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Five Democrats plan to block the confirmation of Saule Omarova, President Bidens nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, who is widely seen as a tough-on-banks pick at an agency that has long been captured by Wall Street.

Three of the DemocratsSens. Jon Tester (D-MT), Mark Warner (D-VA), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ)voted for a 2018 bank deregulation bill that Omarova criticized at the time. By opposing Bidens pick to regulate major banks, they are joining hands with the bank lobby, which has led an unusually intense opposition campaign against the Cornell law professor. Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and John Hickenlooper (D-CO) have also indicated they would vote against Omarova.

Following the news, which was reported the day before Thanksgiving by Axios, several progressives proposed a solution: The White House could name Omarova first deputy comptroller, a position that does not require confirmation.

Omarova could replace Acting Comptroller Michael Hsu, effectively putting her in charge of the agency, since Biden would not need to nominate a Senate-confirmed comptroller to the top job, said Yevgeny Shrago, a policy analyst with the advocacy group Public Citizen.

The move has recent precedent. Two comptrollers under President Trumps, Keith Noreika and Brian Brooks, were never confirmed, but led the agency as acting comptrollers. Hsu has served as Acting Comptroller for more than six months.

Biden should do the same with Omarova, Shrago said. She could be selected as deputy comptroller, making her acting director with all the powers of a full chair.

Noreika and Brooks were very active, despite their nominal status as temps. Noreika weakened the Community Reinvestment Act, reduced penalties on banks for violating fair lending laws and undermined the Consumer Financial Protection Bureaus efforts to reform payday lending. Famously fintech-friendly Brooks encouraged cryptocurrency companies to apply for national banking charters and cleared the way for banks to provide services to issuers of stablecoins.

Omarova could run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) indefinitely as acting comptroller, according to Jeff Hauser of The Center for Economic and Policy Research. While the Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 limits how long some acting officials can remain in a position, it does not apply here, Hauser said. Instead, the National Bank Act gives the Treasury Secretary full authority to designate a first deputy without a fixed limit. John Walsh was acting Comptroller of the Currency from 2010 until 2012longer than the 210 day maximum in the Vacancies Actproviding further recent precedent for the move.

Even if the White House did subsequently nominate and confirm a comptroller, Omarova could still wield considerable power as the OCCs second-in-command. It wouldnt be the first time the White House found a workaround after a favored pick proved to be a lightning rod in confirmation.

Neera Tanden withdrew from consideration following searing confirmation hearings after she was tapped for budget director. But Tanden, who is the extremely online former president of a liberal think tank, may now have more influence as a senior advisor to the White House, where she has been assigned the gnarly job of generating support for Build Back Better agenda.

Other examples abound. In 2015, after Elizabeth Warren successfully resisted the nomination of investment banker Antonio Weiss for a top job at the Treasury, Barack Obama gave Weiss a non-confirmable position as a senior counselor at Treasury, from which he was given wide latitude to design Puerto Ricos punitive debt restructuring.

Hsu, the Acting Comptroller since May 10, came to the OCC from the Federal Reserve, which has become a top supplier of regulators to the Biden administration. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other top Treasury officials come from the central bank, which some progressives say is more conservative and cosier with Wall Street than Democrat-led regulatory agencies.

I am very worried about having Fed group-think among the banking regulators, Todd Phillips, bank regulation director at the Center for American Progress, tweeted on Wednesday.

Nothing is stopping them from designating Omarova as Acting Comptroller, he added.

The news that Omarova is unlikely to overcome opposition in the Senate comes days after Biden reappointed Jerome Powell, a Trump-appointed Republican, to serve as chair of the Federal Reserve, over the objections of progressives.

Supporters of Omarova questioned why the White House did not strike a deal with the senators who opposed her pick. Tester, who was a prominent backer of Powell, was also among Omarovas loudest critics.

Banking committee chairman Sherrod Brown (D-OH) fought for Omarova, but is simultaneously engaged in a fight to put Lisa Cook on the Feds Board of Governors and is negotiating for additional housing funding in Build Back Better, two goals which may have detracted from pushing through Omarova.

Culture wars over the candidates personal background may also deserve blame.

OMAROVAS CONFIRMATION SANK into a brawling match over her identity, and a meta-argument over whether her identity was relevant to the debate.

A newsletter by the Bank Policy Institutes chief executive called attention to Omarova's birth in Kazakhstan and to her college scholarship, which was called the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. At the hearing, Republicans debated the appropriateness of referring to her personal background. I don't know whether to call you professor or comrade, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said.

Democrats happily accepted those terms of the debate, responding indignantly to Republican red-baiting and emphasizing, by way of contrast, Omarovas historic status as a female immigrant.

In his opening comments and in a key press release issued on the morning of the Senate hearing, Brown led with the historic nature of Omarovas candidacy. Professor Omarova will be the first woman, first person of color, and first immigrant to serve as the Comptroller of the Currency, Brown said before mentioning any substantive reason she had been picked for the job.

An eleventh-hour press release by Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) also blessed her tripartite minority status (woman, immigrant, and person of color, which is how liberal Americans describe Omarovas roots in Kazakhstan). In response to Axios reporting that her nomination was in trouble, a White House official told the outlet that it continues to strongly support her historic nomination. Others drew parallels between Omarovas grilling and the fact that Lael Brainard was not awarded the top job after being considered for Fed Chair. (She was nominated instead for the vice chair position.)

The amount of sexist double standards in these nomination efforts this year has been pretty staggering, Todd Tucker, a political scientist at the Roosevelt Institute, remarked following Omarovas hearing.

Now that the identity-centered campaign for Omarova has failed, it may be worth looking back on its limitations.

If you speak with law professors and financial regulators, you will hear that Omarova is indeed a historically unprecedented nominee for comptrollernot because of her physical appearance, but because she is an unusually sharp and plainspoken critic of the bank industry.

She led research into physical commodity trading by big banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, publishing detailed and original research into their buying up of assets like oil, gas and metals from distressed firms.

Omarovas pioneering work on reining in Wall Street abusesas well as her criticism of Tester and Warners deregulatory agendawas the real reason moderates scuttled her nomination. But that dispute was buried in a blitz of coverage focused on her alleged victimization.

If confirmed, Omarova would be the first woman, the first immigrant and the first person of color to lead the 158-year-old agency, the Washington Post dutifully recites in its story on the hearing, which focuses on Kennedys offensive comments. Only the last two paragraphs of the story mention that partisan sniping is likely less consequential to her fate than the decision-making by a pair of moderate Democrats who resent her past objections to their deregulation of banks.

By shrilly and insistently proclaiming over objections that Omarova is eminently qualified, Democrats and liberal media outlets ended up protesting too much.

In that ear-splitting environment, it was easy for bank-friendly moderates to step in, brows furrowed, and in one smooth motion condemn the ad hominems while raising reasonable-sounding concerns about her record. Given progressives screeching and largely irrelevant defense of Omarova, you could be forgiven for missing that those concerns are counterfeit.

Read the rest here:
Here's How Biden Could Override the Democrats Protecting Wall Street - The American Prospect

I am proud that no one at UWA was made redundant, she said.

We used the negotiated collective jobs framework approach, buying time until the end of 2021 so that a better plan could be considered, consulted and mapped for the future.

But she did not welcome the culture wars that broke out between universities and their leaders when they couldnt agree on a national framework to save jobs with the National Tertiary Education Union.

When you take a VC job, the most important thing to do above all else is to leave things better than you find them.

We ended up catastrophizing; universities deciding their sovereignty was being challenged, as if. And that certainly wasnt by the NTEU, she said.

She criticised the federal governments Groundhog Day of budgetary cuts and regulatory changes.

The reductionist view of our elected leaders is demoralising and at risk is our place in the world as funding is cut and an increasingly narrow of what a university education is takes a grip, Professor den Hollander said.

Universities can contribute much more to our nation than simply ensuring graduates get jobs within six months of their graduation.

She said the great moral challenges of climate change and the Indigenous voice to Parliament had not gone away, which remained significant for the nation and the higher education sector.

The surge of support for Black Lives Matter, the increased homeless numbers, the deaths in aged care and the trending violence against women are red signals; signals that were not getting it right and that there are divisions that will bring us down if we do not stand up.

That is the job of universities; to reflect the society, to educate, to speak and write the truth and also to provide some of the solutions.

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As a specialist in digital technologies, Professor den Hollander created profound changes to Deakins tuition and research more than a decade ago by founding it in a digital origin and creating better access for distance education, which helped it roar up the rankings.

She said delivering such change was very rough in the beginning and you cannot shy away from the discussion and the battles, labelling it the hardest job in the university sector.

When you take a VC job in fact, any leadership role the most important thing to do above all else is to leave things better than you find them that is the measure of our success, and it is our individual legacy.

She pointed to the importance of having a strong culture that backs strategy: UWA staff did that and my part in that I will cherish.

And in an almost call to arms, she told academics that the university sector was now in harms way.

Years of successive cuts and malignant disinterest are paying out, she said.

Inclusion and a right to education are now in question, as is our capacity to contribute ideas and to speak the truth.

Our social licence is being questioned and this will need our full attention.

Murdoch Universitys senate election, which closes on December 10, will be telling about what motivates those invested in higher education to vote.

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The alumni seat held by Abby Agrawal is being hotly contested by 10 others, including a retired fisheries science professor who opposed the dissolution of face-to-face lectures at Murdoch, and a corporate watchdog lawyer and the former guild president, who only recently left the university.

Law graduate and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission investigator, Alex Bellotti, has called for the end of bad press about the university and to hold the senior leadership to account.

Murdochs current approach to management and pedagogy is a disservice to everyone involved, causing Murdoch to achieve the unenviable rank as the states worst-performing public university for research, teaching and impact in the influential Times Higher Education World University Rankings, Mr Bellotti said.

We as alumni must take a stand and declare enough is enough, before Murdochs reputation (and by extension our degrees reputation) is further eroded by the discontinuance of leading areas of research and teaching, cost cuts masquerading as contemporary pedagogy or unproductive legal campaigns against whistleblowers.

Former CSIRO marine biologist and Murdoch Professor Emeritus, Neil Loneragan, agreed that since 2012 major and harmful restructures have impacted the reputation and the morale of staff.

In nominating for an alumni position on senate, I bring both senior inside experience and an outside perspective on which priorities are likely to ensure the greatest value and quality of Murdoch University for WAs public good and the alumni community, he said in his election profile.

If elected, I would uphold the values of fairness, respect, equity and transparency in planning and decision-making to ensure the reputation of the university and the value of the Murdoch degree.

But among the most sweeping changes is the universitys academic council, where academic representation is being increased from 19 seats to 25 out of 50, with an additional two seats for heads of school added and two more seats for students, while ex-officio seats are being rolled back from 21 to 17, in a reversal of the national trend.

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It sends the balance of power over academia back into the hands of its grass-roots representatives, which was conceded after a Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency review found Murdoch was at risk of failing to comply over its academic council adequately identifying, mitigating and maintaining oversight of material risks that impact teaching and learning quality at Murdoch.

Based on research, recommended practice and benchmarking, the composition of Murdoch Universitys academic council has been adjusted where elected members now make up the clear majority, a university spokesperson said.

The university has also added the direct election of academic members to many subordinate committees, thus broadening participation in academic governance across the university.

Dr Michael Tomlinson, who was a governance and compliance consultant at TEQSA until January 2020, said academic councils or boards used to be central to the decision-making structures of universities, where academic policies and strategies were debated and decisions made to accredit courses.

But their position has been gradually eroded and more decisions have been made by management over the years, he said.

This was a trend in all universities both here and overseas.

Dr Tomlinson said the changes at Murdoch should allow more collective oversight of managerial proposals.

This is more difficult to achieve if the academic council is dominated by ex-officio appointees from management, who will naturally tend to support a management agenda, he said.

In some respects these collegial bodies can be internal watchdogs ensuring that academic standards are maintained and corners are not cut in the pursuit of entrepreneurial goals.

Murdoch academic and whistleblower Gerd Schroeder-Turk said it was great to see the university bucking the trend over academic representation on boards, councils and committees as it was key to the greater public good of educating future generations.

The recent changes make me optimistic and will strengthen Murdoch University as it continues its proud and strong contribution and service to our society, he said.

I believe that empowered and happy staff are the best guarantee of great outcomes for a university. Increasing elected membership positions on committees does just that.

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Is Murdoch University changing its culture? An executive and governance shakeup is afoot - WAtoday

Crowds march through central London to demand a People's Vote on the Governments new Brexit deal on October 19, 2019 in London, England. As in politics, the temptation is to chase differentiation for your brand in exaggerating difference but the real task is to bring people together and cool the temperature.

Photo: Peter Summers/Getty Images

The business of business is business. Whether or not Milton Friedman, the icon of free-market economics, said these exact words, he would certainly agree with the sentiment. It has been 50 years since he published The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, an epochal essay the title of which makes its position pretty clear.

But a lot has changed since then. Its hard to imagine any business focusing only on the profit margins and staying out of wider societal debates. Some have embraced the shift. For example, the CEO of Axios, the U.S. news site, explains that the Axios way is to think of your brand as a political candidate, where you need to be hyper-aware of how youre seen by your core constituencies (employees and customers) and by the broader public.

Most businesses, however, are trying to navigate a path between the extremes, something that is becoming increasingly difficult in more fractious times.

The focus on so-called culture wars has exploded in the last few years in countries around the world. It used to be a largely American battle, but our major study on cultural divides across countries shows thats no longer the case. For example, our analysis of media content shows there were just 21 articles in mainstream newspapers talking about a culture war in the U.K. in 2015 but by 2020 there were 534.

Whether and how to engage in relentless cultural skirmishes presents real challenges for businesses. Taking sides can alienate a large chunk of your customers but not taking sides can be as big a risk when remaining neutral is increasingly viewed as complicit and when both action and inaction can go instantly viral.

The challenge is not a simple communications problem, but goes to the heart of business strategy. And as with any strategy exercise, we should start with a full understanding of the real position.

Our research suggests that there are three main lessons from a more careful reading of where the public is.

The first is that U.K. consumers are not nearly as exercised as the explosion in media focus on culture wars may lead you to believe. Sections of the media may have imported the U.S. language and concepts of culture wars wholesale but its much less clear whether the majority of the public is as interested.

When people are asked to describe, in their own words, what sorts of issues the term culture wars makes them think of, by far, the most common response is that it doesnt make them think of any.

And only tiny minorities associate culture wars with many of the stories that have been prominent in U.K. media coverage: Just over 1% link the term to the Black Lives Matter movement or debates over transgender rights, while under 1% make a connection to the removal of statues.

But the second point is that this doesnt mean these are unimportant debates or an easy task for businesses far from it. The language and images of the culture war in the U.K. suggest two monolithic blocs of Brits facing each other in a battle over whether being woke is a good or a bad thing. But thats very far from the reality its more complex than that. In fact, weve identified four main groups of people: the Progressives, the Moderates, the Traditionalists and the Disengaged.

The Progressives and Traditionalists make up a quarter of the population each, and the extent to which they have entirely different worldviews is clear from just a couple of defining features.

On one side, 97% of Progressives think equal rights for ethnic minorities have not gone far enough in the U.K., and just 15% agree that political correctness has gone too far. This is an almost perfect mirror of views among Traditionalists: Only 10% of this group believe ethnic minority rights have not gone far enough, while 97% think political correctness has gone too far.

But while the most extreme slithers of these two ends of the spectrum draw most attention on social media and phone-in shows, there are large chunks of the population in the Moderate and Disengaged groups with more nuanced perspectives or no views at all.

The challenge, then, is not picking between two sides, but deciding how to engage with a much more fragmented public position, where businesses need to understand who they are appealing to and help shape a more nuanced debate.

This leads to the third point: Simple demographic profiles are a poor predictor of which of the four culture war groups people fall into, including age or generation. A lot of the discussion around culture wars paints a picture of coming generations of social justice warriors facing off against older generations. But, while there are clearly differences in the age profile of our four segments, with the young being more likely to be progressive, its far from a simple split between young and old.

Ive recently finished writing a book on Generations, which analyses real data and changes over time, rather than the generational myths and stereotypes were more typically served.

Related Reading

This shows that younger generations are always pushing the boundaries of socially progressive views but that the gap between young and old today is no larger than it was in the past. The issues may have changed, from, for example, gender equality to gender identity, but the pattern is the same.

And on some measures, its older groups that are more likely to act against brands. For example, it is Gen Xers and baby boomers who are most likely to have boycotted a product in the last 12 months, while Gen Zers currently lag a long way behind. On this measure, cancel culture is more of a middle-age thing. This is not a passing fad or fashion among the young.

The advice for business from our research is the same as for politicians.

We dont yet have a full-blown culture war in the U.K., but were in a dangerous position, because we could create one if we keep emphasizing division.

Business has huge power and reach across national and cultural borders and, whether it likes it or not, it has a role to play in setting the tone and terms of debate. As in politics, the temptation is to chase differentiation for your brand in exaggerating difference. But the real task is to bring people together and cool the temperature.

No one wins in a culture war, not for long at least. The key social responsibility of business today is to help find common ground.

Link:
Has the UK Imported a US-Style Culture War? - BRINK

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The culture wars keep coming in Texas, and the latest one involves sex, textbooks, and the LGBTQ experience.

On Tuesday the State Board of Education will decide whether proposed textbooks that include content on gender identity and sexual orientation will make their way into the backpacks and laptops of children in Texas and across the country.

Both sides are gearing up, the latest in a series of polarizing fights in Texas schools, which recently included school mask mandates, teaching about systemic racism and library books with sexual content. Just last week, Governor Greg Abbott wanted charges brought against educators offering pornographic books to students after pointing out two LGBTQ memoirs as examples.

Now, after last years approval of new state standards for health classes, the board must approve new textbooksand thats where the new battlefront is.

Gay people can get married today; you cant fire LGBTQ people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, said Dan Quinn, a spokesman for Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning social justice group.

While much has changed in the last few decades, he fears, textbook adoptions in Texas have not.

Conservative activists and parents have issues with all five of the health textbooks the board must approve, but are particularly focused on two for middle schoolers, saying they go too far by normalizing sexual activity, questioning gender identity and going beyond the new state standards.

State law now requires parents to opt-in their children to lessons on sex education. Parents groups, like the Tarrant County Chapter of Moms for Liberty,a right-leaning organization focused on preserving parental rights, argue they want to be the ones instilling morals about sex to their children. They say the new textbooks would rob them of that right.

The attitude of devaluing family and oversexualizing education is detrimental to children, even adults, as well as harmful to society, said Mary Lowe, Moms for Liberty Tarrant County chair.

This base has been galvanized. Loud groups of parents are fuming about what their children are being taught about systemic racism and, using that frustration as a road map, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governors race by making critical race theory and schools key issues in his campaign.

Red meat topics like inappropriate sexual content in schools are ripe for conservative Texas Republican politics ahead of the crowded March 1 GOP primary elections, said Rice University political science professor Mark Jones.

In addition, political attacks like Abbotts fit the narrative that liberal school boards are dropping the ball when it comes to educating the country, he added. And those are the people Abbott wants to show up at the primary election, he said.

Its not what do average Texans think. Its what does the average Republican primary voter think, said Jones. When it comes to teaching about sex, he said, its that nothing should be taught or the bare minimum.

Up until last year, the states teaching standards for health and sex ed hadnt changed since 1997. After more than a year of public hearings and panels, the State Board of Education updated the standards in 2020, with the most significant change requiring seventh and eighth-grade students to learn about birth control, including condoms and other forms of contraception. The new standards go into effect in August 2022.

Progressive advocates urged board members to add topics like abortion, consent, gender identity and sexual orientation to the mandatory curriculum, but the heavily conservative 15-member board declined.

When it comes to high school, sex education is optional. Many schools dont offer sex ed at all. State law requires those that do teach sex ed present abstinence as the preferred choice to all sexual activity, encouraging abstinence until marriage.

A teacher can go further and offer an abstinence plus curriculum, but must devote more attention to abstinence from sexual activity than any other behavior.

On Tuesday, the elected board will take an initial vote to recommend textbooks school districts could buy that cover the new standards. A final vote is expected Friday.

How the final vote will play out is unclear. Several conservative members of the board who voted on the standards in 2020 have since left the policy-making body, replaced by Republicans who skew toward the center. Advocates for comprehensive sex education hope the shift will mean the two textbooks that teach beyond the standards will be approved as is.

Textbook publishers are not bound to those standards and will try to provide content they believe makes their books attractive to school districts in Texas and across the country. While waning, with more than five million students in Texas public schools, the lone star state makes up a giant share of the national textbook market and continues to have outsize influence on content.

But parents like Lowe and advocates like Mary Elizabeth Castle believe the books violate the standards.

The fact that so much public input and agreement among the board went into the standards, it would be transparent and the right thing to do to have the books aligned with the standards, said Castle, senior policy advisor for Texas Values, an organization dedicated to preserving conservative family values.

While parents can yank their students out of sex ed instruction, groups like Texas Values last year convinced the board to keep LGBTQ content out of the standards and is frustrated its still showing up in textbooks.

In the textbook by Human Kinetics, Castle said the text uses two students engaging in sexual activity as an example in a lesson, and in another case has students question whether their gender identity is similar to the one they are assigned at birth. The other textbook, by LessonBee, Inc., includes a text message conversation about ejaculation and arousal.

Advocates for stronger sex ed say the textbooks are needed because students want medically accurate and age-appropriate information about sex.

We want young people to be able to engage in sexual activity if and when they feel comfortable to do so, when they feel they have all the information they need to make that decision for themselves and for their future, said Gabrielle Doyle, state partnership coordinator for Sex Ed for Social Change, a group in favor of the textbooks.

What to teach students in school, particularly when it comes to sex, is a touchy subject in Texas. The state has some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation. A baby is born to a teen mother every 23 minutes in Texas, according to Jen Biundo, director of policy and data at the Texas Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. And Texas is the top state in the country for repeated teen births.

Texas has historically opted to promote abstinence among teenagers to reduce teen pregnancies.

Despite whether more in-depth teaching about sex ed could be beneficial, Jones, the political science professor, said Republicans have little political incentive to encourage it.

As a Republican, said Jones, youre not going to win any votes in an election by pushing a more progressive agenda on sex ed.

Read more:
The Latest Chapter in the Texas Culture Wars: Sex Education and Textbooks - The 74

The culture wars phenomenon may not be as widespread in the UK as in the US, but brands may still need to tread carefully. By Liam Kay.

At the Republican National Convention in 1992, Pat Buchanan spoke about a cultural war equating to a struggle for the soul ofAmerica.James Davison Hunters 1991 book, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, explained culture wars as a struggle to define American public life between progressives and the orthodox, while in the UK, many in the media have tried to import this definition from the US wholesale.

Culture wars today can be broadly seen asreferring to the battles between left and right wings of politics and society Democrats vs Republicans in the US or, increasingly, remain vs leave in the UK, according to the 2018 NatCen report, TheEmotional Legacy of Brexit.

Recent use of the term has surged. In 2015, there were 21 articles in mainstream UK newspapers that mentioned a UK culture war, while, by 2020, there were 534, according to Kings College London research.

Businesses are often caught in the middle. Last year, Coca-Cola condemned a voting law in ...

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Across the divide: Culture wars in the US and UK | Feature - Research Live