions and cast the federal government as the savior. Saule Omara’s scheme does likewise, only more so.

Instead of private banks, people would hold deposits with the Federal Reserve. Government would control everybody’s money. That is a belch from the old USSR, but Saule Omarova has a shot at confirmation.

Tracy Stone-Manning, linked with tree-spiking eco-terrorists, was recently confirmed as director of the Bureau of Land Management. Vichy politicians could easily make way for the Lenin scholar from the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.