by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch
Just for the record, I am a life-long, card carrying, practiced anti-Communist.
As a proud Cold Warrior, I grew up in the heat-seeking years of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Airlift, and the infiltration of world capitals by communist revolutionaries.
At my church, I was a member of a kid’s youth group called the Jet Cadets, which met on Sunday nights. Our theme song was “We are Jet Cadets for Jesus, we are pilots for our Lord, we will strafe and bomb . . . ” You get the gist: the enemy was godless Soviet Russia.
My entire education right through my Ph.D. in international political economy was a study of the evils of communism and the perils of following Marxist economics. In my career as an academic, diplomat, and strategist my Cold Warrior tendencies followed and I proudly stood on the front lines against the evil empire – the Soviet Union.
I still recall, as a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, taking on the brash, young, then-foreign minister (later prime minister) of Mozambique about the errors of his Marxist ways.
As a diplomat, I was at the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie days after it fell in November 1989. It is with pride that I counted myself as a member of the Reagan team that brought down the Soviet Union while I served the United States at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland from 1988 until 1992.
My time with the notoriously capitalist Salomon Brothers makes me all the more righteously indignant for assailing the moneylenders. Capitalism is, after all, a moral system that rewards effort and insight and allows people and nations to prosper. Communism is the precise opposite.
And today, in 2021, President Biden has nominated a sworn former communist, Saule Omarova, to be his comptroller of the currency.
What is going on? Has our country gone insane or has communism become our default progressive ideology?
Yes, Saule Omarova – a Lenin Prize-winning, admitted Communist, who studied at Moscow State University while it was still part of the Soviet Union – is the person the ObamaBiden regime wants to put in control of our currency and to oversee our banks.
It is not a matter of qualifications; this is a national security matter of highest concern. What’s next, a former head of the KGB to run the CIA, or one of Putin’s military cronies to move into the Pentagon?
Omarova has disqualified herself.
She has said she is against private banking and wants all financial power to flow through the Federal Reserve, centralizing our free enterprise system. She has openly called for bankrupting U.S. oil and gas companies in order to move to a so-called green economy. And she called investment bankers and hedge funds “A-holes” – the very people she would need to work with and oversee. Ironically, she is a regulatory professor at Cornell Law School, where her views are appreciated by the leftist faculty club.
The comptroller of currency charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks and federal savings associations as well as federal branches and agencies of foreign banks. The comptroller is an independent bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department. Its mission is to ensure that national banks and federal savings associations operate in a safe and sound manner, provide fair access to financial services, treat customers fairly, and comply with applicable laws and regulations. This important work has been done since 1836.
In a fiery speech in October, Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) told his colleagues, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more radical choice for any regulatory spot in our federal government.”
Omarova “clearly has an aversion to anything like free-market capitalism,” the senator added, citing examples of her academic work.
During his speech, Toomey said Omarova’s interest in these topics and others could have been shaped by her upbringing.
“You could ask yourself, ‘Where would a person even come up with these ideas?’” he said. “Well, maybe a contributing factor could be in if a person grew up in the former Soviet Union, and went to Moscow State University, and attended there on a Vladimir Lenin Academic Scholarship.”
Will the moderate, sensible Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee stop her in her tracks before her nomination goes to the split 50-50 full Senate for a vote? Senators such as Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) should know better. Let them know we are watching.
Omarova’s thesis, “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital,” remains an item of interest to some members on the Senate. It should be. She refused to hand over a copy in Russian or English to the committee, although senators requested it. Yet she cited the thesis as recently as 2017 and it appeared on her curriculum vitae in late 2019. When it was requested from her university in Moscow, officials there said all copies had disappeared. In fact, they had been destroyed.
As her idol, Vladimir Illyich Lenin himself once wrote, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
We can’t give Omarova any rope.
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Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, scholar-diplomat-strategist, is CEO of the thought leadership firm The Roosevelt Group. He is the author of 18 books, including The Plot to Destroy Trump and, with Felipe J. Cuello, Trump’s World: GEO DEUS. He appears regularly in the media, as a keynote speaker, and on television around the world.
