The Guardian: Evicted by Matthew Desmond review – what if the problem of poverty is that it’s profitable to other people?

You might not think that there is a lot of money to be extracted from a dilapidated trailer park or a black neighbourhood of “sagging duplexes, fading murals, 24-hour daycares”. But you would be wrong. Tobin Charney makes $400,000 a year out of his 131 trailers, some of which are little better than hovels. Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher who is one of the only black female landlords in the city, makes enough in rents on her numerous properties – some presentable, others squalid – to holiday in Jamaica and attend conferences on real estate. [...]

The main condition holding them back, Desmond argues, is rent. The standard measure is that your rent should be no more than 30% of your income, but for poor people it can be 70% or more. After he paid Sherrena his $550 rent out of his welfare cheque, Lamar had only $2.19 a day for the month. When he is forced to repay a welfare cheque he has been sent in error and falls behind on rent, he sells his food stamps for half their face value and volunteers to paint an upstairs apartment, but it is not enough. People such as Lamar live in chronic debt to their landlord, who can therefore oust them easily whenever it is convenient – if they demand repairs, for example, like Doreen, or if a better tenant comes along. Sherrena liked renting to the clients of a for-profit agency that handles – for a fee – the finances of people on disability payments who can’t manage on their own. Money from government programmes intended to help the poor – welfare, disability benefits, the earned-income tax credit – go straight into the landlord’s pocket and, ironically, fuel rising housing costs. Public housing and housing vouchers are scarce. Three in four who qualify for housing assistance get nothing. [...]

As Desmond shows, the main victims of eviction are women. Why? They are paid less than men for doing the same job. They are less able to make deals with their landlord, who is almost always a man, to work off part of their rent with manual labour. The main reason, though, is that women are raising children as single mothers. They not only have all the costs and burdens of childrearing, they need bigger apartments – which, since landlords dislike renting to families with young children, are harder to find and a lot harder to keep. Other sociologists – Kathryn Edin, for example – have found that single mothers often get help under the table from their children’s fathers, but Arleen, Doreen and Doreen’s adult daughter Patrice get mostly trouble from men, who are variously abusive, addicted, vanished or in prison. In one of the book’s many small sad moments, Arleen claims she receives child support in order to seem more stable and respectable to a prospective landlord. In fact, she gets nothing.

read the article

The Atlantic: The Window for Brexit May Already Have Closed

Over that same period, however, Britain’s Conservative Party has become more and more committed to Brexit. Sixty-three percent of Conservative Party supporters would rather see Scotland secede from the United Kingdom than abandon the Brexit project. Sixty-one percent of Conservatives would accept significant damage to the British economy to achieve Brexit. Fifty-nine percent would let Northern Ireland go. Fifty-four percent would rather see the Conservative Party itself destroyed than yield on Brexit. [...]

This time, however, the historic British resolution for political crises is unavailable. New rules lock the Johnson government into office until 2022 unless two-thirds of Parliament approve an earlier election. Even if there were an election, Johnson might not lose, because the main opposition party—Labour—has chosen as its leader an extreme leftist who is widely regarded as pathetically inadequate. Jeremy Corbyn’s own parliamentary party has repeatedly tried to get rid of him, accusing him of anti-Semitism, misogyny, and general cluelessness. By a margin of 13 percentage points, British people would prefer even the most painful possible Brexit to a Corbyn-led government.[...]

Johnson could try to lead Britain out of the EU despite the extension. Some of his ministers say they are determined to drive forward regardless of public opinion. But Parliament has voted to require affirmative approval by Parliament of a British exit. Johnson would have to defy that vote and arguably break the law to achieve Brexit. The British courts have slapped him down once, when he tried to prorogue Parliament despite lacking a working majority in the House of Commons. If he bolts for Brexit despite the law, the courts will surely slap him down again. While Johnson is a risk-taking politician, he is no Donald Trump: He is not ultimately a lawbreaker. [...]

What is driving the change in the U.K. is generational replacement. Until very recently, Britain was marked by a uniquely weak attachment to a “European” identity. On the eve of the Brexit vote, only 15 percent of British people thought of themselves as “European,” by far the lowest level of identification for a big EU state. The most striking and surprising effect of the Brexit debate in the U.K. has been to incubate for the first time a European political identity among the young. You see EU-flag pins on backpacks on the subway, EU flags in windows around the University of London. Since June 2016, 2.5 million young people have entered the British electorate, and about 1.4 million older people have died out of it.

read the article

The Week: The coming end of Christian America

America is still a "Christian nation," if the term simply means a majority of the population will claim the label when a pollster calls. But, as a new Pew Research report unsparingly explains, the decline of Christianity in the United States "continues at a rapid pace." A bare 65 percent of Americans now say they're Christians, down from 78 percent as recently as 2007. The deconverted are mostly moving away from religion altogether, and the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated — the "nones" — have swelled from 16 to 26 percent over the same period. If this rate of change continues, the U.S. will be majority non-Christian by about 2035, with the nones representing well over one third of the population. [...]

In what remains of the American church, reactions to this decline will vary. Some will see it as a positive apocalypse, which is to say a revealing of what was always true. America was never really a Christian nation. Our government and society have long made choices and embraced values that are difficult, if not impossible, to square with Christianity, so an end of any association between the two is welcome. Likewise, the proportion of Americans who actually practiced Christian faith in any meaningful, life-altering sense was always substantially lower than the proportion who would identify as Christian in a poll. What we're seeing is less mass deconversion than a belated honesty which may be an opportunity for new faithfulness, repentance, or even revival. [...]

Yet as contradictory as it may seem, I'll also suggest left-wing nones may come to find they miss the religious right when grappling with its successor. The New York Times' Ross Douthat has argued the post-religious right of which President Trump has given us a glimpse will be an ugly beast indeed. Polling shows the "churchgoers who ultimately voted for Trump over Clinton still tend to hold different views than his more secular supporters," he wrote last year, including being "less authoritarian and tribal on race and identity. ...The trend was consistent: The more often a Trump voter attended church, the less white-identitarian they appeared, the more they expressed favorable views of racial minorities, and the less they agreed with populist arguments on trade and immigration." In other words, on the right, the decline of Christianity looks to mean the rise of racism, as the communal life of active faith is replaced by darker impulses.

read the article

UnHerd: Will the Evangelicals dump Trump?

This was Donald Trump’s third appearance at the convention in the last four years, a necessity when 81% of white Evangelicals voted for him in 2016. After sticking with Trump through sexual assault accusations and scores of half-truths and outright lies, it seemed as though nothing could shake their faith in the man; yet an accumulation of factors may be eroding Evangelicals’ enthusiasm for the President, and perhaps even undermining their support altogether. [...]

Even religiously conservative politicians are starting to break ranks. Retiring Illinois Rep. John Shimkus, who gained notoriety for using the Bible to dismiss climate change, officially withdrew his support for the President over the “despicable” decision regarding Syria. And prominent conservative Christian media personality Erick Erickson tweeted at Nancy Pelosi to speed up the impeachment process so that “perhaps we’ll still have time to save some of the Kurds”. [...]

This betrayal is especially hard to swallow because Christian persecution in the Middle East has been a prominent issue for American conservative Christians, and many have therefore been keeping track of how the Kurds became the major defenders of Christian minority populations in Iraq and Syria. American Evangelicals fear these Middle Eastern Christians may now be endangered by a policy that decimates and alienates the Kurds and allows for the resurgence of ISIS. [...]

Yet even with Trump’s apparent success in reshaping the courts, Evangelicals may be in for a disappointment. New Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have pushed the Court somewhat to the Right, but they haven’t been the firebrand conservatives that many conservatives were looking for. The new justices may prove unwilling to halt the trend of advances made to LGBT rights, and sexual identity may be ruled a federally protected class.

read the article

The Economist: How Brexit is changing the EU

Brexit once seemed to pose an existential threat to the European Union. But Britain's withdrawal process has had some surprising results—especially when it comes to how other member states view the EU.