When Tim Met Saule

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott has been mentioned as a possible running mate for Donald Trump. Those who wonder what Scott is about might dial it back to his meeting with Saule Omarova, Biden’s pick for Comptroller of the Currency in the Treasury Department.

Saule Omarova

Born in Kazakhstan, Omarova attended Moscow State University on a Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. She came to the USA during the Gorbachev Era on an exchange program with the University of Wisconsin. There Omarova earned a PhD in political science and also scored 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. Bush’s choice for that post was Brian Roseboro, but it’s unclear who wanted Omarova as a special advisor, and why her Lenin scholarship, Marxist thesis, and contempt for the free market did not become an issue.

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. The market doesn’t always ‘know best.’”

Instead of independent banks, Omarova wanted the Federal Reserve to control everybody’s money, basically a replication of Soviet banking. In a banking committee hearing on November 18, 2021, Omarava faced Sen. Tim Scott:

I want to be fair and I will be fair. I won’t be hyperbolic, but I will be frank and honest. I cannot think of a nominee more poorly suited to be the Comptroller of the Currency based solely on your public positions, statements, and the weight of your writings than you are. Let me just quote you versus anybody else.

On the Green New Deal, you proposed taking economic and climate policy making from Congress and creating an unaccountable bureaucracy called the National Investment Authority. In a roundtable this year—this year—you pushed “to make the NIA the dedicated institutional platform at the federal level for really being the kind of fighting muscle of the Green New Deal and fighting muscle of, you know, all of these other movements that are pursuing environmental justice, social, economic justice, equality,” and so on.

Your disdain for the financial services industry: In 2019, in a documentary titled—I’ll be kind—‘Buttholes: A Theory,’ you said, “The financial services industry, in my view, and I don’t think I’m alone here, is the quintessential ‘butthole’ industry.”

 Killing American energy. In a Jain Family Institute Seminar in March of this year, you proposed bankrupting the coal and oil and gas industries saying, “We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle the climate change.” That’s really hard to misunderstand.

On nationalizing banking, last year, 2020, not 10 years ago, not 20 years ago. Just last year, a paper you titled “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy,” you proposed reforms to, and I quote “effectively end banking as we know it” by nationalizing retail banking, as it relates to the end of private banking. Your words. No one else’s. This year. Not 5 years ago, not 10 years ago, not 20 years ago.

This year. You said, you proposed to, “imagine what it would be like if, instead of just a public option for deposit banking, this would be actually the full transition, in other words, there would be no more private bank deposit accounts and all of the deposit accounts would be held directly at the Fed.”

I don’t have any questions for you, because there is nothing you can say today to undo what you said for years, including this year. Thank you Mr. Chairman.

Sen. Scott was right that Omarova was the most poorly suited for the job, but to be fair that holds true for most if not all of Biden’s choices. The Lenin scholar didn’t get the post but she previewed Obama’s “fundamentally transformed” nation as a kind of Soviet Amerikastan.