IT’S RED ALERT!

WH pick’s pro-Soviet, ‘leftist ideas’

President Biden’s pick for comptroller of the currency is a Soviet-born professor

who has praised the USSR’s lack of a gender pay gap and advocated for ending banking “as we know it” by moving Americans’ finances from private banks to the Federal Reserve.

Saule Omarova, a Cornell University law professor, was nominated by Biden on Sept. 23 to oversee the nation’s biggest banks and federal savings associations. The White House called her “one of the country’s leading academic experts on issues related to regulation of systemic risk and structural trends in financial markets.”

If approved, Omarova (inset) would be the first woman and first nonwhite person to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is within the Treasury Department.

Republicans have objected to her nomination, questioning her “extreme” ideas. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has also reportedly raised concerns.

In an October 2020 paper titled “The People’s Ledger,” Omarova argued for making private banks “nondepository lenders.”

“Banks, in other words, will not be ‘special’ any more,” she wrote, advocating for separating their lending function from their monetary function.

“Once banks lose their ‘special’ status and entitybased access to the public subsidy, they will inevitably lose their appeal as potential acquisition targets for other financial institutions.”

In a 2019 documentary, “A--holes: A Theory,” she called Wall Street a “quintessential a- -hole industry,” the Daily Mail reported.

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, has criticized Omarova as a nominee, quoting her 2020 paper’s call for “radically reshaping the basic architecture and dynamics of modern finance” and “ending banking as we know it.”

“In light of these, and other extreme leftist ideas, I have serious reservations about her nomination,” he said in a statement.

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee, accused Biden of “placating his radical base” with the nomination.

“I am concerned professor Omarova will prioritize a progressive social agenda over the core mission of the OCC,” he said.

In 2019, Omarova faced a backlash after tweeting, “Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there.”

Omarova was born in Kazakhstan in the former Soviet Union. She moved to the US in 1991 and got a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin.

Her nomination has been hailed by Democrats.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) called her “an excellent choice to oversee and regulate the activities of our nation’s largest banks.”

And Senate Banking Committee Chair Sherrod Brown (Ohio) praised Omarova’s experience as a “policymaker in the private sector and in academia.”