Raise the Minimum Wage, Reduce Crime?

'Fight for Fifteen'. (photo: David Ryder/Reuters)

By Jukeyka Lantigua-Williams, The Atlantic

04 May 16

readersupportednews.org

 

A new White House report links higher hourly incomes to lower rates of law-breaking.

merican labor activists have mounted a national campaign to increase the minimum wage. They have made many arguments about the rising cost of living, the long-term effects of poverty, and the obstacles even faced by families who have two incomes. But in a new study, the White House has made a novel argument: Raising the minimum wage reduces crime by 3 to 5 percent.

The Council of Economic Advisers, which advises the president on national economic policy, recently unveiled key findings that cast doubt on the criminal-justice system’s ability to reduce and prevent crime. “Research has established that rising incarceration is not principally responsible for the reduction in crime, and that higher levels of imprisonment have occurred despite—not because of—changes in underlying criminal activity,” states the report. This is a significant finding: For decades, incarceration advocates promoted the opposite idea. So, if putting people in jails and prisons does not reduce crime, what does?

More education, more job opportunities, school enrichment activities, and a basic living wage are among the factors listed in the study. “Higher wages for low-skilled workers reduce both property and violent crime, as well as crime among adolescents,” the authors write. “The impact of wages on crime is substantial … a 10 percent increase in wages for non-college educated men results in approximately a 10 to 20 percent reduction in crime rates.” More concretely, the Council calculates that raising the minimum wage to $12 by 2020 “would result in a 3 to 5 percent crime decrease (250,000 to 510,000 crimes) and a societal benefit of $8 to $17 billion dollars.”

“The research on this is really clear and really consistent; it cuts across party lines,” said Jason Furman, the Council’s chairman and President Obama’s chief economist, at a White House forum. For example, the Council estimates that “a 10 percent increase in wages for non-college educated men leads to a 10 to 20 percent reduction in crime rates.”

The Council outlined several specific policy recommendations for state governments and private businesses in dealing with the formerly incarcerated. The Obama administration has already instructed the Office of Personnel Management—the government’s HR department, effectively—to delay criminal-background checks beyond initial job applications, for example. And the Departments of Justice and Labor will establish a National Clean Slate Clearinghouse to help legal-aid programs, public-defenders offices, and reentry-services providers with “record-cleaning and expungement.”

But there are some practical obstacles involved with these seemingly straightforward recommendations. Over 46,000 state and federal laws restrict “employment, occupational licenses, and business licenses for people with criminal records,” according to the report. Around 70 percent of employers conduct criminal background checks. Additionally, there are more than 1,000 mandatory license exclusions for people with records of misdemeanors and nearly 3,000 exclusions for felony records, per the American Bar Association. The Council also determined that “applicants with criminal records were 50 percent less likely to receive an interview request or job offer.” The combined results of these practices are multiple, leaving people to struggle with chronic underemployment, a purgatory of low-wage jobs, stagnant skill sets, and a lack of professional mobility. Most drastically, it means that formerly incarcerated people earn considerably less than other workers—between 10 and 40 percent less, according to Council’s report.

The irony is that many among the currently incarcerated might not have ever committed crimes if more employment and higher wages were available. Even summer jobs for disadvantaged young people have a meaningful impact on the crime rate; in one case, the probability of incarceration dropped by 10 percent for those who participated in such programs in New York City, according to the Council. In some instances, the Council writes, “states with more flexible labor-market conditions for individuals with criminal records may have lower recidivism rates.”

Offering a higher minimum wage and improved standard of living to those who most need it isn’t just about reducing poverty—it would have a quantifiable impact on the country’s overall crime rate.

Public meeting in Payson for Rim Country Environmental Impact Statement Proposed Action

The Forest Service will be presenting information and gathering preliminary public feedback for the Rim Country Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) draft Proposed Action at an informational meeting Tuesday, May 10 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at the Messinger Funeral Home in Payson, AZ.

The Rim Country EIS is the second landscape-scale, multi-forest EIS in the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI). It will analyze restoration treatments on approximately 1.25 million acres of National Forest System Land across the Mogollon Rim near Blue Ridge, Payson, Show Low, and Springerville.

The meeting, hosted by the 4FRI Stakeholder Group, is open to all members of the public interested in 4FRI the crucial treatments proposed in the Rim Country EIS. The meeting will begin with a 45-minute presentation by the Forest Service on 4FRI projects, other projects around Payson, and the draft Proposed Action for the Rim Country EIS. The remainder of the meeting will be an open house where the public will have an opportunity to visit with resource specialists and provide feedback on the draft Proposed Action.

“This is an informal, informational meeting that we are offering ahead of the formal public scoping meetings and comment periods identified by the National Environmental Policy Act,” says Annette Fredette, 4FRI Planning Coordinator. Those meetings and opportunities to provide comments for the public record will occur this summer with the release of the Notice of Intent and Proposed Action.

“Our intent for the meeting on May 10 is to involve the public in the collaborative process before the formal planning process even begins. It’s important to us that members of the local communities be part of this every step of the way.”

The public can review the draft Proposed Action online at www.fs.usda.gov/goto/4FRIRimCountry.

Socialize the Banks

Goldman Sachs. (photo: Reuters)

By Nuno Teles, Jacobin

7 May 16

Breaking up the banks won’t do. They should be publicly owned and democratically controlled.

ine years after the onset of the international financial crisis, its effects are still with us.

These days observers worry about banks — European institutions like Germany’s Deutsche Bank, France’s Societé Generale, and Italy’s Monte di Pascoale, not to mention the zombie banks that populate the austerity-ridden eurozone periphery in Greece, Portugal, and Spain. These big banks are widely seen as global capitalism’s next weak link, capable of causing massive financial instability if they go bust.

Such concern isn’t particularly surprising — banks were at the center of the latest crisis from the beginning. Indeed, it wasn’t subprime market defaults that unleashed the destructive financial turmoil of 2007–8, but their ruinous impact on a major investment bank, Lehman Brothers. Lehman’s failure — and the state’s subsequent refusal to bail out the bank — created a credit crunch that sent the entire financial sector, as well as the world economy, into a tailspin.

As the US crisis morphed into the eurozone crisis, banks were again at the epicenter. The debt burden of peripheral states and the prospect of their default threatened the solvency of the entire European banking sector, which had lent to agents public and private.

Europe’s major banks, already troubled by their souring US investments (among other things) faced collapse. Only the quick substitution of bank-held debt for official debt — taken on from the troika of European lenders and the IMF in return for punitive fiscal austerity — saved them.

Yet here we are today, facing another potential wave of failing banks. The lingering instability highlights the hollowness of the G-20 countries’ pledges to reform the financial sector in 2008-09. Promises to “extend regulatory oversight and registration to Credit Rating Agencies,” “take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens,” and “prevent excessive leverage and require buffers of resources to be built up in good times” have yielded little substantive change.

Granted, bank reform legislation has been passed in both the US and Europe. The Dodd-Frank Act in the US, the Eric Liikanen working group recommendations in the European Union, and, ultimately, the Bank of International Settlements’ Basel III regulation all raised capital and liquidity requirements and produced new resolution mechanisms for banks.

But once the initial shock of the crisis passed, banks lobbied intensely to water down the rules, and regulators set an extremely low bar for compliance. The banking business, in short, resumed its old practices — but now in a financial landscape marked by even larger banks that posed far greater systemic risks to the world economy.

The Left and Credit

So as the banks have a field day, where is the Left?

Seemingly nowhere to be found. In the core capitalist countries, the Left has repeatedly failed to crawl out from its defensive trenches and seize the opportunity that the crisis opened. Proposals concerning the financial sector have been weak at best, limited to regulation and taxation measures, such as the popular “Tobin Tax.”

Meanwhile, questions about how banks should be organized and governed aren’t even raised. The Left has either latched onto market-based arguments of “let them fail” or turned to more benign liberal solutions like breaking up big banks. As a result, it has failed to contribute to crucial debates about modern capitalism’s pivotal institutions.

Part of the reason why is the Left’s profound weakness: it has little capacity to propose and implement new policies that benefit the working class. But the Left’s tendency to shy away from debates about banks and finance is rooted in other factors as well.

For one, the Left tends to emphasize production over circulation, the sphere where finance is located. As a result the role of finance is under-examined, dismissed as a big Ponzi scheme that capital escapes to when it’s faced with a “structural blockage” in the sphere of production.

At the same time (particularly since the 2008–2010 crisis), the Left has viewed credit with extreme suspicion, often seeing it as an inherent evil to be restrained.

But while the effects of financialization have been dire for many ordinary people, credit is central to any economy, capitalist or otherwise.

As pointed by the political economist, Costas Lapavitsas, originating in the pre-capitalist exchange of commodities (like cloth and foodstuffs), credit is predicated on the lender-borrower interaction: the lender knows something about the borrower’s material circumstances, then chooses whether to enter into a relationship defined by the “promise to pay.”

In capitalism — where loanable capital is common and often doled out by banks — the social relations behind credit are quite depersonalized. Borrowers are much more homogenized, and their ability to repay is gauged by purportedly objective criteria like present-day credit scores.

Banks integrate and mobilize these criteria — information that is unavailable to other economic agents — through their privileged access to the financial dealings of firms and households.

The ability to assess the soundness of a borrower’s “promises to pay” puts banks in a powerful position. And this position is reinforced by banks’ other information-gathering activities — account management, asset management, foreign exchange — which fall outside lending activities but are at the core of investment banking.

The terrain on which banks operate (and compete) has been in flux since the 1970s. Liberalization, deregulation (and capital-friendly re-regulation) of financial markets, and the rollback of public services have conspired with new technologies to create entirely new financial markets, products, and agents.

Financial income, in turn, has migrated to more and more sectors, including housing (in the form of mortgage payments), pensions (commissions and fees charged on private pension funds), and even utilities (bonds and similar mechanisms for financing infrastructure).

The rise of capital markets and the emergence of new financial agents have not caused the traditional banking sector to wither. New markets opened by public policy, new credit assessment instruments, and faster access to data have simply given banks new agents and markets to loan money to — like households, who have become the main recipients of loanable capital in most developed countries, particularly in the form of mortgages.

Banks have also entered the lucrative market of managing savings and financial assets. As a result, banks have grown bigger, with expanding balance sheets and increasing profits relative to the overall economy.

Contemporary states have helped spur this financialization of the global economy, expanding their purview far beyond constructing new financial markets or transforming the provision of different goods and services for capital’s benefit. Governments today play a paramount role in backing banks’ power.

The reason is fairly straightforward: banks hold, through deposits, “promises to pay” that have a shorter maturity than their assets (others’ promises to pay). Or, more simply, they owe more than they hold at any given time. This imbalance is a source of potential fragility, as was clear during the 2008 liquidity shortage.

In order to prevent boom-and-bust cycles, the state stepped in, providing a financial backstop through its control of the money supply. Banks are given exclusive access to central bank reserves, which banks use to settle their liabilities. By conferring on banks the ability to create credit (and money) — a right that other economic agents don’t have — states give banks an incomparable power over the rest of the economy.

The Case for Public Banks

The special relationship between banks and the state became clear in the recent financial meltdown. As trust in the money markets evaporated, banks became dependent on state institutions to survive, let alone thrive.

Banks relied on emergency loans from central banks to sustain their liquidity mismatch, which would have otherwise thrown them quickly into bankruptcy.

Governments also restored their solvency through emergency programs. States bought billions of dollars of worthless assets (through the Troubled Asset Relief Program in the US, for instance) or added regulatory capital through contingent bonds and tax credits or public money transfers (as with the UK’s “temporary” nationalizations).

States provided implicit and explicit subsidies to banks by boosting guarantees on deposits, carrying out unprecedented quantitative easing programs that granted banks safe returns through asset buying, and lowering interest rates to historic lows, thereby reducing banks’ funding costs.

The transfer of public resources to private banks was extraordinary. Yet the rescue measures were wrapped in financial jargon and a sense of political inevitability, and so, despite some halfhearted grumbling by lawmakers, they largely escaped public scrutiny.

That may be changing. The state’s heavy footprint in the financial sector is making it increasingly difficult to argue banks should remain privately owned. Why should profits accrue to shareholders, after all, when the risks and losses are socialized?

Public banks are not a novelty of course. Many countries, such as Germany and France, have long had such institutions, either in the form of commercial banks or development banks that provide loans to specific economic sectors.

And public ownership alone is no silver bullet for challenging global capitalism and its attendant crises. More often than not, these banks behave no differently than their private counterparts, or are controlled by public bureaucracies that end up serving particular private interests.

Simply put, public ownership of banks is necessary but not sufficient.

For public control to be liberatory, it must be part of an expansive vision that reshapes the practices and uses of credit along egalitarian lines. Private finance has promoted the commodification of (and shaped the organization of) key sectors like health and education. Taking control of credit must mean democratizing access to these essential services.

On the question of bank governance, it is not enough to have public officials in charge. Unions, social movement actors (like consumer organizations), and elected officials from both local and central government must have a role in their management. A progressive finance policy can only be enacted when a variety of societal actors, who all possess specific knowledge and interests, have a say in the organization and provision of credit.

Considering the global nature of contemporary finance, any plan to socialize the credit system — and reform the relation between money, credit, and state — must also take into account the highly unequal power relations that characterize the global economy.

US, as issuer of the dollar, controls a quasi-world currency that’s commonly used to settle international liabilities even between non-American agents. This gives the US immense power over the world economy, unmatched by any other country.

Through its own banks, the US controls the quantity and price (interest rates) of dollars used across the globe. (The euro — which is primarily controlled by Germany, the eurozone’s biggest economy — also enjoys global reach.)

In this context, any attempt to socialize the credit system must take into account the specificities of each country: how it is integrated into the world economy and how it can be disconnected from the chains of international finance and gain the space it needs to pursue its own economic and social policies.

Its balance of payments position, external indebtedness, and foreign currency reserve position are constraints that have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. For instance, it is difficult to imagine how any peripheral country in the eurozone could nationalize its banks without breaking with the euro, regaining sovereignty over its own currency, ending central bank independence, and introducing strict capital controls.

After years of financial crisis, rising inequality, and “secular stagnation,” the time is ripe for the Left to advance an egalitarian project that places finance at the center.

This doesn’t mean a “one size fits all” program. Each country will have to devise its own socialized system of credit. But the goal will be clear, across borders and states: a more equitable, democratic international economic order.

We Must Do Everything Legally Possible to Prevent Trump From Becoming President

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page

06 May 16

readersupportednews.org

 
ere’s what Donald Trump says he’ll do in his first 100 days as president, according to today’s New York Times:

1. Nominate a new Supreme Court justice in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia.


2. Rescind the Obama executive orders on immigration.


3. Threaten punitive measures against corporate executives who shift jobs out of the United States.


4. Design the wall with Mexico, seal the southern border, and assign more security agents along it.


5. Put in place a ban on immigration to the United States by Muslims.


6. Rescind the Obama executive orders on immigration.


7. Repeal the Affordable Care Act.


8. Give military leaders more power over foreign affairs.


9. Put business executives and generals in charge of cabinet agencies.


10. Use twitter and other social media to intimidate and bully adversaries.


11. Begin an audit of the Federal Reserve.

And that's just a start. As commander-in-chief, Donald Trump would have control over the nation's nuclear warheads, and its spy agencies (including domestic spying). He'd have enormous discretion over how the nation's laws were executed and administered -- labor laws, civil rights and voting rights, women's rights, environmental protection. And he's have the Bully Pulpit to spread his racist and xenophobic venom.

All of us owe it to ourselves, our children and grand children, our communities, nation, and the world, to do everything legally possible to prevent this utter idiot from becoming president of the United States.

What do you think?

Who Is More Electable?

Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders. (photo: Reuters)

By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News

04 May 16
readersupportednews.org

 
on’t look now, but in the latest hypothetical general election poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports, Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton.

According to the survey, which was conducted from April 27 to 28 among 1,000 likely voters:

Trump now has the support of 73% of Republicans, while 77% of Democrats back Clinton. But Trump picks up 15% of Democrats, while just eight percent (8%) of GOP voters prefer Clinton, given this matchup.

Among voters not affiliated with either major party, Trump leads 37% to 31%, but 23% like another candidate. Nine percent (9%) are undecided.

Hmmm, I do not think 32% are lining up to vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. So these are voters who at this point are not supporting anyone likely to be on the ballot in November.

Give the voters the option of staying home and the same poll has the race tied.

Rasmussen Reports did not poll a hypothetical Sanders versus Trump matchup.

Other polls all show Sanders beating Trump by more than 10 points. Those same polls have the race closer between Clinton and Trump.

Talk about a race to the bottom, the two most unpopular candidates in either party will likely be the nominees of the two major political parties.

Now let’s look at some other indicators of electability.

Favorability: (Huffington Post average)

Sanders:	52%
Clinton:	47%
Trump:	35%

Unfavorability: (Huffington Post average)

Trump:	61%
Clinton:	55%
Sanders:	40%

Honesty: (yougov.com poll)

Sanders:	47%
Trump:	29%
Clinton:	27%

Dishonesty: (yougov.com poll)

Clinton:	56%
Trump:	52%
Sanders:	24%

When asked by Peter Hart and Associates in an April poll, all voters chose Sanders as the candidate they could support at higher levels than any other candidate.

Here is the exact question, Q13: “I’m going to mention a number of people running for president in 2016. For each one, please tell me, yes or no, whether you could see yourself supporting that person for president in 2016. If you don’t know the name, please just say so.”

Sanders:	49% yes	48% no
Clinton:	41% yes	58% no
Trump:	31% yes	68% no

If these numbers are true, why isn’t Sanders winning? The answer is simple: These numbers are among all voters, many of whom are shut out of the nominating process. Hillary Clinton’s numbers are better if you only ask Democrats. Donald Trump does better among Republicans.

I hear you: these are the party primaries not the general election. I would say you were right if there were a level playing field for all political parties. We have a two party system, and it is becoming clear that the two parties do not represent the views of the whole country.

According to the Pew Research Center, based on 2014 data 39% of Americans identify as Independents, 32% as Democrats, and 23% as Republicans. This is the highest percentage of Independents in more than 75 years of public opinion polling.

As we are seeing in the open primaries, Bernie Sanders beats Hillary Clinton with Independents in state after state. The strongest candidate for President in November is Bernie Sanders. If all voters had a chance to weigh in during the nominating process we would likely see a race between Trump and Sanders. If we had a multi-party system Sanders, would have a chance to win as an Independent or as a candidate of another party.

The reality is that the system is rigged in favor of the two major political parties, and we will probably be stuck choosing between the two most unpopular candidates for President. It is time for a democracy movement in America. We don’t have a real democracy now.

---

Scott Galindez attended Syracuse University, where he first became politically active. The writings of El Salvador's slain archbishop Oscar Romero and the on-campus South Africa divestment movement converted him from a Reagan supporter to an activist for Peace and Justice. Over the years he has been influenced by the likes of Philip Berrigan, William Thomas, Mitch Snyder, Don White, Lisa Fithian, and Paul Wellstone. Scott met Marc Ash while organizing counterinaugural events after George W. Bush's first stolen election. Scott will be spending a year covering the presidential election from Iowa.

Wingnut Week In Review: Making Lemons Out Of ‘Lemonade’

April 29, 2016

Terrance Heath
Campaign for America's Future
ourfuture.org 

Nobody but nobody drops an album like Beyoncé. The lady single-handedly changed the game on how albums are released, and showed herself to be a savvy marketer.

This week, after dropping multiple hints, Beyoncé finally dropped her latest, a 13-track collection called “Lemonade,” a deeply personal and boldly political meditation on infidelity, race and sexism that dares to embrace both anger and forgiveness. 

“Lemonade” is also a love letter to black women. In the hourlong HBO special and “video album,” the camera lingers on the faces of countless black women as Beyoncé gives voice to her own experience as a black woman, while honoring and validating those of others.

That all proved more than enough for wingnuts to exhibit the kind of derangement only First Lady Michelle Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton previously inspired.

None went nearly as crazy as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Somebody obviously slipped something in his lemonade:

● Jones claimed that “Lemonade” is part of a CIA plot to inspire “urban terrorism” to ensure that “young people go out and act like maniacs and try to start a race war in this country.”
● Not done, Jones denounced Beyoncé as a “psychopath” whose music is “designed to absolutely ruin [children’s] lives on purpose,” all because his daughter comes home singing Beyoncé’s songs.
● Bravely stepping up to tell black folks what’s good for them, Jones begged black parents to “stop killing your kids and get them in church, whatever, take them away from Beyoncé, who wants to eat their brain with the CIA, literally.” The CIA? Is that a new brand of hot sauce?
● Larry Tomczak (who?) declared “Lemonade” “scandalous,” an “outrage,” and “idolatry,” before moving on to do a “holy dance” on the graves of both David Bowie and Prince.
● Fresh from failing to make it on American television, Piers Morgan longed for the old Beyoncé and claimed, “The new Beyoncé wants to be seen as a black woman political activist first and foremost, entertainer and musician second.” Never mind that Bey hasn’t exactly been apolitical with her support for Barack Obama’s campaigns, and work on gun reform and police brutality. Twitter took care of him, tho’.

Fortunately, we have Stephen Colbert to white-mansplain it all.

Meanwhile, Beyoncé is selling “Boycott Beyoncé” merchandise at her concert. Making lemons into lemonade, natch.

Here’s the rest of the best of the worst in wingnuttery this week:

● Former House Speaker John Boehner is a bitter, bitter man – and it’s glorious. Boehner recently shared his thoughts on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), calling Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh,” and “a miserable son of a bitch.”
● Fox News hosted “climate expert” Marc Morano to explain how a stuffed armadillo proved “there’s nothing to worry about global warming.”
● North Carolina state Republican Senator Buck Newton is running for state attorney general, with a great campaign slogan: “Keep our state straight.” All that’s missing are the white sheets.
● This Family Dollar cashier ranting and raving about how refusing to serve LGBT customers is a fine example of what laws like the ones in Mississippi and North Carolina are designed to protect.
● Bryan Fischer said that Target’s policy of letting transgender persons use the bathrooms appropriate to their gender identity would turn the story into a motel for “rebellious teenagers.”
● Meanwhile GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told a reporter he basically doesn’t want any transgender person using any public restroom anywhere.
● Caitlyn Jenner may once have declared her support for Cruz, but that didn’t stop her from trolling Cruz by stopping at Trump Tower to use the ladies’ room. “By the way Ted,” she quipped, “nobody got molested.”
● Jenner might want to avoid Oxford, Alabama. The town recently passed a law punishing individuals for using public restrooms that do not match the biological gender on their birth certificates. Each offense is a $500 fine and up to six months in jail.
● Meanwhile, Tennessee’s governor signed a bill allowing therapists to deny service to LGBT people.
● Oklahoma is becoming one of the worst states for women in America. First, the state assembly found an absurd new way to ban all abortions. Then an Oklahoma court ruled that forced oral sex is not rape if the victim is passed out drunk.
● Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said that you might be the real bigot if you’re thinking of moving to Canada if Donald Trump wins the presidential election.
● Maine’s Republican Governor Paul LePage told The Associated Press that Indian workers are the “hardest” and “the worst ones” to understand, but then made it all better when he added that they’re all “lovely people but you’ve got to have an interpreter.”
● LePage later stomped out of an open meeting at the University of Maine when he was confronted by students holding signs critical of him and his policies, but not before calling them “idiots.”
● Newtown conspiracy theorist Dr. James Tracy is suing Florida Atlantic University for firing him for failing to submit forms documenting the work he did outside of the University.
● Ben Carson called putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill a “cheap trick” to convince black people to support “a nearly bankrupt symbol of American debt.” I bet he says that every time he cashes an infomercial check.
● In a WorldNet Daily column, Don Feder objected to putting Tubman on the $20 bill, because “American history was made by white males.”

WHEN WILL WE REALIZE IT AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN?

The Voice of Rim Country

With the delay and possibly the cancellation of their plans to bring the ALA Charter School to Payson and the lack of any formal commitment from any university to build a campus in Payson, it seems that we are left with only one other possible institution of higher learning to occupy the land intended for "educational use only".  (Payson, AZ) Mayor Kenny Evans and ladies and gentlemen of the SLE, start your negotiations now. And bring your whoopee cushions.