Saule Omarova, President Biden's nominee for comptroller of the currency, is the target of a ludicrous red-baiting campaign straight from the 1950s. rtraister reports
Photo: Victor Llorente When she was a child in western Kazakhstan, Saule Omarova fantasized about visiting America. Her wish was shaped in part by her father, who used to play old records for her. “There was one — Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, and they sang ‘Hello, Dolly!’” Omarova said recently by phone. “I loved it. That was the song that I associated with America. But at that time, dreaming about coming to America was basically like dreaming about going to the moon.
The banking lobby piled on. Rob Nichols of the American Bankers Association asserted that Omarova would “effectively nationalize America’s community banks,” while Brad Bolton, chair of the Independent Community Bankers of America, tweeted, “This nomination must be stopped!” Virtually all of the Too Big to Fail behemoths have federal charters that put them under the regulatory jurisdiction of the OCC, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup, and the agency has long been known for serving, rather than supervising, these ballooning financial entities.
“The administration settled on a smart person with a background in the banking industry and in government as well as path-breaking scholarship on financial regulation,” said Carter Dougherty, a spokesperson for Americans for Financial Reform, a nonpartisan nonprofit that pushed for Omarova. “In less polarized times, somebody appointed by a Democratic president who worked for a previous Republican administration and for a Wall Street firm would be the kind of candidate everyone can agree on.
Her grandmother, a young child at the time, had been hidden by neighbors and grew up in an orphanage, living under a changed name. Omarova said, “She told me from a young age that basically I could only rely on my own strength and on my own brain and that my one ticket into the future and to safety was education.”
Mark Beissinger, now a professor of politics at Princeton whose work has often focused on the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet states, was Omarova’s dissertation director at Wisconsin. “She really impressed us, taking a full load of graduate courses. She came first of all to study democratic political theory, so the idea that she’s a Leninist is absurd,” he said.
Mitigating that risk, Omarova said, is what guided her focus as an academic. “We need to protect ordinary Americans, families, businesses, communities, and the public as a whole from unwittingly becoming the last holder of all that risk,” she said. Omarova brings with her a reputation for frankness. Among the things she’s currently being derided for by bankers and their political defenders is her comment, in a Canadian documentary called Assholes: A Theory, that “the financial-services industry, in my view, and I don’t think I’m alone here, is the quintessential asshole industry.”
But expecting reasoned debate in this era of political profiteering is probably naïve. So here is Omarova, forced to respond to lug-nutty demands that she produce a term paper she wrote while an undergraduate under a Soviet regime, something that was never demanded of Trump FDIC chair Jelena McWilliams, who grew up in communist Yugoslavia but nonetheless earned lavish praise from Toomey himself.
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