Above, commie Saule Omarova

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Biden Banking Nominee, a ‘Lenin Scholar,’ Is Fellow at Pro-China Think Tank

Chuck Ross • October 18, 2021 4:00 pm

President Joe Biden’s pick to regulate the nation’s banking system is a fellow at a think tank that one of the Chinese government’s propaganda agencies has touted as helpful to Beijing’s foreign influence efforts.

Saule Omarova, who received a Lenin Scholarship at Moscow State University and has refused to turn over a thesis she wrote on Karl Marx in the late 1980s, joined the Berggruen Institute last year as a senior fellow. The institute promotes progressive causes and has developed close ties to Chinese leaders. Berggruen’s position on China has earned praise from the Cyberspace Administration of China, which touted a relationship with Berggruen as an opportunity to "influence" foreign audiences.

This is the latest in a series of controversies for Omarova, whom Biden nominated to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. She has already faced resistance to her nomination from the financial industry and Republicans over her alleged anti-capitalist policy positions. Omarova proposed "radically" changing the banking system by having the Federal Reserve accept bank deposits instead of private banks. She has also proposed the creation of a massive New Deal-style federal bureaucracy to oversee the nation’s infrastructure projects. Her proposals have garnered the endorsement of the liberal Sierra Club, which hopes she’ll use her perch as bank czar to regulate the fossil fuel industry.

Omarova’s praise for the economic policies of the Soviet Union has raised eyebrows in Washington, D.C. Omarova said in 2019 that the Soviet model of state-controlled salaries had eradicated the so-called gender pay gap. She scrubbed her résumé of references to her Marx thesis, but Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) has asked her to provide a copy to the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee as part of her confirmation process.

Omarova, who has not responded to the Washington Free Beacon’s requests for comment, accused her critics of racism and sexism in an interview with the Financial Times last week. She also denied being a communist sympathizer.

While some Berggruen scholars have criticized China’s human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims and protesters in Hong Kong, the think tank has pushed for globalization and increased cooperation between the United States and China through a series of "Understanding China" forums. Berggruen hosted an event for Chinese president Xi Jinping in 2015.

One member of Berggruen’s network is Zheng Bijian, the founder and chairman of the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy. Zheng, who reportedly advises Xi, has held positions within the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus, including as head of the party’s Literature Research Office and executive deputy director of its Publicity Department. Zheng spoke at a Berggruen event in 2018.

In 2017, China’s Cyberspace Administration, which censors internet content, identified Berggruen as a tool of influence for the Chinese government, the National Pulse reported. A Cyberspace Administration memo touted cooperation between Berggruen and state-controlled media outlet China Daily in its efforts to "expand" socialist propaganda.

Saule Omarova, who Biden tapped to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, listed a paper titled "Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital" on her résumé as recently as 2017. But the paper was not disclosed on the version of the résumé reported last month by the Washington Free Beacon. Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.), the ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, pressed Omarova about the discrepancy in a letter on Tuesday asking her to hand over a copy of her report.

Omarova, a professor at Cornell Law School, has already proved a controversial nominee. She has said she wants to "end banking as we know it" by providing bank services through the Federal Reserve rather than private banks. She has also proposed the creation of a federal agency called the National Investment Authority, which would coordinate long-term national economic strategy and infrastructure development for the United States. Omarova, who left the Soviet Union after graduating from Moscow State in 1989, has praised the Soviet Union for eliminating the gender pay gap.

Toomey asked Omarova to provide a copy of the original thesis to the Senate banking committee by Oct. 13. He said in a statement that neither Omarova nor the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency agreed to hand over the thesis. He noted that presidential nominees are required to submit all copies of their published writings.

Omarova did not respond to questions about the thesis or the revision to her résumé. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency also did not respond to requests for comment.

Omarova has received support from progressive lawmakers and special interest groups who support more regulation of the banking system. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) called her nomination "tremendous news." The Sierra Club said that Omarova would erect "guardrails against Wall Street's risky fossil fuel investments" to fight "climate chaos."

Omarova in 2019 praised aspects of the Soviet Union's economic system, calling the lack of a gender pay gap a "huge achievement" and an example of a flaw in capitalism. A native of Kazakhstan, Omarova graduated in 1989 from Moscow State University, where she received the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship, according to her résumé.

Omarova is already facing opposition from the financial services industry over her proposal to "end banking as we know it." A proponent of stricter bank regulations, Omarova has proposed a banking system that relies on individuals, rather than banks, to hold bank accounts with the Federal Reserve. She said that a radical change to the system would make it "more inclusive, efficient and stable."

Omarova teaches at Cornell School of Law and worked in the Bush administration's Treasury Department. She later obtained a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin and a law degree from Northwestern University.

In addition to tougher bank regulations, Omarova supports numerous progressive proposals, including the multitrillion-dollar Green New Deal. She has also called for the creation of a massive government bureaucracy that she calls the National Investment Authority. Modeled on the New Deal-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the National Investment Authority would coordinate the United States' longterm national economic strategy and infrastructure development.

The authority would have a congressionally approved governing board and regional offices across the country. In addition to developing roads, bridges, and other traditional infrastructure projects, the authority would fund affordable housing, public transit, and clean energy projects, as well as "climate change mitigation solutions," Omarova told Congress this year.

Omarova's policies have won her accolades from prominent progressive lawmakers and special interest groups. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Omarova's nomination was "tremendous news." The Sierra Club said Omarova would help the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fight against "climate chaos" and set up "guardrails against Wall Street's risky fossil fuel investments."

Saule Omarova was granted The Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship in 1989 while studying philosophy at the Moscow state university, then flew out to the United States as a Visiting MacArthur Scholar in 1995 at the Center for International Security and Arms Control of Stanford University.

She hardly stayed there, studying a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin and a JD shortly after. Who financed all her university studies? At the same time she becomes a law clerk and thereafter an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell where she stayed for about five years.

A tour of Germany and France follows as a visiting professor, and the restless Omarova, originally from Kazakhstan, so keeps moving until Cornell.

Tackling the hip field of fintech, she says it risks disrupting the New Deal settlement where the private market is in her view subject to public control.

The public in her view, through the state, should become a market actor in itself. She argues thus for a National Investment Authority (NIA).

“When you say direct public investment you should mean actual state owned enterprise, because if not, then it’s still public money given to private actors,” she says.

The government should become an “asset manager” she argues, and so through that have a direct say over market participating companies it controls in regards to whatever agenda the government may have.

“The key is that the NIA, as a standalone institution, cannot be situated inside the Treasury or the Fed. Its job has to be to get inside the financial markets and effectively outcompete Wall Street banks and asset managers that currently play an incredibly important role in managing and controlling the flow of capital.”

It sounds like she is saying that basically there should be communism. She says:

“Given the growing systemic significance of these market infrastructures as providers of the new era’s core public goods, and the inherent difficulty of anticipating the precise effects of the ongoing change in their operations, it may make sense to mandate a direct government stake—the ‘golden share’—in these entities.

This approach would turn these systemically important infrastructures into public-private enterprises, in which the government would have direct management rights.” She sounds like a commie to me.

The infrastructures she had in mind are “digital asset trading and payment systems, major MPL and other crowdfunding platforms, cloud service providers, crypto-currency exchanges and derivatives markets, and so forth.”

“While the specific design features of this public-private FMI model may vary depending on the platform type, its overall goal would be to create a powerful organizational node of public-interest-driven management inside the core infrastructure of digital finance,” she says.

By the public, she naturally means the state in practice, the government, and more specifically the unelected bureaucracy in the government which she argues should have a say not only over how Coinbase or Robinhood should be regulated, but over the management of Coinbase or Robinhood.

It is a bit terrifying that such arguments not only are seriously being made in USA, but are being considered for the powerful position at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Saule in effect wants to follow China’s model of ‘state capitalism, a one party state, where the government funds ‘private’ enterprises which it controls and so are under The Party’s direction.

This has the fundamental flaw of considering the public and the government, especially its bureaucracy, as one and as one interest.

As Stalin and Mao and maybe even Xi Jinping may show, the state or the government can often be one person, and that one person can never be the public.

It isn’t through the government that the public has a voice necessarily because the public has almost no voice over the bureaucracy, but through the market.

It is through free choice, as well as all those things she characterizes as bad like personalized financial packages, that the public gets to have a real voice.

The interest of the public therefore is served not by the state suffocating competition through getting its hands in all things.

That competition does far more than any bureaucrat or direct bureaucratic company management to keep even monopolies on their toes, with fintech being the prime example of a disruption that the public is loving and flooding to it because it satisfies better their needs and thus gives them a far better real voice and direct oversight through choice.

I find it is somewhat curious therefore that someone who is basically arguing for communism is at Cornell, but it may well explain why she has kept jumping throughout her career as teaching communism in corporate finance is a bit of a pantomime, with a paper on govcoins stating:

“It offers a blueprint for a comprehensive restructuring of the central bank balance sheet as the basis for redesigning the core architecture of modern finance. Focusing on the U.S. Federal Reserve System (the Fed), the Article outlines a series of structural reforms that would radically redefine the role of a central bank as the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a democratic economy—the People’s Ledger.”

Patriots she would completely destroy the United States as we know it in eradicating banks.

The primary strength of the United States is the limited role of the government and its bureaucracy so as to offer the maximum freedom with its involvement being as minimal as possible and only where necessary for basic public needs. We do not need more big government and bureaucracy.

That facilitates innovation, which then gives it real strength, with nothing new coming out of communist China or any other communist country, while the internet, iPhones, the blockchain, ai, and a countless list has come out of the free market.

A market where the state minds its business, and any involvement is through grants, not taking up private shares in trying to turn bureaucrats into entrepreneurs.

We need to do the exact opposite of what this communist is saying and lower the regulatory burden for financial activities or capital formation so that there are more new entrants competing to offer more and better choices.

Rather than having the state try to manage everything and continue its sedation of our economy, the home of the brave needs to take more risk, and needs to become more comfortable with failure, as risk is unavoidable, and the risk of state control is the inevitable state collapse.

Above all, we need more freedom. Both socially and in the market. Primarily freedom from the state.

That is becoming more urgent with this suggested nomination as America may well be at risk of a communist takeover. Something that freedom lovers need to fight at every corner and every way.

Saule Omarova at Moscow State U.

Joe Biden‘s pick for Comptroller of the Currency Saule Omarova was an ardent Young Communist who was ‘born in a yurt’ – a traditional tent in the Kazakhstan steppe – who fled the Soviet Union for America and allegedly left behind an unpaid debt to a friend at Moscow State University.

An exclusive new picture shows Omarova, 54, as a student at the prestigious Russian educational institution alongside a crowd of classmates and teachers in the Gorbachev era of 1988 after her childhood where she grew up as head of her local Komsomol.

At university, she wrote the thesis: Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital. She now appears to have wiped it from her resume and top Senate Republicans want her to hand it over for her confirmation hearings to head the regulatory agency overseeing the country’s largest banks.

Her past academic work advocating for moving Americans’ financial accounts from private banks to the Federal Reserve and for forcing banks to lose leverage on federal subsidies by becoming ‘non-depository lenders’ has drawn a fierce response from the GOP and the banking community.

American Banking Association CEO Rob Nichols told DailyMail.com: ‘ We have serious concerns about her ideas for fundamentally restructuring the nation’s banking system which remains the most diverse and competitive in the world. Her proposals to effectively nationalize America’s community banks, end regulatory tailoring based on risk and eliminate the dual banking system are particularly troubling.’

Now, DailyMail.com can reveal more about her childhood in the USSR that includes growing up on a street named after Vladimir Lenin, taking on a scholarship in his name and getting involved in an alleged spat with a roommate over $50.

Among her friends in the glasnost USSR was Olga Cassidy who claims this woman – who the president wants in charge of the dollar and then studying ‘Scientific Communism’, and writing a thesis on’ – still owes her an unpaid debt for a dorm scam.

The amount – around $50 – may not seem excessive by today’s standards, but in 1987, things were different.

Some 34 years on, it still grates with her former friend, as we found in an in-depth investigation into the past of Professor Sauna Omarova in the former Soviet Union.

Olga – now in New Zealand – lived with her parents in a secret scientific town near Moscow, and did not need to take up her place in the student dorm accommodation.

Though a devout communist at the time, Saule worked out that if Olga claimed her place in the two-room dorm, but did not use it, then Saule would have a prestigious room all to herself.

More than a generation on, Olga spoke to DailyMail.com with undisguised fury about their student conflict.

‘With bitter tears and pleas, Saule exhorted me to get us a place in a two-bed student dorm, which I absolutely did not need, but was entitled to,’ she explained.

‘I could not resist Saule, who vowed to pay me for the ‘dead soul’ in the dorm so she could live in peace without unnecessary neighbors’.

Olga Cassidy claims Omarova still owes her $50 after she gave up her dorm at Moscow State University. Omarova’s mother is pictured on the right

So Olga paid from her pittance of a scholarship for Saule’s room, she said, while her erstwhile friend ‘lived in conditions of increased comfort’.

The cost amounted to around $50 for the academic year at the then official exchange rate to the basketcase Soviet rouble.

But the notional value hid the true cost to Olga of an arrangement which she said cost her perhaps 15 per cent of her meagre student stipend.

She confronted Omarova about the money, expecting to be reimbursed, she told us.

‘I finally managed to ask Saule, who had been avoiding me, about the monetary debt accumulated over the whole school year,’ said Olga with ill-concealed angst over an event long ago.

‘She suffered an amnesia attack and fled.’

With a large dollop of sarcasm, Olga said: ‘So I have no doubt that Saule will succeed in her new position in America.

‘For me back then, a young girl from a family of intellectuals, it was a downright shock how she behaved.

‘And since then I had no further communication with Saule.’

Above, a copy of the register from Omarova’s school says she was a member of the Komsomol, or ‘Young Communists’ in the USSR

This is just one of many revelations about Omarova – today a Cornell Law School professor – who has turned into a highly controversial Biden nominee for the critical economic role.

Senator Toomey said of Biden’s nominee: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more radical choice for any regulatory spot in our federal government.’

‘She clearly has an aversion to anything like free market capitalism.’

Our investigation shows there is little doubt that back in the USSR, Saule was the archetypal Lenin loyalist destined to go far had the Communist world not crumbled, as it happened, while she was on a semester-long exchange in Wisconsin.

She did not return to the Soviet Union yet has professed guilt at not doing so, instead forging her way in the capitalist US.

Yet in her native Kazakhstan – now independent – and in Russia, where she completed her undergraduate degree – she has left a trail that will raise some eyebrows in Washington DC.

A friend, for example, recalled her as a student assiduously working in a student labor gang digging potatoes near Moscow, a ritual expected of all Party adherents.

Her first academic success came at School Number 21 in Uralsk, now known as Oral, close to the Russian border in Kazakhstan.

She grew up in cramped communal conditions on Prospekt Lenina – named after Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin – and while little is known of her father Tarif, her mother Saida Alibayeva was a tuberculosis doctor, born in 1940 into a family of medics.

‘It was her mother who raised her,’ said a friend.

The account about this TB doctor giving birth to her daughter Saule in a Kazakh tent comes from Professor Adam Levitin, of Georgetown University Law Center.

‘Saule…has an inspiring personal story,’ he Tweeted.

Above the backyard of karaoke bar at the address where Saule Omarova lived as a child, 190 Prospekt Lenina, Uralsk ( now Oral), Kazakhstan, in the former USSR.

The school register in Uralsk indicates that Saule Omarova at the age of 17 was a proud member of the Komsomol – the Young Communists, without mentioning if she was born in a yurt, a story some here say is apocryphal.

Yet Saule was the school’s Komsomol leader, the most diehard of her generation.

The school at the time was packed with the children of favoured Party members.

A family friend from the time, Erken Bulegenov, 52, who attended the same school, said Omarova was such an ardent Communist that she led her academy’s Komsomol, the ruling party’s youth movement.

‘She never dated anyone at school or university,’ he recalled. ‘She was too busy with her studies.’

Saule prospered even though ‘her mom had to re-sew her clothes so she looked better’, said another contemporary.

The same year – 1984 – she graduated from school with the highest marks, and with a rare gold medal, the ultimate badge of honour for Soviet students, clearly picked out for a fast-tracked future in the USSR.

Above, the karaoke bar at the address where Saule Omarova lived as a child, 190 Prospekt Lenina, Uralsk (now Oral), Kazakhstan, in the former USSR

Here she is remembered as exceptionally talented and also ambitious as she studied scientific communism in the philosophy faculty.

A friend in her dorm block was Olga Lakhina, 54, a Moscow-based art exhibitions curator, who confirmed Omarova studied scientific communism – described as the science regarding the working-class struggle and the socialist revolution.

Being unquestioning communists, they went harvesting potatoes together in labor gangs sent to the fields in autumn, along with soldiers and workers.

‘Those were very cheerful times,’ remembered Lakhina.

‘When we started our first year at university, aerobics had just arrived in the USSR..

‘We were among the first in Moscow to have aerobics in PE classes… Saule and I were lucky.

‘We passed the selection process, and we were in the first-ever aerobics group at Moscow State University.

‘Our first performance was with hull hoops. We wore beautiful green leotards that we dyed ourselves because only white leotards were sold back then.

‘Saule was petite, slim, just like she is now. She has been into dancing all her life. Saule has always been great at studies, at sports. She is persistent, focused, hardworking.’

But another ex-classmate Dr Igor Lyagushkin, 54, now a philosophy lecturer at another university, has fond memories of Omarova.

‘Saule was always friendly, even-tempered, and well-integrated in the student group,’ he said.

‘But she could not have been just a regular pupil to enter the philosophy department.

‘In 1983 Yury Andropov (ex-KGB chief who went on to lead the Soviet Union) introduced a special admission procedure for those entering certain programs, including philosophy, political communism, and some others.

Above, school Number 21 in Uralsk (now Oral), Kazakhstan, where Omarova started her education and her route to Cornell University and potentially a role in the Biden administration.

To qualify, the applicant [among other things] needed to be recommended by a local regional committee of the Communist Party.

‘They needed to be known for their achievements, so she could not be a regular pupil.’

He recalled: ‘She had an unsullied reputation, was always friendly, and had a good sense of humour.

‘She was into aerobics and dancing.

‘University teachers liked her, she was a good student.’

He said it was around ten years since he saw her at an annual graduates party in Moscow.

‘I am sincerely happy for her – she is a decent person, and she had the courage to face new challenges.

‘I have only good memories about her, she is a supportive, kind-hearted, and a sincere person.

Another Moscow classmate Elena Pestresova, now living in Crimea, said: ‘I remember her being incredibly determined, sincere, and kind-hearted.

‘You know, there are people who know from the start what they want from life, what quality of life [they want], she’s one of them.

‘It’s very sad that this is not happening in our country.’

Saule herself explained once how she went to the US to study for a month, missing a revolution her university classes had never foreseen – the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The expert in Marxist-Leninism stayed in America.

‘There was at the very end of the Gorbachev era an exchange program between Moscow State and University of Wisconsin Madison,’ she said.

‘I got lucky against all odds, and I came for that one semester in 1991 to Madison, Wisconsin. Perhaps the KGB or communists sent her on an infiltration mission to the U.S.

‘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.’

She married Timur Han Uckun, 57, an IT security and risk assurance executive who works at Cornell University. They have a son.

Her mother went to live with her in the States after retiring as a doctor in Kazakhstan, say former colleagues.

Confused and dazed Biden seems to think better he needs a communist as comptroller.

To that I can only say: God Save USA and GO BRANDON!

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Watchman Report Oct. 26, 2021 "Commie Nominee Would Permanently Change U.S. Banking System"

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