Demonstration protests death at Erie County Holding Center
Credit: Tom Answeeney
By Juniper Carpenter
Workers World Party members and people from the community gathered outside the Erie County Holding Center, N.Y., on March 31 in response to the March 13 death of Mikey Frears. Frears was the 36th person to die in the Holding Center since Sheriff Tim Howard took office in 2005.
Demonstrators demanded that Sheriff Tim Howard resign, that addiction be treated through treatment and not through incarceration, and for abolition of the unjust prison system.
The U.S. prison system continues to prey on the working class. For decades, the system has been profiting from the labor of prisoners while paying them a minuscule amount in wages and isolating them from their community. Specifically in locations like the Holding Center, individuals are held before going to trial. And any death in these holding centers or jails happens because the administration refuses to care for the people i
Why the bourgeoisie needs fascism
Excerpts taken from the Jan. 14 webinar,“Workers Can Defeat Fascism and Racism,” sponsored by Workers World Party, moderated by Ted Kelly. Tom Answeeney spoke
from the WWP Buffalo branch. To view the entire panel discussion, go to youtu.be/d9 NDIKT0vw.
Ted Kelly: Comrades, we want to talk about why the bourgeoisie needs fascism.
Tom Answeeney: We’ve seen the steady escalation of fascist violence over the past four years [during the Trump presidency]. So in some ways, the attack in Washington on Jan. 6 was predictable.
These forces were willing to break with capitalist “democratic” norms if we can even call them democratic! Really just those of a liberal representative democracy under capitalism. They were willing to go in and just let all that shit happen. That surprised me. I would have expected five people to die on the streets, but not inside this building that is supposed to represent the U.S. across the world.