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The retirement puzzle -- Capitalist crisis and pension insecurity -- Reconversion and the origin of bargained plans -- Turning labor into finance capital -- Toward the 401(k) ownership society -- Conclusions

In The Moth Snowstorm Michael McCarthy, one of Britain's leading writers on the environment, proposes this joy as a defence of a natural world which is ever more threatened, and which, he argues, is inadequately served by the two defences put forward hitherto: sustainable development and the recognition of ecosystem services. Drawing on a wealth of memorable experiences from a lifetime of watching and thinking about wildlife and natural landscapes, The Moth Snowstorm not only presents a new way of looking at the world around us, but effortlessly blends with it a remarkable and moving memoir of childhood trauma from which love of the natural world emerged. It is a powerful, timely, and wholly original book which comes at a time when nature has never needed it more

How can finance be durably democratized? In the centers of financial power in both the United States and the United Kingdom, proposals now circulate to give workers and the public more say over how flows of credit are allocated. This article examines five democratization proposals: credit union franchises, public investment banks, sovereign wealth funds, inclusive ownership funds, and bank nationalization. It considers how these plans might activate worker and public engagement in decision making about finance by focusing on three modes of public participation: representative democracy, direct democracy, and deliberative minipublics. It then considers the degree to which democratization plans might be resilient to de-democratization threats from business. It argues that of the five, bank nationalization goes furthest in guarding against de-democratization threats but is still pocked with pitfalls if it relies solely on representative democracy. It argues that two criteria appear necessary for democratically durable alternatives: the active direct participation of workers and citizens and the weakening of businesses' capacity for democratic retrenchment.

Most of the news about Northern Ireland for the past year has been about what effect Brexit will have on the North's relationship with the Republic of Ireland. The discussion of eliminating the "soft-border," and replacing it with a "hard- border," which would see the reinstitution of checkpoints along the 500-kilometer border, continues to dominate international headlines. The EU has been attempting to allay concerns, and in March, President of the European Council Donald Tusk, traveled to Dublin and reaffirmed the EU's commitment to avoiding a hard border and maintaining the peace process in the region (Stone, 2018). At the surface level, this hard border issue would appear to just be an economic problem that threatens the current trade arrangement between Northern Ireland and its Southern neighbor, but it is also an Irish identity issue which some fear would threaten the longstanding freedom of movement, employment and residency between Britain and the Republic, which predates both Irish independence and EU membership. A hard border would fundamentally divide the population in a matter that has not been seen in decades. Tony Blair recently commented on the border issue, stating that, "I find it not just disappointing but sickening that people should really be prepared to sacrifice peace in Northern Ireland on the altar of Brexit" (Allegretti, 2018). Though this quote may sound melodramatic, it is a real fear for some that the current peace and harmony enjoyed in Northern Ireland could revert back to how relations were during "the Troubles," a multi-decade streak of sectarian violence that afflicted the region from the late 1960's through the 1990's, and pitted Catholic and Protestant neighbors against each other. This paper attempts to examine the effects that the Troubles had on the ever-changing Irish national identity during this time period, specifically in the field of poetry, by analyzing the works of several prominent Irish and Northern Irish poets, including Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Ciaran ...

This article explores union attempts to control pension fund investment for the debate on financial restructuring in the United States. It puts popular control of finance into comparative and historical perspective and argues that laws and politics help explain why the flow of finance is corporate controlled. First, changes in the legal regime—the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974—put constraints on labor's ability to influence investment decisions. This is evident when comparing single- and multi-employer plans, where the laws had different consequences. Second, attempts to reform these laws failed. Had they been successful, Carter's proposed economic revitalization plan in the run-up to his failed reelection in 1980 would have created new ways for unions to control and redirect retirement investment for social purposes. The reform failure is treated as a "suppressed historical alternative" through a comparison with a successful reform in Quebec, Canada, which gave unions broad controls over the Solidarity Fund in 1983. The findings suggest, somewhat counter-intuitively, that legal restrictions need to be loosened for democratic control of finance to be possible. For pension funds, more regulations led to more corporate control, not less.