The Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing on two Federal Reserve nominees who have backed controversial policies such as ESG investing, amnesty for illegal aliens, and tying Fed monetary policy to the black unemployment rate.
The Senate Banking Committee will discuss on Wednesday President Joe Biden’s nominations of Dr. Lisa Cook to be a member of the Fed Board of Governors, as well as Adriana Kugler to be a member of the Fed Board of Governors.
The Senate previously confirmed Cook on partisan lines, or 51-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie. Now, if confirmed, Cook would serve a 14-year term, giving her significant sway over the future of the Fed and its policies.
Cook is a Fed governor, and Democrats, including Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-OH), have claimed that her career as a Ph.D. economist and professor would bring a different perspective to the Fed board.
At the time of Cook’s confirmation to the Fed board, Brown called it “historic” because she was the first black woman to be so named.
Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), the former Senate Banking Committee chairman, slammed Cook for seeking to “cancel” an economist who opposed defunding the police.
According to internal Michigan State University documents obtained by Breitbart News, Cook’s status as a full professor appears to have been elevated, even though she had been rejected for the position.
Tucker Carlson said that Cook had allegedly “lied” on her resume about writing an influential peer-reviewed paper in the American Economic Review.
Breitbart News reported about her controversial views, which include:
Cook gave a presentation in support of legislation that would create a commission to study and develop reparations proposals.
The Federal Reserve nominee also agreed with calls to have the Federal Reserve focus on targeting its federal funds rate to improve the black unemployment rate instead of the national employment rate.
Cook also called on the University of Chicago to fire its economics professor, Harald Uhlig, in June 2020 after Uhlig criticized the Black Lives Matter movement for its support of defunding the police. Cook accused Uhlig of “racial harassment.”
She claimed that “free speech has its limits.”
After the passage of the California law that would impose a $100,000 fine on California companies with all-male boards and a subsequent bill requiring every board to have at least one person of color on it by 2022, Cook called for a more expansive affirmative action policy.
“I would adopt that rule more broadly,” Cook said in 2020.
Cook also served as a member of the Regenerative Climate Response Committee, which called for using the financial regulatory system to force Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) through the rest of society.
Among its many proposals, the Committee called for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to adopt rules to “require investment advisers to have policies and procedures to identify and assess relevant ESG factors.”
It also called for enhanced disclosures of alleged “climate risks and impacts, including:”
- Financed emissions, including implied negative emissions (deforestation) anywhere in the world, which should be expressed as a percent of total dollar value of combined portfolios invested in high-carbon emission sectors based on public data of the EPA’s GHG Reporting Project;
- The maturity of investments within and across all portfolios;
- The value and number of investments in new projects within each sector; and
- Scenario analyses for impacts of all portfolios from the 1.5 degrees C. above pre-industrial levels by 2050 (which reflects the implementation of the Paris Agreement).
Kugler also has many views on climate change, abortion, and immigration that would be perceived as extreme by many Americans.
In her written responses relating to her nomination to the World Bank last Congress, Kugler declined to support funding coal, oil, and natural gas and instead said that the World Bank can “play a vital role” in “promoting the flow of capital toward climate-aligned investments.
During her 2021 nomination, Kugler said that climate change “is the biggest existential threat of our time, and I do believe that we need domestic action to go hand in hand with global leadership on climate change.”
Senate Foreign Relations Committee
During a 2023 Brookings Institute event, Kugler called for trillions of dollars in spending to address alleged climate change:
There was a commitment from the 2018 capital package to deliver 23 billion of cumulative core mobilization by the end of the decade. Now, having said that, obviously that, that’s a needle in a haystack compared to the trillions that we need to address our global challenges that we face. Trillions from what we’re told in terms of climate challenges, probably also just as much in terms of addressing pandemics and conflict and fragility. Right. Which on top of having to redress some of the progress that we lost ground on on poverty, on some of the other traditional development challenges.
In a paper she co-wrote while serving as a fellow for the Center for American Progress (CAP), she contended that President Donald Trump’s pro-life policies were “anti-woman:”
Each of these eforts separately has negative consequences for women, but together—along with too many other examples—they comprise a regressive, anti-woman agenda wrapped in a cynical, false narrative about women’s empowerment. Te administration’s shallow claims to support women’s equality coupled with atacks by congressional opponents of pro-women policies have shown a complete ignorance of the complex ways in which women’s economic opportunities are linked to their reproductive rights and health care access.
Kugler also agreed with the statement “Control over one’s reproduction is part of economic justice.”
Across her career, Kugler has called for granting amnesty to illegal aliens.
In written testimony to the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) in 2013, Kugler wrote:
We need to modernize U.S immigration policy to continue to help our economy grow…The economy can benefit from not only allowing new immigrants to come in…but also from providing legal status and citizenship to the currently 11 million undocumented workers already living in the US.
“Thanks Prez Biden for putting immigration as a top priority. Legalizing the undocumented is the smart and right thing to do.,” Kugler wrote in January 2021. “Legalization improves employment opportunities for US and immigrant workers and increases purchasing power and tax contributions. #ImmigrationReform.”
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
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