Randle was forced to choose between his livelihood and his right to vote. As of the April 5 presidential primary, he is still not able to vote in Wisconsin. After voting without incident in the formerly Jim Crow South, he was disenfranchised when he moved to the North. Stories like Randle’s are why the Wisconsin Supreme Court dubbed the voter ID law a “de facto poll tax” and it was blocked in state and federal court until a panel of Republican-appointed judges reinstated the measure in 2014.

Randle is one of 300,000 registered voters in Wisconsin, 9 percent of the electorate, who do not have a government-issued photo ID and could be disenfranchised by the state’s new voter-ID law, which is in effect for the first time in 2016. Wisconsin, one of the country’s most important battleground states, is one of 16 states with new voting restrictions in place since 2012. The five-hour lines in Arizona were the most recent example of America’s election problems. Wisconsin could be next.

Randle’s account is hardly unique in Wisconsin. The lead plaintiff who challenged the voter-ID law, 89-year-old Ruthelle Frank, has been voting since 1948 and has served on the Village Board in her hometown of Brokaw since 1996, but cannot get a photo ID for voting because her maiden name is misspelled on her birth certificate, which would cost $200 to correct. “No one should have to pay a fee to be able to vote,” Frank said.

Others blocked from the polls include a man born in a concentration camp in Germany who lost his birth certificate in a fire; a woman who lost use of her hands but could not use her daughter as power of attorney at the DMV; and a 90-year-old veteran of Iwo Jima who could not vote with his veterans ID.

Noted voting-rights expert Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University, says the Wisconsin voter-ID law “represents the first time since the era of the literacy test that state officials have told eligible voters that they cannot exercise their fundamental right to vote—not in the next election, probably not ever.”

There is a clear racial disparity in terms of who is most impacted by the law. In 2012, African-American voters in Wisconsin were 1.7 times as likely as white voters to lack a driver’s license or state photo ID, and Latino voters were 2.6 times as likely as white voters to lack such ID. More than 60 percent of people who’ve requested a photo ID for voting from the DMV have been black or Hispanic, according to legal filings.

The law also targets students. Student IDs from most public and private universities and colleges are not accepted because they don’t contain signatures or a two-year expiration date (compared to a ten-year expiration for driver’s licenses). “The standard student ID at only three of the University of Wisconsin’s 13 four-year schools and at seven of the state’s 23 private colleges can be used as a voter photo ID,” according to Common Cause Wisconsin.

Nonaffiliated voters must notify their counties by April 26 in order to receive an Independent Party ballot.

(Politicus USA) WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Wall Street investment banks must take losses amid efforts to fix Puerto Rico’s debt crisis, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said, adding that policymakers must focus on the island’s people, not financial firms.

“These wealthy investors must take a significant haircut. The people in Puerto Rico should not be asked to suffer even more, so that a handful of wealthy investors can become even wealthier,” Sanders said in a statement on Friday.

(TruthDig) Starting Sept. 9, prisoners in the United States will begin a coordinated effort to shut down prisons across the country. They plan to stop working in correctional institutions. Without prisoners doing their jobs, these facilities cannot be run. According to Support Prisoner Resistance, the nationwide prisoner work stoppage will serve as a protest against prison slavery, the school-to-prison pipeline, police terror and post-release controls.

Some people may bristle at the notion that prisoners are slaves, but they are forced to work for little or no pay. The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery, also maintains a legal exception for continued slavery in prisons. It states “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.

Correctional officers watch over every move of prisoners, and if assigned tasks are not performed correctly, prisoners are punished.”

Of those 2.2 million prisoners, the racial disparity is glaring. The Sentencing Project reports that “more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities. For Black males in their thirties, 1 in every 10 is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the ‘war on drugs,’ in which two-thirds of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color.”

The organizers for this national prison strike campaign chose the start date for symbolic reasons. On Sept. 9, 1971, prisoners shut down and took over Attica, New York’s most notorious prison. A total of 43 people were killed in the Attica prison riots—one of the darkest chapters in American penal history.

(Progressive Army) From the beginning of this cycle’s presidential race, Black people of all stripes, myself included, flocked to the well-known Democratic brand, Hillary Clinton. It felt safe, warm and familiar. I was content. I was on a barreling freight train headed straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in the shadow of the one-and-only Big Dog, Bill Clinton. This train had been in motion since before the long, hard days of W & Cheney’s evil ass. We were destined to win and win BIG.

Then I felt a pull. A beckoning of sorts. I went to the window. In the wake of the Billary Express, I saw the carnage. I saw my communities crumbling from jobs lost to NAFTA. Black mothers skipping meals as they realized their meager wages could not make up the gap left by the end of their welfare allotment. Black men jailed by an unjust drug war that targeted my community was turned from “stun” to “kill.” I saw Black and Brown wealth and the “ownership society” destroyed by financial deregulation. The voices of Black brilliance warned me of past transgressions against my community that needed redress- West, Coates, Alexander, et al.

My gut told me I had no business on this locomotive. I pushed past the smiling faces. Many were like me, gleeful. Just glad to be riding along. As I walked through first class, I saw many people I looked up to- “leaders.” Some were even known to me as heroes. These people were not smiling. They were plotting. Cutting deals with each other, those in the luxury class and Billary Express leadership. I then realized that my fellow riders were not passengers. We were cargo. Votes to be delivered for whatever Team Billary decided we were worth.

As I exited this nightmare, I heard another voice. An old Jewish, Democratic Socialist with unruly hair and a spine of steel. A plain-spoken man offering the things I knew my country needed. There were no fairy tales here. First, it was a whisper of revolution. A Political Revolution. I knew that meant one thing – lots and lots of work. Yet, the payoff was real. My children and grandkids could get a postsecondary education without being saddled with debt like I knew the rich kids could. They could have healthcare that was straightforward and cost effective. They would have a cleaner planet. Police would serve and protect all communities equally. A roaring economy that worked for everyone. The predatory class would be tamed and repurposed for productive tasks. An end to the senseless and endless war. We would rejoin the world as a partner. We are the richest most powerful country in human history. Nothing is out of reach if we work hard together and will it so. We had our own little Love Train.

Dispatches from the Billary Express were frequent and deafening. They never actually made sense. The first edition told us that the SNCC organizer and the Goldwater Girl had equal histories concerning race in our nation’s darkest hours and we shouldn’t talk about either. Huh? The second said that economic concerns were White people issues. What? The third indicated that Urban Poverty in neighborhoods of color was just like everyone else’s poverty. Come again? The messages kept coming. Only the tiny Love Train riders didn’t understand. Even some pedestrians cheered at every missive as if they were written on stone tablets. They laughed at us. Something was clearly wrong with us. We were cursed with the math, the history, and the English. We continued to be baffled. We are all OK with that. We continue the work of political revolution. We will accept all in our ranks. Even former Billary Expressers like me.