The Breakfast Club (Late Night)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club After Dark. A breakfast club Sunday edition published about twelve hours late.

AP’s Today in History for January 26th

Breakfast Tune Bluegrass Banjo solo phantom of the opera

Something to think about, Breakfast News & Blogs below

US citizen detained and interrogated by DHS agents about anti-war movement solidarity with Venezuela
Max Blumenthal, The Gray Zone

On his way back from a Christmas visit to his family in Nicaragua, 31-year-old US citizen Sergio Lazo Torrez was detained by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers at Fort Lauderdale International Airport on January 20, then interrogated by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents who grilled him about his involvement in the US anti-war movement.

Torrez was a participant in the Venezuela Embassy Protection Collective, a group of activists and journalists formed in April 2019 to defend Venezuela’s embassy in Washington DC against a takeover attempt by the Trump-backed coup administration of Juan Guaido.

As The Grayzone reported, Torrez was previously detained by CBP at Dulles International Airport on August 2 after returning from a solidarity trip to Venezuela with fellow members of the collective, including this reporter. There, he was questioned for several hours about his activities in Caracas and was forced to surrender his cellphone for a search.

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• MLK was ‘gravely disappointed’ with white moderates — whom he believed were responsible for impeding civil rights
  Bob Hennelly

• Here are 7 pressing questions for corporate media outlets about their blatantly anti-progressive biases
  Jeff Cohen

• Did Shareholders’ Benefit by Paying Boeing’s Fired CEO $62 Million?
  DEAN BAKER

• The Trump Coup to Come
  Paul Street

• America’s Long History of Meddling in Russia
  TED RALL

• ‘The Only One I Didn’t Want Her to Pick’: In Secret Recording, Trump Admits Fear of Clinton Picking Sanders as VP in 2016
  Jon Queally

• Amtrak conductor tried to force NAACP Legal Defense Fund exec to give up her seat
  Paula Froelich

• Belmarsh Prison Inmates Prove More Ethical Than Entire Western Empire
  CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

• Class Struggle Built the Finnish Welfare State
  TATU AHPONEN

• Insurance Lobby Talking Points Don’t Come With Warning Labels
  JOSHUA CHO

• Shaky Joe Biden, Billionaire Bloomberg, and the Global Race to the Bottom
  Glen Ford

• “A Who’s-Who” of People Against Progressive Agenda: DNC’s Perez Under Fire for Convention Committee Picks
  Andrea Germanos

• Trump linked Ukraine aid to Biden inquiry, Bolton book draft says – report
  Joanna Walters

• ‘Big-Monied Interests Are Getting Very Nervous’: Sanders Leads in New Hampshire Poll
  Andrea Germanos

Something to think about over coffee prozac

 
For Corporate Media, Bernie Sanders Is Bigger Threat Than Donald Trump
Julie Hollar, Common Dreams

As Bernie Sanders emerged as a threat to Hillary Clinton’s presidential nomination in 2016, media began liberally tossing around articles equating Sanders and Donald Trump (FAIR.org, 4/15/16, 12/9/16). These typically acknowledged that the comparison seemed far-fetched, but pointed in their defense to some version of a “remarkable amount of policy convergence” (Atlantic, 1/6/16)—which included shared positions like opposition to trade agreements, protecting Social Security, opposing big money in politics, and opposing foreign military intervention—or to the two candidates’ reliance on “angry white men” for their base of support.

No journalist in their right mind would attempt an argument about a policy convergence between Sanders and Trump today, given Trump’s reversal on virtually every one of those original populist stances. And as for those “angry white men,” polls have shown that Sanders’ supporters are more female and less white than those of any other Democratic candidate—and much more so thso than Trump supporters. If they were an absurd stretch in 2016, then, efforts to make a Sanders/Trump equivalence today are even more desperate and disingenuous.

And yet they are experiencing a renaissance, as Sanders creeps toward the top of the Democratic primary polls in early-voting states.

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