While the Strauss-Kahn circus has played out on a worldwide stage, U.S. rulers have pitched the Bulger drama to a domestic audience. On June 22, the FBI at long last collared fugitive gangster and “rogue” FBI collaborator Whitey Bulger. Bulger had served as an FBI informant and was protected by his handlers even as he was accused of 19 murders, a fact that has given this police-state agency a black eye for two decades.
On one level, the hype over Whitey’s capture forms part of a ruling-class effort to publicly rehabilitate the bungling, corrupt FBI and win greater support for the burgeoning wartime U.S. police state.
On a deeper level, busting Bulger represents a profound shift from the ideology of the 1970s. While U.S. capitalists still rely on racist big-city police departments, and still protect KKK-Nazi groups to mislead white workers, they’ve needed to shift their emphasis from locally-oriented gutter racism to massive, patriotic, national racism and global genocide, often under the leadership of black politicians like Obama and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.
Whitey and his “legit” politician brother, Billy, reached the height of their power at the end of the Vietnam War era. As part of a Defense Department shutdown after the war, the main Rockefeller-led liberal bosses wiped out thousands of better-paying jobs in redundant shipyards in South Boston, Charlestown, East Boston, and Quincy.
The predominantly white workers there quickly turned against liberal Kennedy & Co., their former protectors. No longer able to win over workers with federally-sponsored employment, the liberals set the Brothers Bulger to organizing white workers to blame — and fight — black workers. Liberal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., who lived in a lily-white Boston suburb, provided the tinder: school desegregation.
Desegregation is, of course, a good thing. But Boston’s liberals turned it into a school-shutting vehicle to divide the local working class. Billy Bulger, Democratic Party president of the Massachusetts State Senate, made anti-busing speeches, while Whitey fed drugs to racist thugs. This was the anti-busing crowd our Party fought and smashed in 1975, in our genuinely anti-racist Summer Project (see plp.org).
Now the liberal war-makers need white South Boston enlistees willing to take orders from Obama and their black sergeants to kill Arab and Asian workers. (This facade of a “multi-racial” power structure masks U.S. rulers’ continuing racist super-exploitation of black workers through higher rates of joblessness and imprisonment — along with worse pay, education, medical “care,” and housing.) They require allegiance to a national patriotism, not to a two-bit racist ward boss or drug lord.
So the Bulger Klan is essentially history. Whitey now faces the rest of his life in jail. Meanwhile, brother Billy had been bought out of politics by Governor William Weld with a cushy academic job as president of the University of Massachusetts. But Billy was forced to resign after it emerged that he’d recommended a corrupt FBI agent (Whitey’s in-house protector) to be Boston’s police commissioner. Now he stews in retirement (on a $200,000 annual pension.)
The Strauss-Kahn and Bulger sideshows aim at getting workers to kill and die for U.S. imperialism, against our class interests. We have the opposite goal: to expose and attack the sideshows’ billionaire puppet-masters. Alongside building our communist party, PLP, this is an essential step toward the revolution that will ultimately eradicate the profit system and the wars it ceaselessly spawns.
