PROGRESSIVE POLICIES BUILT ON FDR’S ECONOMIC BILL OF RIGHTS

The policy agendas of progressive candidates (see my previous post for some examples) tend to be presented in a piecemeal fashion that makes it hard to grasp an overarching progressive vision or set of goals. In this and my two next posts, I will summarize proposals for an overall progressive policy agenda for the US. These proposals highlight policies that could excite voters and increase voter turnout by addressing issues that truly matter to working Americans.

The American Prospect magazine, the premier journal for US progressive policy analysis and proposals, recently published an article entitled “An Economic Bill of Rights for the 21^st century” by Paul, Darity, and Hamilton. [1] It builds on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1944 proposal for a Second Bill of Rights, a set of economic rights that would complement the political rights guaranteed by the original Bill of Rights. FDR’s proposal was never adopted, of course, but the need for an economic bill of rights is as clear today as it ever was.

As FDR noted, people who struggle to make ends meet are not free to engage in the pursuit of happiness that our Declaration of Independence promises. He went on to say that “Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” True freedom, according to FDR, requires the following economic rights:

The right to a useful and remunerative job,
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation,
The right of every businessman … to … freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies,
The right of every family to a decent home,
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment, and
The right to a good education. [2]

FDR died before he could enshrine these economic rights in policies let alone the Constitution. Moreover, his New Deal, which had rewritten many of the rules of our economy to increase economic fairness and security, was the result of a political deal with southern segregationists, probably out of necessity for getting the New Deal passed, that excluded Blacks. US government policies since then have often explicitly, and almost always at least implicitly, excluded Blacks from economic justice and opportunity. The Jim Crow policies in the south exacerbated the racial discrimination of federal policies.

The civil rights movement, Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign (which linked economic justice with civil rights), and President Johnson’s War on Poverty of the 1960s marked a resurgence of a focus on economic justice and security. Nonetheless, highly unequal economic outcomes are clearly evident today, especially by race and ethnicity but also to a growing degree by class.

For the past 40 years, our two major political parties have both embraced policies that rely on market forces and market-based solutions for meeting social and human needs, while reducing the role of government, deregulating business’s activities, and moving toward uncontrolled capitalism.

As a result, the middle class is under siege. Its incomes have stagnated for 40 years (when adjusted for inflation) and it is experiencing high levels of economic insecurity due to the instability of employment and reduced pay and benefits from the jobs that are available. Economic inequality has sky rocketed and economic mobility has declined. Poverty remains high, especially for children (who are most vulnerable to its long-term negative effects); 43 million Americans live below the official government poverty line, which is out-of-date and dramatically understates the cost of living in most, if not all areas, of the country.

This economic reality is the result of policy choices not inevitable economic evolution. FDR’s economic rights above are clearly still very relevant. Furthermore, the authors identify three additional economic rights that are necessary today to ensure an economy that provides opportunity and security for everyone:

The right to sound banking and financial services,
The right to a safe and clean environment, and
The right to a meaningful endowment of resources as a birthright.

This birthright endowment is an innovative proposal by the authors to address the high levels of economic inequality in both income and wealth. (Wealth is even more unevenly distributed, particularly across race and ethnicity, than income.) Wealth (i.e., savings or economic reserves) is an essential component of economic security and social well-being. The ability to be resilient when an economic shock occurs – a sudden loss of a job, a health emergency, an accident – is critical. Yet almost half of American households do not have $400 of wealth or savings to see them through an economic shock. Moreover, for every dollar of wealth or savings held by whites, Blacks and Latinos have only 5 cents and 6 cents respectively. In other words, white household wealth is, on average, 20 times that of Blacks and almost 17 times that of Latinos.

The authors’ proposal addresses this dramatic inequality by giving every American, at birth, an endowment that would be held in trust until he or she reaches adulthood. Then, the individual could spend the money on an asset building activity such as paying for higher education, buying a home, or starting a business.

The endowment would be universal, but its amount would vary: babies born into the wealthiest families would receive $500 and those born into families with no or minimal wealth would receive $50,000. This would attempt to level the playing field, given the implicit endowment that affluent families are able to provide to their children. Estimates indicate that the cost would be about 2% of the federal budget. The federal budget currently spends a similar amount on another policy that supports households in building wealth: the home mortgage interest deduction. By reducing this support for wealth building through home ownership, which provides its biggest benefits to already wealthy households, the federal government could pay for the proposed “baby bonds.” This would go a long way toward providing economic opportunity and security for every baby born in America, as well as reducing wealth inequality. As another option, the “baby bonds” could be paid for, in whole or in part, by cutting the budget of the Defense Department (which is about 15% of the federal budget), by up to 13%. (Many analysts believe the defense budget is bloated with unnecessary expenditures and waste that primarily benefits the wealthy corporations of the military-industrial complex.) Another option to pay for the “baby bonds” would be to reduce the tax cuts that were passed in December 2017; they will cost over twice as much as these “baby bonds” would and, rather than reducing economic inequality, the tax cuts will exacerbate inequality because they primarily benefit already wealthy corporations and individuals.

I’m interested in your comments on this post. What do you think of this proposal for “baby bonds” – a birthright endowment to give every new baby a more or less equal opportunity for success in life? In particular, would you be more inclined to vote for a candidate who supported “baby bonds”?

My next post will summarize the proposal of the Campaign for America’s Future, which it calls: An Economic Agenda for America’s Future.”

[1] Paul, M., Darity, Jr., W., & Hamilton, D., 3/5/18, “An economic bill of rights for the 21^st century,” The American Prospect (http://prospect.org/article/economic-bill-rights-21st-century)

[2] Wikipedia, retrieved 7/28/18, “Second Bill of Rights,” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights)

WINNING ELECTIONS BY EXCITING VOTERS WITH PROGRESSIVE POLICIES

We need to elect people to Congress in November who will stand up to vested and powerful interests (namely wealthy individuals and large corporations) on behalf of everyday working people and families. We need to do this to rescue our democracy from plutocracy. This will require a high voter turnout, which will happen only if voters are excited and enthusiastic about the candidates they are voting for. It does not happen if voters are just voting against the other candidate or party, or for the lesser of two evils; that is not enough to motivate many voters to get out and vote.

In the last presidential election, despite all the attention it got, less than 56% – barely half – of eligible citizens actually voted. Although Trump and Clinton each excited a relatively small segment of voters, the electorate at large was not excited by either of these two candidates. Senator Sanders in his run for the Democratic nomination excited more voters and had more voters enthusiastically voting for him than either Trump or Clinton. President Obama excited enough voters, particularly Blacks, in his 2008 run for president that 62% of eligible voters went to the polls, which is the highest turnout since 1970, but still well below voter turnout among most of the other relatively wealthy democracies. (I’ll do a subsequent post on low voter participation in the US and reasons for it.).

If Democrats want to win in November, they need to put forward a clear, progressive agenda that will excite and motivate a broad swath of the electorate. Such a strategy has the potential to increase turnout substantially by getting people who vote irregularly or who have never voted excited and wanting to go vote. This is particularly important in non-presidential elections when typically, only 40% of eligible voters go to the polls. Some Democrats think that running against President Trump and the Republicans who are enabling his behavior and policies will lead them to electoral success. This is a risky strategy; it’s much better to be running for something than against something.

Exciting and motivating voters is what Senator Sanders did in his surprisingly successful and almost victorious campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. This is what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did in winning a shocking upset in her recent primary election victory for a US House seat in New York. This is what Senators Merkley and Warren and others are doing in their re-election bids. And what a wide range of candidates for local, state, and national offices are doing across the country. It is why Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez were in Kansas supporting two candidates for Congress, James Thompson and Brent Wilder. Overflow crowds of thousands enthusiastically rallied for these progressive candidates in Republican Kansas. [1]

An emerging progressive movement is evident in at least four candidates for Governor (in Florida, Maryland, Michigan, and New York), at least 53 congressional candidates, and too-numerous-to-count candidates for state legislatures and local government posts. [ 2] These candidates are listening to the grassroots and to polls that show what Americans want from their government – good jobs with fair pay, good K-12 public education, affordable higher education, support for balancing work and family, a health care system that works (with many specifically supporting a single-payer system or Medicare-for-all), and economic security. Unfortunately, many of the leaders of the Democratic party are resisting this progressive ground swell of energy, fighting against it by supporting centrist and corporate-leaning candidates rather than progressive, grassroots candidates.

Many in the media and some political pundits are describing this progressive movement as “far left.” That may be true in today’s political climate, but it is not true historically. Many of the progressive policies being espoused by the current progressive movement were mainstream Democratic policies in the 1960s and a surprising number of them were supported by Republicans then as well. As a more recent example, believe it or not, the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – the requirement that everyone buy health insurance – was a conservative, Republican think tank policy proposal. Despite the vehement Republican attacks on the individual mandate ever since the ACA was proposed – and Democrats’ unwillingness to defend it with any vigor – the individual mandate was proposed by the very conservative and Republican Heritage Foundation as part of its plan for comprehensive national legislation to provide universal “quality, affordable health care.” The plan was introduced in a 1989 book, “A National Health System for America,” by Butler and Haislmaier. [3]

In labeling current progressive policy proposals as “far left,” people are forgetting that President Clinton and other Democrats in the late 1980s and 1990s moved the Democratic Party a long way to the right and toward the political center in their efforts to win the presidency after 12 years of Republican presidents and then to win Clinton’s re-election.

The emerging progressive movement is getting short shrift from our mainstream media. A dramatic example is the lack of media coverage of the Poor People’s Campaign. From late May through June, it sponsored 40 days of action including multiple rallies and civil disobedience actions in Washington, D.C., and 30 state capitals but it got almost no coverage in the mainstream media. Thousands of people demonstrated, and hundreds were arrested for civil disobedience, but coverage was minimal. It was organized to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s original Poor People’s Campaign that linked the issues of civil rights and economic justice for all. [4] [5]

A number of groups have been organized to support progressive, grassroots candidates including Our Revolution (the spinoff from Senator Sanders presidential campaign), the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (which describes itself as the Senator Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party), the Working Families Party, Indivisible, Justice Democrats, and Brand New Congress. They provide numerous opportunities to support progressive candidates and activities, if you’re so motivated.

These organizations and the candidates they support are putting forth a progressive policy agenda. However, they tend to do so in a piecemeal fashion that makes it hard to grasp or summarize overall goals. In my next posts, I will summarize various proposals for an overall progressive policy agenda for the US that would excite voters by addressing issues that truly matter to working Americans.

[1] Nichols, J., 7/20/18, “Sander and Ocasio-Cortez rally Kansas for a working-class politics that stands up to the Kochs,” The Nation (https://www.thenation.com/article/sanders-ocasio-cortez-rally-kansas-working-class-politics-stands-kochs/)

[2] Burns, A., 7/21/18, “There is a revolution on the left. Democrats are bracing,” The New York Times

[3] Roy, A., 10/20/11, “How the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, promoted the individual mandate,” Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/10/20/how-a-conservative-think-tank-invented-the-individual-mandate/#720de15a6187)

[4] Sarkar, S., 5/23/18, “Hundreds of Poor People’s Campaign activists got themselves arrested for racial justice,” Common Dreams (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/05/23/hundreds-poor-peoples-campaign-activists-got-themselves-arrested-racial-justice)

[5] Corbett, J., 6/21/18, “‘Stop the war! Feed the poor!’: March by Poor People’s Campaign ends with arrests in DC,” Common Dreams (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/06/21/stop-war-feed-poor-march-poor-peoples-campaign-ends-arrests-dc)

CORPORATE PROFITS MORE IMPORTANT THAN BABIES’ SURVIVAL

The influence of large corporations on federal policy is nothing new, although the Trump administration seems to be even more unabashedly aligned with corporate interests than previous administrations. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s callousness and inhumanity on issues having to do with families and children is clear, most notably in its policy of separating immigrant parents and children – despite the First Lady’s “Be Best” campaign that promotes good child outcomes.

Nonetheless, the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine a World Health Organization (WHO) resolution in support of breastfeeding shocked medical professionals, diplomats, and public health officials around the world. In case you haven’t heard, the US delegation to a WHO meeting in May attempted to block and then succeeded in somewhat watering down a resolution that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breastfeeding” and to put limits on misleading and dangerous marketing of breast-milk substitutes, such as infant formula, and other food products harmful to young children.

This effort by US officials promoted the interests of the $70 billion infant formula industry, despite decades of evidence of the benefits of breastfeeding over the use of infant formula. [1] Lobbyists for the industry were present at the meeting to support the Trump administration’s efforts. [2] The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends breastfeeding exclusively for a baby’s first 6 months whenever possible, as well as for the next 6 months or longer as other foods are appropriately introduced. [3]

Some of you may remember the boycott of Nestle in the 1970s when it was aggressively promoting infant formula in developing countries where clean water for preparing infant formula was often not available. Babies died because infant formula was contaminated with bad water and because mothers couldn’t afford to the continue with the formula but couldn’t breast-feed because they had stopped lactating. Abbott Laboratories, based in Chicago, is one of the biggest corporations in the infant formula industry, along with Nestle, which is based in Switzerland but has a significant presence in the US.

Breastfeeding is the cheapest, easiest, and safest form of nutrition for infants in most cases, especially for low-income mothers and where clean, safe water is not reliably available. A 2016 study found that universal breastfeeding would save 800,000 infants’ lives annually around the world, while saving $300 billion as well. Breast milk provides not only nutrition, but hormones and antibodies that protect babies from diseases. Breast-fed infants have significantly fewer respiratory tract, ear, and gastrointestinal infections. Breast-feeding is also associated with lower risks of sudden infant death syndrome, allergies, asthma, eczema, celiac disease, bowel disease, diabetes, obesity, and leukemia. Mothers who breast-feed have lower risks of breast and ovarian cancers, diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, and high blood pressure. [4]

As part of its efforts to block the breastfeeding resolution, the US delegation threatened to cut its funding for the World Health Organization. The US is the biggest funder of the WHO, providing about 15% of its budget or $845 million. The WHO is essential to public health globally and in the US, as it provides, for example, the first response to flu and Ebola epidemics wherever they occur. It also plays a leading role in addressing the rising death toll from diabetes and cardiovascular disease around the world.

Ecuador, the original sponsor of the breastfeeding resolution, withdrew its sponsorship after the US threatened it with trade sanctions and withdrawal of military assistance, which helps it deal with violence spilling over its border with Columbia. Health advocates scrambled to find another sponsor, but at least a dozen other countries refused citing fear of retaliation from the US. Russia finally agreed to sponsor the resolution, and apparently the US did not threaten it. [5]

Nonetheless, the US succeeded in weakening parts of the resolution. It insisted on adding the words “evidence-based” to references to long-standing practices that promote breastfeeding, despite public health experts pointing out that doing random assignment studies (where some children would be denied breast milk) to establish “evidence-based” outcomes would be ethically and morally unacceptable. The US unfortunately succeeded in getting language removed from the resolution that called on the WHO to support governments in their efforts to block the “inappropriate promotion of foods to infants and young children.”

In another part of the resolution, the US succeeded, unfortunately, in removing language that supported taxing sugar-laden soft drinks as a strategy for addressing soaring rates of obesity around the world. Fortunately, however, the US was unsuccessfully in its attempts to block a WHO program that helps poor countries obtain life-saving medicines at an affordable cost; opposition to this program comes, not surprisingly, from the pharmaceutical corporations.

It is appalling to me that the US government is making corporate profits a higher priority than the lives, health, and well-being of children and adults around the world, including in the US. These examples from the WHO meeting are some of the more dramatic and appalling ones, but there are plenty of other ones.

Corporate profits have been prioritized over the well-being of workers and the middle class in the US, in a variety of ways, for almost 40 years now. This is why US voters were so angry with the status quo in the federal government that in 2016 almost half of eligible voters did not vote in the presidential election and why almost half of those that did vote, voted for Trump. (He won in the Electoral College even though he lacked a majority of the actual votes.)

We need to change our policy priorities and put people first and regulate corporations so they serve the public good. The whole point of allowing the creation of corporations and other limited liability organizations was to more efficiently promote the public good and an economy where everyone could pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The purpose for corporations and the priorities of our public policies have gotten turned upside down. Particularly in the US., but elsewhere as well, the priorities of government and the role of corporations in our economy need to be returned to those of the late 1940s through the 1970s when income inequality was much lower and economic security was much higher.

[1] Khazan, O., 7/10/18, “The epic battle between breast milk and infant-formula companies,” The Atlantic

[2] Jacobs, A., 7/8/18, “U.S. opposition to breast-feeding resolution stuns world health officials,” The New York Times

[3] Williams, E., 7/10/18, “Breastfeeding: The benefits,” The Boston Globe

[4] Rabin, R. C., 7/9/18, “Trump stance on breast-feeding and formula criticized by medical experts,” The New York Times

[5] Jacobs, A., 7/8/18, see above

CONSUMER FINANCE PROTECTIONS UNDER ATTACK

Many in Congress and the Trump administration are openly working to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). It was created as part of the Dodd-Frank Law, the major piece of legislation passed to reform the financial industry after the 2008 crash. The CFPB protects consumers from abusive and fraudulent practices of financial corporations, such as mortgage loans that consumers can’t afford (which were a major element of the 2008 crash and the foreclosures that destroyed many families’ savings), abusive and discriminatory practices on student and auto loans, usury by payday lenders, and deceptive marketing. The CFPB also reduces the risk of future financial industry crashes by stopping the marketing of financial products that can create financial bubbles and lead to high rates of loan defaults and bankruptcies. These can threaten the stability of financial corporations, as happened with mortgages in 2008.

The CFPB’s role is to protect consumers from unsafe financial products and practices in the same way that the Consumer Product Safety Commission protects consumers from unsafe physical products – from appliances to toys. The financial industry has opposed the CFPB from when it was first included in drafts of the Dodd-Frank legislation. The financial industry does not want to be held accountable. It wants to be able to make profits with no holds barred. It has been lobbying hard to have the CFPB emasculated.

Despite the valuable roles the CFPB can and has been playing, Congress and the Trump administration, at the urging of the financial industry, have been working to keep the CFPB from being an effective advocate for consumers by:

Blocking or repealing its consumer protection regulations
Stopping its enforcement actions
Weakening its independence and effectiveness

For example, in April Congress passed and the President signed a law repealing a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) regulation that prevented car dealers and corporations making car loans from discriminating based on race. The CFPB had fined several lenders and dealers millions of dollars for charging higher interest rates to Black and Hispanic borrowers, even when they had the same credit scores as White borrowers. Consumer advocacy groups note that this discriminatory behavior is pervasive and repeal of this regulation will allow it to continue. [1]

In October, a law was passed repealing a CFPB regulation that allowed consumers to band together in class action lawsuits against financial corporations and prohibited financial corporations from forcing consumers into arbitration. Many financial institutions include mandatory arbitration clauses in the agreements consumers sign when they open a bank account, take out a loan, or get a credit card. This legal language, buried in the fine print, requires the consumer to pursue any claim against the company only through arbitration and not through the courts or a class action lawsuit. The arbitration process is skewed in favor of the financial institution and a typical consumer doesn’t have the time and resources to pursue their claim on their own. [2]

Forced arbitration language initially protected Wells Fargo and Equifax by preventing large-scale consumer scandals from coming to light. Forcing consumers to pursue claims individually in arbitration hid Wells Fargo’s opening of and charging millions of customers for unauthorized accounts. Only after many months did the authorities and the public become aware of the scandal and its scale, and force Wells Fargo to compensate customers. The same pattern occurred with Wells Fargo’s requirement that auto loan borrowers buy insurance they didn’t need and with Equifax’s huge data breach.

To respond to these problems, the CFPB issued a regulation banning the use of mandatory arbitration clauses by financial corporations in individual consumer agreements. However, at the behest of the financial industry, Republicans in Congress pushed through a bill repealing the regulation; Vice President Pence cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate.

Separate from Congressional action, Mick Mulvaney, the acting director of the CFPB appointed by President Trump in November 2017, has delayed regulation of payday lenders, who charge usurious interest rates and often trap customers into loans they can never repay, while the lender collects huge amounts of interest and fees.

Mulvaney has also stalled the CFPB’s investigation of the Equifax data breach, which allowed hackers to obtain the personal information, including Social Security numbers and birth dates, of 145 million people. Equifax’s breach was particularly egregious because it was preventable: Equifax did not install a software patch that had been available for months. Equifax failed to disclose the breach for months while people’s identities and accounts were at-risk. And Equifax executives sold $2 million of stock in the months between the breach and its becoming public knowledge. [3]

Not content to just attack the regulations and enforcement actions of the CFPB, Mulvaney, the Trump administration, and members of Congress (mainly Republicans) have worked to weaken the CFPB’s organizational effectiveness and independence. In June, Mulvaney fired the agency’s 25-member advisory board which included consumer advocates, experts, and industry executives. It had played, and was created to play, an influential role in advising CFPB’s leadership on regulations and policies. Two days before their firing, eleven of the 25 members held a press conference to criticize Mulvaney for canceling legally required meetings of the advisory board, ignoring them and their advice, and making unwise changes at the CFPB. [4]

Mulvaney has stripped enforcement powers from the CFPB unit pursuing discrimination cases. He has undermined the consumer complaint system. [5] He has asked Congress to weaken CFPB’s power and independence by giving Congress and the executive branch more control over its budget and regulations. [6]

The reasons we need a strong and independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are clear. Its enforcement actions have led to a $1 billion fine on Wells Fargo for a series of misdeeds in consumer banking, lending, compliance with regulations, and overall management, [7] [8] as well as to a $335 million settlement with Citigroup for overcharging 1.75 million credit card customers over eight years. [9]

Since its creation, the CFPB has protected consumers from financial corporations that violate the law. It has gotten compensation of over $12 billion for more than 31 million victimized consumers. In less than 8 years, it has responded to over 1.5 million consumer complaints and issued, for example, new standards that make home mortgage documents clearer and easier to understand. At CFPB’s website, you can find information that will help you understand your credit score and make a good decision about a car or student loan. (See my earlier post about the CFPB here for more information.)

I urge you to contact your U.S. Representative and Senators and to ask them to support the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the very valuable work it does. The efforts to weaken the CFPB and regulation of the big financial corporations are putting consumers at-risk and increasing the likelihood of another collapse of the financial sector and our economy. You can find your US Representative’s name and contact information here and your Senators’ information here.

[1] Merle, R., 4/18/18, “The Senate just voted to kill a policy warning auto lenders about discrimination against minority borrowers,” Washington Post

[2] Freking, K., 10/25/17, “Senate votes to end consumer credit rule,” The Boston Globe from the Associated Press

[3] Rucker, P., 2/4/18, “Exclusive: U.S. consumer protection official puts Equifax probe on ice – sources,” Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-equifax-cfpb/exclusive-u-s-consumer-protection-official-puts-equifax-probe-on-ice-sources-idUSKBN1FP0IZ)

[4] Merle, R., 6/7/18, “Consumer bureau chief fires advisers,” The Boston Globe from the Washington Post

[5] Singletary, M., 4/8/18, “Switching from watchdog to lapdog,” The Boston Globe

[6] Merle, R., 4/3/18, “Trump-appointed head of consumer watchdog asks Congress to hamstring his agency,” Washington Post

[7] Dreier, P., 2/7/18, “Wells Fargo gets what it deserves – and just in time,” The American Prospect (http://prospect.org/article/wells-fargo-gets-what-it-deserves-and-just-time)

[8] Flitter, E., & Thrush, G., 4/20/18, “US to slap $1b fine on Wells Fargo,” The Boston Globe from the New York Times

[9] Hamilton, J., 6/30/18, “Citigroup will repay $335 million to customers,” The Boston Globe from Bloomberg