Komsomol Currency Controller Nominee Pivots from Marx to Maggie

Saule Omarova, Joe Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency in the Treasury Department, went to Moscow State University on a Lenin Scholarship and wrote a thesis on “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in ‘The Capital.’” Omarova has yet to provide the Senate banking committee with readable copies and the Biden nominee recently indulged a fascinating dodge.

Omarova wants the government to take ownership of financial firms and attributes this view to the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Trouble is, the Thatcher government wanted to privatize inefficient state industries and had to temporarily retain a stake in those industries as it shifted them to private ownership.

As Roger Kimball explains, Omarova “wants the government to insinuate itself and play a bigger role in industries that are now in private hands.” So the Biden nominee “is advocating something close to the opposite” of what the Thatcher government did, which was ultimately to abolish central state control of companies.

Senator John Kennedy was curious about Omarova’s membership in the Kommunisticheskiy Soyuz Molodezhi, the Communist Union of Youth also known as the Komsomol, a core Communist Party organization. Omarova claims that in the Soviet Union everybody was in the Komsomol, which is not true. Joining was a matter of choice and membership was the key to advancement in the USSR, and Omarova duly gained a Lenin scholarship.

Omarova is on record that the “small players” in the American oil, gas, and coal industries “are going to probably go bankrupt in short order,” and in her opinion bankruptcy for these industries was not a bad thing. As the White House nominee added, “at least we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change, right?”

It has also emerged that, back in 1995, the Soviet transplant was arrested for stealing four pairs of shoes, two bottles of cologne, two belts, and socks from a T.J. Maxx store in Madison, Wisconsin. Omarova, then 28, concealed the stolen items by placing them in a large purse, covered by other clothing items.

Despite the arrest, Omarova managed to become a lawyer, a law professor, and gain a job in the Treasure Department under the George W. Bush administration. Of all the lawyers in all the law schools in all the states, one wonders why this former Komsomol member and Lenin scholar got the nod.

Saule Omarova’s financial ideas are a belch from the Soviet Union, one of the greatest economic failures of all time, yet the Biden White House sticks by the deceptive nominee. As they struggle with inflation and soaring energy costs, embattled Americans should keep a close watch on this nomination.