3 articles on N. Korea: 30% N. Koreans killed in '50s; CFR Grand Strategy; Long, Dirty History of U.S. Warmongering against North Korea

4/26/2017 11:32 PM

'Maggie Zhou' via BostonUNAC

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KNOW THE FACTS: North Korea lost close to 30% of its population as a result of US bombings in the 1950s

http://www.globalresearch.ca/know-the-facts-north-korea-lost-close-to-30-of-its-population-as-a-result-of-us-bombings-in-the-1950s/22131

'During The Second World War the United Kingdom lost 0.94% of its population, France lost 1.35%, China lost 1.89% and the US lost 0.32%. During the Korean war, North Korea lost close to 30 % of its population.'

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The Long, Dirty History of U.S. Warmongering against North Korea

http://progressive.org/dispatches/the-long-dirty-history-of-u-s-warmongering-against-north-kor/

'The Korean War was an asymmetrical conflict in which the United States monopolized the skies, raining down ruin. Four million Koreans—the vast majority of them civilians—were killed. ...... In North Korea where no family was left unscathed by the terroristic violence of the Korean War, anti-Americanism thus cannot be dismissed as state ideology alone.'

'Instability in Korea has, for several decades, lined the pockets of those who profit from the business of war. Indeed, the Korean War rehabilitated a U.S. economy geared, as a result of World War II, toward total war. Seized as opportunity, the war enabled the Truman administration to triple U.S. defense spending and furnished a rationale for the bilateral linking of Asian client states to the United States, and the establishment of what Chalmers Johnson called an “empire of bases” in the Pacific. General James Van Fleet, the commanding officer of UN forces in Korea, described the war as “a blessing” and remarked, “There had to be a Korea either here or some place in the world.”'

'Far from being an intractable foe, North Korea has repeatedly asked the United States to sign a peace treaty that would bring the unresolved Korean War to a long-overdue end.'

'It has also proposed that the United States cease its annual war games with South Korea—games, we must recognize, that involve the simulated invasion and occupation of North Korea, the “decapitation” of its leadership, and rehearsals of a preemptive nuclear strike. In return, North Korea will cap its nuclear weapons testing. China has reiterated this proposal. The United States maintains that its joint war games with South Korea are simply business as usual and has not seen fit to respond.'

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“Dangerous Circumstances”

The Council on Foreign Relations Proposes a New Grand Strategy Towards China

by Laurence H. Shoup

https://monthlyreview.org/2015/09/01/dangerous-circumstances/

This article cites CFR report to show how the unambiguous reason for US policies in the Asia Pacific is always to maintain “U.S. primacy in Asia”, and the existing “international order” where US hegemony remains unchallenged, by the perceived threat from the growing Chinese power.  The stated purpose of “protecting vital US national interests”, is simply euphemism for the economic interests of the extremely wealthy and powerful U.S. plutocracy.

In this endeavor, the countries deemed most important for US purposes of maintaining its “primacy” in Asia over China, are Japan, S. Korea (ROK), Australia and India, in that order.  To that end, the strategy “include(s) working with the ROK (and Japan) to develop a comprehensive strategy for regime change in North Korea.”

 

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Maggie Zhou, PhD

https://www.facebook.com/maggie.zhou.543

Twitter: @mzhou_us

mzhou_us@yahoo.com

+41 61 535 0508 (Switzerland, landline)

Skype: mzhou_us

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It's a Beautiful Day-Bulgaria-In Honor Of The Summer Of Love, 1967

A View From The Left-NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong-Join The Resistance Now!

NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong

Trump to visit Israel, Saudi Arabia, Vatican in first foreign trip

The president said he will begin his trip in Saudi Arabia, where he will convene a “historic gathering” of “leaders from all across the Muslim world” to form a new push to combat terrorism and Islamic radicalism and confront Iran… The gathering in Saudi Arabia will also include leaders of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as other nations…  Unlike Obama and Bush, Canada and Mexico will not be among the first group of countries Trump visits. The president has clashed with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto over trade and immigration.   More

How Americans Remember (and Forget) Their Wars

While it is natural for people and nations to focus on their own sacrifice and suffering rather than the death and destruction they themselves inflict, in the case of the United States such cognitive astigmatism is backlighted by the country’s abiding sense of being exceptional, not just in power but also in virtue. In paeans to “American exceptionalism,” it is an article of faith that the highest values of Western and Judeo-Christian civilization guide the nation’s conduct -- to which Americans add their country’s purportedly unique embrace of democracy, respect for each and every individual, and stalwart defense of a “rules-based” international order.  Such self-congratulation requires and reinforces selective memory. “Terror,” for instance, has become a word applied to others, never to oneself. And yet during World War II, U.S. and British strategic-bombing planners explicitly regarded their firebombing of enemy cities as terror bombing, and identified destroying the morale of noncombatants in enemy territory as necessary and morally acceptable…  The sanctification of the site of the destroyed World Trade Center as “Ground Zero” -- a term previously associated with nuclear explosions in general and Hiroshima in particular -- reinforced this deft legerdemain in the manipulation of memory.   More

KINZER: Old debts come due in North Korea

Until 1979, the United States worked with focused determination to prevent Pakistan from obtaining banned nuclear equipment and material. In the following years, under terms of our agreement with Pakistan, we abandoned that effort. This allowed Pakistan’s nuclear program to blossom. Pakistan successfully tested its first nuclear device in 1998. Along the way, it began sharing secrets with another quasi-pariah, North Korea… Nuclear expertise and equipment from Pakistan gave North Korea the ability to provoke today’s crisis. Pakistan was able to develop that expertise and equipment largely because the United States agreed to turn a blind eye to its global proliferation campaign. Today’s North Korea crisis flows from a decision we made more than 35 years ago. It is a classic example of what national leaders do too often: jump to respond to an immediate problem and leave future generations to clean up the messy results.  More

Why Do North Koreans Hate Us? One Reason — They Remember the Korean War.

North Korean officials make wild threats against the United States while the regime, led by the brutal and sadistic Kim Jong-un, pumps out fake news in the form of self-serving propaganda, on an industrial scale. In the DPRK, anti-American hatred is a commodity never in short supply. “The hate, though,” as long-time North Korea watcher Blaine Harden observed in the Washington Post, “ is not all manufactured.” Some of it, he wrote, “is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets.”  … How many Americans, for example, are aware of the fact that U.S. planes dropped on the Korean peninsula more bombs — 635,000 tons — and napalm — 32,557 tons — than during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese during World War II?  How many Americans know that “over a period of three years or so,” to quote Air Force General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, “we killed off … 20 percent of the population”?  Twenty. Percent. For a point of comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland’s pre-World War II population. According to LeMay, “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.”  Every. Town. More than three million civilians are believed to have been killed in the fighting, the vast majority of them in the north.   More

Trump and Putin Agree to Seek Syria Cease-Fire

President Trump reopened direct communications with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday and sought to reignite what he hoped would be a special relationship by agreeing to work together to broker a cease-fire in war-torn Syria. In their first telephone conversation since the United States launched a cruise missile strike on Syria’s Moscow-backed military to retaliate for a chemical weapons attack on civilians, Mr. Trump agreed to send a representative to Russian-brokered cease-fire talks that start on Wednesday in Astana, Kazakhstan. He and Mr. Putin also discussed meeting each other in Germany in July…  “President Trump and President Putin agreed that the suffering in Syria has gone on for far too long and that all parties must do all they can to end the violence,” the White House statement said. The Kremlin said Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov would “intensify” their dialogue to “search for options” in Syria.  More

Turkey and Russia push for safe-zones in Syria

Russian representatives had presented the rebels with a proposal for four "de-escalation zones" in Syria where the warring sides would be separated by "security lines"…Putin also said Russian and Syrian government jets would halt flights over the specified zones if all sides respect the ceasefire.  The proposal presented to the opposition in Astana delineates four zones in Syria where front lines between the government and opposition forces would be frozen and fighting halted, according to a statement made by the opposition.  The four zones include areas in the provinces of Idlib and Homs, the Eastern Ghouta suburb outside Damascus, and an area in the south of the country.  The zones, according to the proposal, would be monitored by international observers and allow for the voluntary return of refugees…  Later on Wednesday, Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy for Syria, called on the opposition to return to the talks in Astana "because what is important is also to look at the possibility of an outcome on a de-escalation". He stressed the importance of not destroying "the opportunity of good news" related to this issue.   More

VIJAY PRASHAD: ISIS Gains Power and Innocents Die as Syria Retreats From Peace

In Syria, the armed opposition knew from 2011 that it would not defeat the Assad government without the accompaniment of massive US airstrikes. This is why it has sought to encourage US intervention. Obama’s slogan - ‘Assad must go’ – and the adventures of US Ambassador Robert Ford to opposition protests suggested to the armed opposition that the US cruise missiles were on the way. The shadowy promises from the United States prolonged this war, with the rebels unwilling to come to the table because they assumed that the maximal position (regime change) would be reality. At the same time, the US along with its Gulf Arab allies and Turkey financed and armed the opposition through Turkey and Jordan. This program was known as Timber Sycamore, which was the pipeline for millions of dollars of arms that entered not only the various rebel forces but also the black market. The hope that the US will eventually overthrow Assad remains central to the strategy of even the al-Qaeda proxy. Trump’s 7 April strike merely rekindled that hope and therefore broke the momentum of the peace talks… Air cover came from the base that Trump’s cruise missiles hit, which delivered ISIS a momentary advantage on the ground. ISIS chatter now suggests that defeat in Mosul would be compensated by a victory in Deir ez-Zor. In practical terms, the Trump strike might very well have made this possible.   More

Let's Call Western Media Coverage of Syria By Its Real Name: Propaganda

Syria is proof of how low mainstream Western media are prepared to sink in the service of state power; it’s where journalistic standards, like global jihadists, go to die. Rank propaganda is the order of the day. Honest observers are appalled. Stephen Kinzer wrote that “coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press,” while Robert Fisk described the war as “the most poorly reported conflict in the world.” Patrick Cockburn registered a similar concern, writing that “Western media has allowed itself to become a conduit for propaganda for one side in this savage conflict.” … So the ideology-driven Western media, in allying themselves with the armed opposition in Syria, have helped to create a situation in which it pays to kidnap and murder people who seek to report the truth. Ergo, they have violated the canons of their profession in the most egregious manner possible. And you’ll have noticed that they’re totally shameless about it. None of this gives them a moment of pause. They keep pumping out the propaganda, day in, day out, never stopping to reflect on the potential consequences. When one story falls apart, they move on to the next one. The most, or perhaps only, important thing is to manipulate public opinion so that it corresponds to government policy. Beyond that, who cares?   More

A View From The Left-WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME-Join The Resistance

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WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

How the GOP vote to undo Obamacare could affect the places that went for Trump

Republicans in the House successfully moved a bill forward Thursday that could make insurance more costly — especially for those living in places around the country where President Trump is most popular. The bill would undo and rewrite some of the most consequential elements of the Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare. The GOP legislation would limit the financial help Obamacare makes available to middle-class households for buying insurance. Additionally, the legislation could weaken protections for patients with certain conditions, allowing insurers to charge them more because they require more expensive treatment…   An analysis by The Washington Post found that of the 35 counties where residents stand to lose the most in financial assistance under the GOP plan, Trump carried 33 — in many cases, by overwhelming margins.  More

Opposing Trump's "Moral Chaos," People's Budget Offers Roadmap for Resistance

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) on Tuesday unveiled its "People's Budget," offering a vision of economic equality and fairness that comes in sharp contrast to the Trump administration's "slash-and-burn approach to governing based on ideological extremism."

The People's Budget: A Roadmap for the Resistance (pdf) includes a $2 trillion infrastructure investment; closes corporate tax loopholes; ensures families don't pay more than 10 percent of their income for childcare; and supports progressive measures such as a minimum wage increase, clean energy expansion, and debt-free college. Bottom line, the caucus said Tuesday, the document "puts political and economic power back in the hands of the people."  …"It's one thing to oppose President Trump and expose his broken promises to workers, but it's also important to lay out a positivepath forward," said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.). "The Congressional Progressive Caucus's budget is a plan to actually help working Americans who have felt left behind by an economy rigged against them. Our budget is a roadmap for the resistance, investing in the progressive priorities and economic, kitchen-table issues that matter to real people: infrastructure to create jobs; education to help our kids reach their full potential; and access to affordable healthcare."   More

‘The People’s Budget’: Analysis of the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget for 2018

The People’s Budget is focused on both short- and long-term economic objectives. In the short run, The People’s Budget targets a rapid and durable return to genuine full employment through the use of expansionary fiscal policy. In the long run, The People’s Budget pushes back on decelerating productivity growth by making necessary and sustained public investments.  The budget was developed from the evidence-based conclusion that the present economic challenge of joblessness results from a continuing shortfall of aggregate demand—the result of the Great Recession and its aftermath—and that the depressed state of economic activity is largely responsible for elevated budget deficits and the recent rise in public debt. Further, much recent research indicates that aggregate demand is likely to remain depressed in coming years without a fiscal boost (this hypothesis about chronic ongoing demand shortages is often referred to as “secular stagnation”). Labor market slack resulting from this continuing demand shortfall is in turn exacerbating the decade-long trend of falling working-age household income and the almost four-decades-long trend of markedly increasing income inequality.   More

Prospects for black America about to get worse under Trump, report says

Black and Hispanic Americans continue to lag far behind whites economically -- and their prospects look much worse under President Trump, according to a reportto be released Tuesday by the National Urban League.  Despite promises of a “new deal for black America,” any recent progress made towards racial equality is increasingly under threat, said Marc Morial, the league’s president and chief executive. The president's incendiary rhetoric on the campaign trail has translated into discriminatory public policy, he said. “The social cancer of hate continues to metastasize, thriving in a climate conducive to hostility towards religious and racial minorities, permeating even at the highest levels of national discourse and threatening to further crack our fractured nation,” Morial wrote in the report. In an interview with The Post, he pointed to Trump's intent to roll back key Obama-era policies from expanding health care coverage to greater police oversight as evidence that the future for black America is precarious. The annual report found the standard of living for African Americans is 72 percent that of the average white person.  More

ALL IN THE FAMILY TRUMP

It turns out that the voters who cast their ballots for Donald Trump, the patriarch, got a package deal for his whole clan.  That would include, of course, first daughter Ivanka who, along with her husband, Jared Kushner, is now a key political adviser to the president of the United States.  Both now have offices in the White House close to him.  They have multiple security clearances, access to high-level leaders whenever they visit the Oval Office or Mar-a-Lago, and the perfect formula for the sort of brand-enhancement that now seems to come with such eminence. President Trump may have an exceedingly “flexible” attitude toward policymaking generally, but in one area count on him to be stalwart and immobile: his urge to run the White House like a business, a family business. The ways that Jared, “senior adviser to the president,” and Ivanka, “assistant to the president,” have already benefited from their links to “Dad” in the first 100 days of his presidency stagger the imagination. Ivanka’s company, for instance, won three new trademarks for its products from China on the very day she dined with President Xi Jinping at her father’s Palm Beach club.  More

GREENWALD: Trump’s Support and Praise of Despots Is Central to the U.S. Tradition

Since at least the end of World War II, supporting the world’s worst despots has been a central plank of U.S. foreign policy, arguably its defining attribute. The list of U.S.-supported tyrants is too long to count, but the strategic rationale has been consistent: In a world where anti-American sentiment is prevalent, democracy often produces leaders who impede rather than serve U.S. interests.  Imposing or propping up dictators subservient to the U.S. has long been, and continues to be, the preferred means for U.S. policymakers to ensure that those inconvenient popular beliefs are suppressed. None of this is remotely controversial or even debatable. U.S. support for tyrants has largely been conducted out in the open, and has been expressly defended and affirmed for decades by the most mainstream and influential U.S. policy experts and media outlets…  All of this history is now being erased and whitewashed, replaced with jingoistic fairy tales by the U.S. media and leading political officials. Despite these decades of flagrant pro-dictatorship policies, the U.S. media and leading political officials have spent months manufacturing and disseminating a propagandistic fairy tale that casts Donald Trump’s embrace of dictators as some sort of new, aberrational departure from the noble American tradition.   More

The Military-Industrial Complex Revisited: the Trump Administration and the Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy May 8 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm Cambridge Friends Meeting, 5 Longfellow Park

The Military-Industrial Complex Revisited: the Trump Administration and the Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy

May 8 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Cambridge Friends Meeting, 5 Longfellow Park

$5 donation requested; no one turned away

William Hartung is director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.  He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011) and the co-editor, with Miriam Pemberton, of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War (Paradigm Press, 2008).  Previous books include And Weapons for All (HarperCollins, 1995), a critique of U.S. arms sales policies from the Nixon through Clinton administrations. From July 2007 through March 2011, Mr. Hartung was the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. Prior to that, he served as the director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute. He also worked as a speechwriter and policy analyst for New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams. Bill Hartung’s articles on security issues have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and the World Policy Journal. He has been a featured expert on national security issues on CBS 60 Minutes, NBC Nightly News, the Lehrer Newshour, CNN, Fox News, and scores of local, regional, and international radio outlets. He blogs for the Huffington Post and TPM Café.

Sponsored by Massachusetts Peace Action, Friends Meeting at Cambridge, and Veterans for Peace – Smedley Butler Brigade.  Hartung is a featured speaker on a different topic at Saturday's "Reducing the Threat of Nuclear War" conference at MIT.

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Date:

May 8

Time:

7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Cost:

$5

Event Tags:

Foreign policy, Militarism, military-industrial complex, Trump administration, William Hartung

Organizer

Massachusetts Peace Action

Venue

Cambridge Friends Meeting

5 Longfellow Park 
Cambridge, + Google Map

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Cole Harrison

Executive Director

Massachusetts Peace Action

11 Garden St, Cambridge, MA 02138

w: 617-354-2169

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f: /masspeaceaction

t: @masspeaceaction

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Action Against AIPAC to End the #DeadlyExchange! Sunday, May 7th, 5-7pm Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, 415 Summer St, Boston

Action Against AIPAC to End the #DeadlyExchange!

Sunday, May 7th, 5-7pm
Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, 415 Summer St, Boston

Join us in protesting AIPAC at their New England Leadership Dinner. AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is a lobby that works to sustain U.S. support for Israel, including policies that harm, displace, and discriminate against Palestinians. The policies AIPAC supports in Israel, including discriminatory immigration bans and building walls are paralleled in the policies of the Trump administration

AIPAC, which helps to facilitate these and other harmful policies, is one of many organizations that organize "Deadly Exchange" trips, in which thousands of the highest ranking police officials and law enforcement executives across the US participate in programs in Israel, in which U.S. law enforcement learn counterterrorism tactics from the Israeli military and police. In other words, these programs are an opportunity for US and Israeli law enforcement to exchange "worst practices" towards communities of color, including extrajudicial executions, shoot-to-kill policies, police murders, racial profiling, massive spying and surveillance, deportation and detention, and attacks on human rights defenders

We believe civil rights organizations and Jewish communal institutions have no business participating in further endangering those in Trump’s and Bibi’s crosshairs by dispatching police, ICE and FBI agents to exchange tips with an occupying army. We also believe so called progressive cities must end their participation in these programs.

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Puerto Rico Students Battle Colonial Austerity For the Right of Independence!

Workers Vanguard No. 1110	21 April 2017

Puerto Rico

Students Battle Colonial Austerity

For the Right of Independence!

Since March 28, students have been on strike at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), the island’s main public university system with a total of 70,000 students. UPR has been the target of $348 million in budget cuts over the past three years and it faces more austerity demanded by the American colonial masters. The students’ main demands are no budget cuts and no tuition increases. The strike is being actively supported by the unions of teachers and campus workers, who have themselves experienced union-busting attacks, wage reductions and shrinking pensions over the past decade. The students’ battle gives voice to the anguish and anger of Puerto Ricans enduring a desperate economic situation—a direct consequence of imperialist colonial domination. Victory to the student strike!

Many strikers today remember the two-month student strike at UPR in 2010, when the students fought against attempts by the bourgeoisie and campus administration to implement tuition hikes and budget cuts. That strike was met with bloody police repression, but it successfully beat back the worst of the government’s and UPR administration’s attacks.

We stand for free, quality public education for all, including open admissions and a state-paid living stipend for all students! But under capitalism, the provision of education and other social services is subordinated to the ruling class’s drive for profit. Our Marxist perspective is for a free, egalitarian society based on material abundance, where education is an actual right. This can only be achieved through a socialist revolution that sweeps away the decaying capitalist system and establishes workers rule in the oppressed colonies and neocolonies as well as in the U.S.

In 2016, the Obama administration imposed a Financial Oversight and Management Board, known as the “junta,” to ensure that Puerto Rico’s debt of over $70 billion is paid to the hedge fund parasites and financial institutions. The capitalist investors claim that Puerto Ricans, almost half of whom subsist below the poverty line, have been living “beyond their means” and must pay. These vultures sucked the blood of Puerto Rico’s economy and for decades enjoyed a tax haven with low-wage labor. The junta’s task is to oversee implementation by the island’s government of the bipartisan bill passed by the U.S. Congress, grotesquely dubbed PROMESA (“promise,” Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act). This law demands budget cuts of $450 million to education alone—in addition to more taxes, the sale of $4 billion worth of public buildings and the slashing of government spending. The governor, Ricardo Roselló, is a union-busting lackey of the imperialists, who is faithfully imposing their austerity.

The Puerto Rican masses are threatened with the destruction of public education, health care, pensions and the privatization of the government-owned public utility company, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. The teachers’ pension fund is so depleted that contributions by working teachers flow straight out to retirees. The New York Times (8 March) reported that “none of Puerto Rico’s current teachers can expect to get their money back, because the fund is due to run out of money in 2018.” Since 2008, more than 350 schools in Puerto Rico have closed and today many hospitals have no funding to provide essential services. Workers in the U.S. should take a side with the workers and oppressed of Puerto Rico who are being ground down by colonial oppression and demand: Cancel the debt!

A century ago, Puerto Ricans were given limited American citizenship rights, but they are unable to vote in federal elections and have no voting representation in Congress. When Puerto Rico came under the rule of the U.S. in 1898, as a result of the Spanish-American War, the population was forced to receive their education in English. In 1909, Spanish was banned in all public schools. This was an assault on four hundred years of language and culture under the guise of “civilizing a savage people.” It wasn’t until 1949 that Spanish became the language of public education.

As forthright opponents of national oppression and U.S. imperialism, we favor Puerto Rican independence. Puerto Ricans hate their second-class status as residents of a U.S. commonwealth, but their feelings about independence are mixed. On the one hand, people on the island have a very strong sense of nationhood; on the other, many are fearful of losing the ability to live and work on the mainland and of sinking to the level of poverty of their independent Caribbean neighbors. We oppose any attempts to forcibly impose independence against the will of the population. Thus, we emphasize the right of independence.

The fight against colonial oppression in Puerto Rico would necessarily be directed at the local agents of imperialism and could therefore act as a lever for socialist revolution. Such struggles would also reverberate throughout the Caribbean, Latin America and on the U.S. mainland.

About five million Puerto Ricans live in the United States (the population on the island is 3.5 million), where they are a component of the multiracial U.S. working class in many urban centers. These workers can be a link for class unity of workers in Puerto Rico and the United States against both the imperialists and their local enforcers. Our perspective is to build Leninist parties in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico whose goal is to establish workers rule.

As we said in our article “U.S. Colonialism Chokes Puerto Rico” (WV No. 1075, 2 October 2015):

“A victorious workers revolution in the U.S., in which class-conscious Puerto Rican workers can play a vanguard role, would immediately grant Puerto Rico independence and massive amounts of economic aid, establishing relations on the basis of its freedom to exercise national self-determination. But the spark of revolution could also come from the colonial or neocolonial countries. Workers struggle in Puerto Rico against U.S. colonial domination could inspire the multiracial working class on the mainland in the revolutionary overthrow of U.S. imperialism.”