End US colonial rule in Puerto Rico!

The imposition of a fiscal board on Puerto Rico strips away the mask from a simple fact: the island nation is a U.S. colony.

All seven members of the board will be appointed by the president of the United States. It will have the power to veto any law passed by the Puerto Rican legislature, to order layoffs of government workers, to sell off Puerto Rican government property and to impose criminal penalties on anyone who disobeys its edicts. So much for the “self-governing” Commonwealth.

The big-business media and politicians often slander the Puerto Rican people as lazy riffraff who live off welfare and food stamps, with a corrupt government that won’t make hard decisions to pay off its creditors.

At best, they say some blame falls on “vulture” hedge funds, which bought up a chunk of the island’s bonds for as little as 30 cents on the dollar, but demand payment in full.

But the problem is not vulture capitalism: it’s capitalism, specifically in the form of Washington’s imperialist domination.

U.S. capitalists of all stripes reap superprofits from the colonial oppression of Puerto Rico: the giant pharmaceutical corporations that benefit from low wages and taxes on the island; the shipping companies that have a monopoly on cargo trade; agribusiness that provides 80 percent of the food because imperialist domination wiped out much of the island’s agricultural production.

With the layoffs of thousands, increases in sales taxes and cuts in pensions, working people in Puerto Rico are already paying for the capitalist crisis. The fiscal board will further tighten the screws.

President Obama and leading Democratic and Republican Party politicians, including Bernie Sanders, say they are for a referendum to give the people of Puerto Rico a choice between independence, statehood or keeping its current status.

But any vote under colonial rule is a sham. What kind of free vote can there be under the watchful eye — including cops, courts, and spies — of those who benefit from Puerto Rico remaining a colony under the rule of the same imperialist government that has held independence fighter Oscar López in U.S. prisons for the last 35 years?

The Socialist Workers Party at its founding convention in 1938 opposed “any attempt by American imperialism, open or masked, to infringe upon the right of self-determination of any nation or people.”

“More than ever working people in Puerto Rico and in the U.S. have everything to gain by fighting together for our common interests and backing the fight for Puerto Rico’s independence from colonial rule,” Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president, told the Militant. She’s right.

Independence for Puerto Rico! Free Oscar López!

Related articles:
Puerto Rico debt crisis: product of US capitalism’s colonial rule

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