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Biden triples down on ‘wokeism’ with controversial Federal Reserve nominees

January 14, 2022 | | Print Article

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President Joe Biden continues to nominate the “wokest” of the “woke” — from those obsessed with climate change to those obsessed with race —  to serve in his administration.

On Friday, the president is slated to nominate Sarah Bloom Raskin to serve as the Federal Reserve’s top banking regulator, and Lisa Cook and Philip Jefferson to serve on the Federal Reserve Board.

Sarah Bloom Raskin

Raskin is a former Obama-era official who served first on the Federal Reserve Board between 2010 and 2014 and then as Deputy Treasury Secretary between 2014 and 2017.

Besides being an Obama administration alumni, she’s also reportedly a climate zealot who has a history of trying to stick it to fossil fuel companies.

“Sarah Bloom Raskin has specifically called for the Fed to pressure banks to choke off credit to traditional energy companies and to exclude those employers from any Fed emergency lending facilities,” Sen. Pat Toomey said in a statement to Bloomberg News Thursday.

“I have serious concerns that, if nominated, she would abuse the Fed’s narrow statutory mandates on monetary policy to have the central bank actively engaged in capital allocation. Such actions not only threaten both the Fed’s independence and effectiveness, but would also weaken economic growth.”

Indeed, during the early days of the pandemic, she penned a column for one of America’s most left-wing papers, The New York Times, bashing the Trump administration for offering pandemic relief even to oil-and-gas companies.

Had she been in charge at the time, these companies may not have received relief.

Lisa Cook

Cook is another Obama administration alumni who served on the Council of Economic Advisers from 2011 to 2012. Unlike Raskin, she appears to have one positive going for her.

The Wall Street Journal notes that she “wrote her doctoral dissertation on the underdevelopment of Russia’s banking system after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a feature she attributed to weak property rights.”

In other words, she believes in property rights. However, she’s still a left-winger, though the policies she supports aren’t necessarily radical — they’re just left-wing.

“Asked on a Nov. 8 panel to identify three policies that would be most effective in addressing discrimination and lack of opportunity, Ms. Cook cited child-care and elder-care support, paid family leave and infrastructure,” according to the Journal.

“All are included in either the bipartisan infrastructure package that was enacted this year or in the social-spending and climate legislation that passed the House, but has stalled in the Senate.”

Her only possible major shortcoming might be a focus on immutable characteristics.

“[T]he economist has embraced the issue of race to pursue research at the intersection of the African-American lived experience and macroeconomics,” the International Monetary Fund notes.

This has led to her, as an example, studying how lynchings slowed economic development by discouraging black inventors from coming forward.

None of this is bad by itself, though it does pose a possible risk of her behaving in “woke” ways while on the Federal Reserve Board.

Philip Jefferson

Jefferson, previously a research economist at the Federal Reserve, is a staunch believer in so-called “diversity.”

“In a 2018 interview with a publication of the Minneapolis Fed, Mr. Jefferson discussed the importance of including more diverse voices in policy-setting roles,” according to the Journal.

“When you are a person who represents diversity, and you are engaged in the conversation, it changes the nature of the conversation. We need to be sitting around the table. I think it is crucially important for public policy that we hear voices that represent diversity,” he reportedly said at the time.

The problem with his mindset is that it places “diverse” life experiences over shared common knowledge. An example of the consequences of this mindset is Supreme Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the “wise Latina” whose rulings seemed drenched in emotions and misinformation versus facts and constitutional law.

Like Cook, Jefferson also seems focused on race.

“In graduate school at the University of Virginia, I was the only African American in the program the entire time there. It has been a long, lonely road professionally,” he reportedly said in a 2018 interview.

Moreover, according to the Journal, his research “has focused on labor markets and poverty, including a 2008 paper that examines economic volatility faced by African-American families and female-headed households and its relationship to declining volatility in economic output.”

Coupled with his concern about “diversity,” he could wind up being a major “woke” threat.

Vivek Saxena
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