What can we say about Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s nominee to the important Treasury position of head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency?
I think of her as the Rosa Klebb of the Biden “let’s destroy America” pool of apparatchiks.
In the movie version, she had moved on from a high-ranking position in Soviet counterintelligence to working as “No. 3” for Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the pussy cat-petting evil mastermind played with consummate creepiness by Donald Pleasence.
Has anyone taken the trouble to investigate Omarova’s footwear? I merely ask.
She came to the United States in 1991 and took a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.
She has declined to share her undergraduate thesis on “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in ‘The Capital’” with U.S. senators charged with assessing her fitness for the Treasury position.
Doubtless, that was prudent.
After all, a paper on that subject might well dilate on the revolutionary idea that “property is theft” (as Proudhon insisted) or the anti-bourgeois potential of redistribution of wealth.
Powerline’s Scott Johnson got it exactly right.
Imagine picking a communist-trained economist who wants to bankrupt the engine of the American economy to battle a phantom enemy, “climate change.”
But this is exactly what Biden did. Which leads Johnson to his sad conclusion. The Ludlum novel would be de trop because the “Omarova omen has already materialized in the politics and public policy that have kicked off the dire economic trends with which we contend.”
Asked about a paper in which she outlined a plan for the government to take ownership stakes in big financial firms, she said “I’m with Margaret Thatcher on this one.”
Oh, really?
Freeman observes that “this would have been Washington’s most deceptive comment of the day if House members had not been debating the reconciliation bill.”
But what was behind Omarova’s claiming the mantle of the avidly pro-privatizing Margaret Thatcher?
Thereby hangs a tale.
As Freeman notes, the Thatcher government, in order to mobilize the political wherewithal to privatize inefficient and corrupt state-run industries, had to be wary of foreign actors gaining control of key industries.
She had to retain, temporarily, a government stake in those industries as it shepherded them to private ownership.
“Thatcher’s team,” Freeman explains, “was agreeing to let the government keep a piece of an asset as the price for getting it out of total state control and into productive private hands.”
Omarova, on the contrary, is advocating something close to the opposite.
She wants the government to insinuate itself and play a bigger role in industries that are now in private hands.
Thatcher was willing to prolong a measure of governmental control as the price for abolishing that corrupt and counterproductive political-economic model.
Omarova wants to subject companies that are now in private hands to precisely the sorts of central state control that Thatcher was determined to abolish.
“I’m with Thatcher,” meaning, I am working to destroy everything she stood for.
It’s all in the dialectic, you see. Nice work if you can get it.
So maybe, Scott Johnson speculates, “it’s not too late for Omarova to inspire a good Ludlum-style novel after all.”
How so? The key, he points out, is in the subhead to Freeman’s article: “Some aspiring apparatchiks will say anything to seize power.”
I hope I am right in predicting that Omarova will fail to win confirmation.
But a few more nominees like her and the Biden administration may well be in negative numbers.
