President Joe Biden’s nominee for a top banking regulatory position at one point said she wants to see the oil, gas, and coal industries go bankrupt, even if that meant the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Saule Omarova, who graduated college in the USSR and is now Biden’s nominee to be Comptroller of the Currency, admitted in March that the federal government would need to push fossil fuel companies towards bankruptcy to “tackle climate change,” according to a resurfaced video.
“A lot of the smaller players in that industry are going to, probably, go bankrupt in short order — at least, we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change,” she said.
“But that creates a lot of this sort of loss of jobs, a lot of displacement, and economic fallback … so [the National Capital Management Corporation] could actually become a kind of equity investor at that point,” she said, “taking over management of those companies and basically leading them through restructuring to a new technological basis and to a new technological business model, and in that sense, it’s the same type of activity but a different context.”
Joe Biden’s nominee for the Comptroller of the Currency Saule Omarova on oil, coal and gas industries: “We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change.”
Those industries are responsible for MILLIONS of Americans’ paychecks.pic.twitter.com/37DYwoFw8m
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) November 9, 2021
Omarova is facing considerable opposition from Republicans who have pointed out how radical her theoretical proposals are. Republicans cited a recent paper Omarova authored in which she advocates for “radically reshaping the basic architecture and dynamics of modern finance.”
She is also facing scrutiny for her time in the USSR, during which she wrote a thesis titled, “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital.”
Even Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., has said he has “real concerns” about her nomination.
