As we've reported, Soule Omarova, Biden's withdrawn nominee for comptroller of the currency, had to withdraw because of her wild statements about how "we want" oil and coal companies "to go bankrupt" for climate change, and she tweeted in 2019 "Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’"
The Daily Mail added she appeared in a 2019 documentary film called A**holes: A Theory, where she called Wall Street’s culture a “quintessential a–hole industry.”
But some media outlets pretended Omarova was somehow smeared as a radical, especially National Public Radio, home of leftist radicals. Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep supportively interviewed Omarova on December 15, and ignored any and all evidence of her extreme record. There were only quotes of Republicans calling her a radical, and then Inskeep pretending this was all about her being born in Kazakhstan in the old Soviet Union. Oh, and racism!
STEVE INSKEEP: She publicly suggested soon afterward that the criticism played on her race. She identifies as Asian. Our conversation with Saule Omarova is her first interview since her confirmation died. What does she make of her experience? And what were the ideas that Republicans and some Democrats found so radical? We started with that fact that attracted criticism - her birthplace.
Inskeep ignored everything she wrote and said, just reciting a resume: "She worked on Wall Street and in the administration of President George W. Bush. She accepted President Biden's offer to serve as a bank regulator, though she says she knew she would struggle to win Senate confirmation because she favored tighter regulation," like curtailing banks investing.
STEVE INSKEEP: Isn't that speculative trading, as you phrase it, the way that financial institutions make insane amounts of money?
SAULE OMAROVA: That's exactly what it is, and that's why I expected them to be against my nomination.
It would seem like editorializing if we said Steve Inskeep makes "insane amounts of money" as a taxpayer-funded radio host ($453,000 a year). He should be best known for adoring interviews with President Obama.
But Inskeep wasn't done sucking up to Omarova. He asked how she prepared for her nomination: "Do you mean when you gamed through all the possible questions you might be asked, it didn't occur to you that someone would say, are you a communist?"
Then he suggested her radical ideas might be popular: "I'm wondering if you think that if you talked about your ideas about banks, well, they might actually be popular with people. I mean, if your proposition is that banks are not serving ordinary people, it would be easy to get a lot of Americans to line up behind that idea. Do you think they were looking for something that was less popular to say about you?"
Inskeep ended with a cynical take: "Saule Omarova, who says she came to America in part to better understand democracy. She's now back at Cornell, having learned another lesson in how it works."
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Transcript below:
NPR Morning Edition
December 15, 2021
STEVE INSKEEP: We had a video call this week with a woman in the Finger Lakes region of New York where winter is closing in.
SAULE OMAROVA: Yes, I'm in Ithaca.
INSKEEP: It appears to be a beautiful day there, but is it really?
OMAROVA: Everything is relative, Steve. Today is a beautiful day compared to every other day most of the time.
INSKEEP: Saule Omarova has returned to teaching at Cornell University. She will not be moving to a new job in Washington, D.C. President Biden nominated her as Comptroller of the Currency, a top banking regulator, but she withdrew last week after members of the U.S. Senate attacked her writings and beliefs.
PAT TOOMEY: I don't think I've ever seen a more radical choice for any regulatory spot.
INSKEEP: That's Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey, and this is Louisiana's John Kennedy, who suggested Omarova was a communist since she came from the former Soviet Union.
JOHN KENNEDY: I don't mean any disrespect. I don't know whether to call you professor or comrade.
OMAROVA: Senator, I'm not a communist. I could not choose where I was born.
INSKEEP: She publicly suggested soon afterward that the criticism played on her race. She identifies as Asian. Our conversation with Saule Omarova is her first interview since her confirmation died. What does she make of her experience? And what were the ideas that Republicans and some Democrats found so radical? We started with that fact that attracted criticism - her birthplace.
OMAROVA: So I was born in Kazakhstan, in a small town in western Kazakhstan, and I grew up there.
INSKEEP: It was then a remote part of the Soviet empire. She went to college in Moscow but soon moved to America. She became a U.S. citizen as she continued her study of politics and democracy.
OMAROVA: When I came to the United States, I was just like a sponge trying to soak up everything that I could.
INSKEEP: The student became a professor. She worked on Wall Street and in the administration of President George W. Bush. She accepted President Biden's offer to serve as a bank regulator, though she says she knew she would struggle to win Senate confirmation because she favored tighter regulation.
OMAROVA: Ultimately, my positions are quite simple. I think that our financial system needs to do better in serving the interests of the regular Americans and American businesses and the American economy, the real economy. It needs to channel capital, channel credit into the real, productive enterprise and into the hands of working Americans. And I believe that in the last several decades, the financial industry, the banking industry at the core of that financial sector have become diversified financial conglomerates whose main profits and main business comes from trading in complex financial instruments rather than from lending to the communities and the families that need credit the most.
INSKEEP: Isn't that speculative trading, as you phrase it, the way that financial institutions make insane amounts of money?
OMAROVA: That's exactly what it is, and that's why I expected them to be against my nomination.
INSKEEP: If confirmed, she expected to push banks to serve communities more by pushing them away from riskier investments.
OMAROVA: And from that perspective, who directs the policies of the federal bank regulators, particularly the OCC, would have had and does have tremendous impact on how banks perceive their ability to take risks and for what purpose.
INSKEEP: So if the financial services industry wanted to continue doing business exactly as they have been, they had reason to be worried about you.
OMAROVA: They absolutely do have the reason to be worried. I think the job of the regulator is generally to constantly keep asking private banks and other financial institutions with respect to the risks that they generate. We, as a public, are subsidizing banks. We are subsidizing in a very important sense their ability to make private profits. So we have the right to press them all the time with respect to the decisions they make.
INSKEEP: Now, you said that you anticipated some difficulty with your nomination for the reasons that we've just discussed. How did you prepare to get through this confirmation?
OMAROVA: So I expected that the debate and the fight over my nomination would be centered around the substance of my views, specifically on the ability of the large banks to engage in speculative trading, as opposed to more traditional forms of relationship-based lending. And I was preparing with respect to kind of how to answer those types of substantive questions. Unfortunately, the substantive questions never really came up. Instead, the substance of my scholarship has been completely distorted. And it's been so politicized in such a simplified way that all my preparation for a kind of debating the complex technical questions of bank regulation turned out not to be necessary.
INSKEEP: Do you mean when you gamed through all the possible questions you might be asked, it didn't occur to you that someone would say, are you a communist?
OMAROVA: Well, imagine that. That I genuinely did not expect because it's been 30 years since the Soviet Union fell apart. That country is gone. That regime is dead. That system was dying even when I was there, and we all knew that. So to me, it was a shock that the appeal to that sort of fear of communism, particularly in its Soviet incarnation, could still have that much power in today's day and age, in today's America.
INSKEEP: I'm wondering if you think that if you talked about your ideas about banks, well, they might actually be popular with people. I mean, if your proposition is that banks are not serving ordinary people, it would be easy to get a lot of Americans to line up behind that idea. Do you think they were looking for something that was less popular to say about you?
OMAROVA: I think that's exactly what they did because look, you know, who in their right mind here in today's America would support another big bank bailout?
INSKEEP: Senators questioned her academic writings. She had written, for example, of pushing the Federal Reserve into the retail banking business, something she would have no power to do as a regulator.
OMAROVA: It's kind of comical that the banking lobby made me some kind of a crazy radical who came up with such a radical idea. It's not that new.
INSKEEP: Some key Democrats also questioned her nomination. Omarova maintains they listen too much to the banking lobby, but the Democrats' opposition made her confirmation impossible. Her withdrawal became another divisive story about race and identity, though Saule Omarova says that was never really the issue.
OMAROVA: And in fact, I believe that the Wall Street lobby doesn't really care about my race or my sex or anything like that. They would have loved me just the way I am if only I stood up for their interests and if only I was the kind of comptroller nominee that they knew would do their bidding for them and treat them as, quote-unquote, "clients." But they chose to weaponize my identity because that was the easiest way politically to tank my nomination.
INSKEEP: Saule Omarova, who says she came to America in part to better understand democracy. She's now back at Cornell, having learned another lesson in how it works.
