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President Joe Biden’s choice for comptroller of the currency, Saule Omarova, wants to transform America’s free market economy into a Soviet-style system – the same kind of central planning that destroyed her native country, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
As an immigrant from the former Soviet Union and communism survivor, I know firsthand the damage central planning can do to an economy and to lives. United States senators must reject "Comrade" Omarova’s radical ideology which includes ideas like nationalizing banks, empowering federal government apparatchiks to set pay scales and prices, and enabling academics to oversee investments so they can finance social experiments. It all will doom America to the same destiny as the country I fled 30 years ago.
Omarova, a winner in her home country of the "Lenin" award, praised her native Soviet socialist system because of the lack of gender pay gap. She derided the free market economy for producing a Wall Street "a--hole culture" and expressed contempt for our "dysfunctional" financial system.
As someone who grew up standing in line for hours to shop in an over-crowded grocery store or a bare-shelved department store, let me tell you about Omarova’s "wondrous" socialist system. By the time you reached the counter to pay, all that was left to buy was rancid milk, or at the department store, wrong-size boots. You bought them anyway – the first to make a sour-tasting tvorog (cottage cheese), and the second to wear with several pairs of socks.
The socialist economy didn’t produce enough of anything and everything that was manufactured domestically was barely usable. Why? There was no incentive for anyone to work hard or innovate, because everyone was paid the same regardless of effort. Government bureaucrats, like Omarova, made it impossible for people to improve their lot and better themselves by controlling every aspect of their lives.
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We had a saying under communism: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." There can’t be a gender pay gap when there’s no pay. Whether a garbage collector or a doctor, the salary was never enough to support a family, spurring people to seek seedy alternatives like corruption and black market dealings. Meanwhile, the Communist Party ruling elites were the Soviet version of Omarova’s Wall Street "a--holes," except they didn’t produce any wealth.
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President Biden and his coterie of socialists like Omarova are hard at work transforming America into the type of "Workers’ and Peasants’ Paradise" many fled for freedom. For whatever reason, Omarova never shed the socialist mindset upon arriving in America, and she is a pawn in a familiar foreign scheme designed to undermine the United States. As a former DIA intelligence officer and specialist in Russian doctrine and strategy, I am very familiar with efforts to undermine America from within through ideological subversion.
Soviet defector and KGB-trained covert-influence expert Yuri Bezmenov warned Americans in the 1980s about a secret Soviet program. This "master plan" was designed to transform the United States, over 30-plus years, from a capitalist to a communist-socialist country through ideological subversion.
The four-stage program, which was implemented by the vast network of KGB agents highly trained in psychological warfare, aimed to change the mindset and behavior of young Americans by exposing them to Marxist-Leninist ideas such as equality of outcome, intolerance of dissent, and rejection of religion. Intelligence operatives infiltrated academia, media, government institutions, labor unions, and Hollywood to portray socialist ideas as desirable and humane, and capitalism as evil and unjust.
The Soviet Union lost the Cold War, but the effort to undermine America is still very hot.
Spies targeted left-leaning individuals, the so-called "useful idiots," and cultivated them as "agents of influence" who would educate the next generation of elites – sometimes unwittingly helping the Kremlin execute its plan. In turn, these elites were supposed to assume senior roles eventually within government, business, culture and other institutions—positions with the power to change or overturn the American system.
The Soviet Union lost the Cold War, but the effort to undermine America is still very hot.
A prominent Russian think tank, in its 2018 issue of an "International Threats" forecast, recommended to "disorganize" the "fundamentals of American strategy." The Russian "analysts" pointed out that under U.S. law, foreign governments can lobby the federal government through agents, and it is not considered interference in domestic politics. The use of emotionally charged language, biblical themes, and arguments related to the defense of human rights and individual freedoms was recommended to create narratives that would resonate with Washington, D.C., elites.
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Whether some Americans’ disturbing embrace of socialism is a result of a long-term foreign influence program or a natural outcome of a democratic society that places a premium on a free exchange of ideas is irrelevant. History has proven time and again which system produces prosperity – and which produces stagnation and tyranny.
Biden must stop acting like a useful idiot who seems to be letting agents of influence and radicals – whether home-grown like Bernie Sanders or foreign-born like Saule Omarova – destroy our country from within.
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