Inside the American Injustice System

America’s justice system has been broken for a while. You can trace the development of our current blight of mass imprisonment—we have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world—in a nearly unbroken lineage from President Richard Nixon’s 1971 declaration of a “war on drugs,” through the disproportionate penalties for crack versus powder cocaine possession in the 1980s, to Bill Clinton’s reelection friendly 1994 crime bill. For many Americans, most of them poor and from communities of color, what policy wonks call the carceral state is a daily fact of life. That the iniquities of the

politics Sept/Oct/Nov 2014

The Solipsist State

When President Barack Obama announced a sustained campaign of drone assaults on strongholds of the militant isis (Islamic State) faction in Iraq and Kurdistan, pundits tended to categorize the move as a limited, one-off maneuver. The idea was to contain the spread of isis influence in northern Iraq, and to aid some 40,000 Yazidi Kurds under siege from the group on an isolated mountain. Obama himself stressed that “there’s no American military solution to the larger crisis in Iraq”—and as if to prove him right, the Iraqi government quickly descended into a political crisis, as a newly appointed