Do you know who Saule Omarova is? She’s President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Never heard of the OCC? It’s “an independent bureau within the United States Department of the Treasury that … serves to charter, regulate, and supervise all national banks and thrift institutions and the federally licensed branches and agencies of foreign banks in the United States.”

Kinda powerful.

And what would Saule Omarova want to do, if confirmed? You might think she’d want to ensure that the chartering, regulating, and supervising of banks and thrift institutions gets done right, without corruption, without unfair influence by lobbyists, etc.

You’d be wrong.

What does she want to do? Here are her own words:

“And here what I’m thinking about is primarily the coal and oil and gas industry. A lot of the smaller players in that industry are going to probably go bankrupt in short order. At least, we want them to go bankrupt if we want tackle climate change, right?”

As of 2019, about 1.7 million Americans were employed in the coal, oil, and gas industry. They’d lose their jobs. So, by implication, that’s what Omarova wants.

As of 2019, coal, oil, and gas provided about 80% of all energy we use in the United States. By implication, Omarova wants us to go without all that energy.

Granted, Omarova wants to replace it with energy from wind, solar, and other “renewables”—properly called “unreliables”—which provide about 12% of our energy. But it will cost $Trillions to achieve that. So, by implication, Omarova wants us to spend those $Trillions that way rather than on food, clothing, shelter, education, transportation, communication, health care, research, recreation, and whatever else you might want to spent it on.

She said that when speaking for the Jain Family Institute’s (JFI) “Social Wealth Seminar” on “her case for a US National Investment Authority.” What is the Jain Family Institute? Well, its website describes it as a “nonprofit applied research organization” whose mission is “to address pressing social problems by identifying and implementing high-impact interventions that will translate to real world progress.” Sounds innocuous.

But candid statements are usually more revealing. In this case, host Paul Katz, Vice President of Special Projects at JFI, explained the purpose of the “Social Wealth Seminar”: “… the Social Wealth Seminar is the Jain Family Institute’s ongoing virtual forum exploring strategies to manage public assets and resources in service of a more just society ….”

And just what is “social wealth”? Well, one thing you can be sure of, it’s not private property. It’s social wealth—wealth that, presumably, belongs to the whole society. Kind of like the wealth of the former Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, and various other Communist countries.

What could possibly go wrong?

You get a little more idea of what JFI is all about when you read the specialties of its researchers. Of thirty (excluding “Affiliate Researchers”), nine specialize in “Universal Income.” That makes “Universal Income”—i.e., income provided by taking from some what they produce and giving to others who don’t produce it—obviously a key focus for JFI.

Indeed, the next most popular specialty, “Digital Ethics and Governance,” is the focus of only six researchers; “Social Wealth Portfolio” has four. No other has that many.

And if you’re not yet convinced that the foundations of JFI’s thought are Marxist, try reading its page about “Digital Ethics and Governance.” The hallmarks of Critical Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory, both birthed by the Cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School, are all over it, e.g.: “engaging the technical knowledge and lived experience of a diverse range of academic experts”; “Are cases of algorithmic discrimination best understood as instances of disparate treatment or disparate impact, as those doctrines are applied in US law?”; “When algorithms are said to discriminate on the basis of race, what conception of race is at work?” (all italics added).

But enough of JFI. President Biden didn’t nominate it to head the OCC. He nominated Saule Omarova. And despite fierce opposition, he’s sticking by his nominee.

A “financial regulation professor at Cornell University,” she has, according to Reuters, “faced persistent and vocal opposition from banks since her nomination was announced.” Ordinarily, that would be a good reason to applaud the nomination. You never want a regulator to be a sweetheart to those she regulates.

This time’s an exception.

For one thing, she favors moving all checking and saving accounts out of private banks and directly into the Federal Reserve Bank. That makes government surveillance of our financial transactions much easier—and threatens our privacy. It’s also a step toward the cashless society, which has its own dangers, as James Rickards explained in a talk for Hillsdale College’s Center for Constructive Alternatives November 8, 2021.

But that’s mild stuff. She also advocates a “National Investment Authority what would be an independent agency that would have the power to direct public and private investment in the US.” Otherwise known as Fascism—a particular brand of socialism.

Who is Saule Omarova, anyway? What kind of thinking would she bring to this position?

Well, she grew up in the Soviet Union, where in 1979–1980 she was a “Young Pioneer” (the Communist youth mass movement), graduating from high school in 1984 as a member of Komsomol, or “Young Communists.” She went on to study at Moscow State University, writing her undergraduate thesis on “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution.” Despite Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs rules requiring nominees to provide copies of all their writings, she didn’t provide it. Indeed, she deleted reference to it from the resume she provided to the Committee despite and in response to a request from Ranking Member Pat Toomey (R-PA) refused to provide a copy.

No problem, you think. Universities keep copies of theses, and many are available on the Web.

Omarova’s isn’t. Moscow State University destroyed the only copy long ago.

Oh, and the Daily Mail reports that she opposes private banking (as I noted above) and praised the Soviet Union’s financial system.

But don’t worry. Nothing to see. Nothing to hide. She told the Financial Times,

I was in the Soviet Union, where there was no academic freedom, and this was a mandatory assigned topic. What I wrote in that paper has nothing to do with what I believed in then or in what I believe in now. … My grandmother was orphaned because Stalin sent her entire family to Siberia and they died there.

Not buying it? Contact your Senator.