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About Joe Emersberger

Joe Emersberger is an engineer, a member of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union, and a UNIFOR member with Ecuadorian roots who writes on issues in South and Central America. He lives and works in Windsor, Ontario. Follow him at @rosendo_joe.
  • Hugo Chávez

    The media myth of ‘once prosperous’ and democratic Venezuela before Chávez

    Originally published: FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) on August 26, 2021 (more by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting))  |

    Economists typically use GDP per capita to assess how rich a country is. It is basically a measure of the average income per person. If journalists cared to be at all precise when they say that Venezuela had once been “rich,” then that’s a statistic they’d cite.

  • Alex Saab

    Saab case shows Western media’s casual acceptance of U.S. atrocities

    Originally published: FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) on July 21, 2021 (more by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting))  |

    Imagine being imprisoned for nonviolently attempting to prevent a heinous crime. That sums up the absurdity of Saab’s predicament–and Western media’s coverage of it.

  • David Villamar (Wikimedia Commons: Gabriela Zurita Camacho)

    Lessons, dangers and dilemmas for Correismo after Ecuador’s election

    David Villamar and Joe Emersberger

    On April 11, the second round of Ecuador’s presidential election saw the rightwing candidate Guillermo Lasso prevail by 52.4% to 47.6% over his left wing opponent Andres Arauz.

  • Jeanine Áñez

    To Western Media, prosecuting Bolivian coup leaders is worse than leading a coup

    Joe Emersberger

    Brutal dictators supported by Washington have no reason to doubt that establishment journalists and big NGOs will try very hard to keep them out of jail. Removing the threat of U.S.-backed coups from the world will involve a constant struggle against Western media and the sources they present to us as reliable.

  • Belly of the Beast‘s “Cuba’s Door-to-Door Doctors” (4/17/20)

    U.S. campaign against Cuba’s medical brigades targets healthcare, not ‘forced labor’

    Originally published: FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) on May 31, 2020 (more by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting))  |

    For decades, Cuba has sent tens of thousands of its medical professionals abroad to work in countries where natural disasters or poverty have left people without healthcare. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the catastrophic U.S. response to it, the absurdity of a propaganda war against Cuban medical missions has become more obvious than ever. But you can’t rely on corporate media to explain why.

  • Reuters Can’t Find US Critics to Question Amazon’s Anti-Venezuela Propaganda

    Reuters can’t find U.S. critics to question Amazon’s anti-Venezuela propaganda

    Originally published: FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) on September 18, 2019 (more by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting))  |

    A line from the trailer for Jack Ryan, an Amazon TV drama whose second season streams on November 1, is: A nuclear Venezuela…. You will not hear about it on the news, ’cause we’ll already be dead.

  • Maduro Guevara Rosas

    How Amnesty International is reinforcing Trump’s regime-change propaganda against Venezuela

    Originally published: The Canary on February 26, 2019 (more by The Canary)  |

    All of the reasons above make a powerful case for questioning the integrity and objectivity of Amnesty when it comes to Venezuela. And for the sake of peace and justice, we should hold Amnesty to much higher standards.

  • Venezuela Poses No ‘Threat to the World’—but WaPo’s Claim That It Does Is Dangerous

    Venezuela poses no ‘threat to the world’—but WaPo’s claim that it does is dangerous

    Originally published: FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) on September 11, 2018 (more by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting))  |

    The phrase “a threat to the world” has a hyperlink to an earlier Tharoor piece (3/1/18), which includes the claim, “As many as 4 million Venezuelans—more than 10 percent of the population—have already left the country, according to the Brookings Institution,”

  • Why Venezuela Reporting Is So Bad

    Why Venezuela reporting is so bad

    Originally published: FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) on June 27, 2018 (more by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting))  |

    Review of Alan MacLeod’s Bad News From Venezuela

  • Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro holds the Venezuelan flag next to singer "El Potro Alvarez" during a rally in Caracas on Thursday

    Trump is not the Venezuelan supreme court

    Joe Emersberger

    The US Empire consists of allied governments like Canada, private media companies and prominent NGOs who all share its delusion that it is entitled to decide which government is a “dictatorship” that “must go”. It is a truly formidable and lethal system of misinformation. Leftists should always have done more to challenge the US Empire on Venezuela during the Chavista era, and to challenge imperialism in general. We really need to step up now.

  • Supporters of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro participate in a rally in support of the National Constituent Assembly in Caracas

    What do Venezuelans think?

    Originally published: The Dawn News on June 23, 2017 (more by The Dawn News)  |

    Venezuelan public opinion is not what you’d expect if you rely on the disinformation loop in which corporate media and Washington-friendly NGOs like HRW participate.

  • Debating Amnesty About Syria and Double Standards

    Joe Emersberger

    I sent the following note to Amnesty on June 16 after it put out a detailed report on the conflict in Syria: Dear Amnesty In your most recent report on Syria you ask the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo on the Syrian government.  You ask for no such arms embargo on the […]

  • Amnesty Demands Russia Let Imperialists Turn Syria into Another Libya

    Joe Emersberger

    Dear Amnesty ([email protected]): “Russia’s threats to abort a binding UN resolution on Syria for the second time are utterly irresponsible,” said José Luis Díaz, Amnesty’s representative to the UN.  “Russia bears a heavy responsibility for allowing the brutal crackdown to continue.”1 With Libya still suffering the lethal consequences of western military “liberation,” with Iran gravely […]

  • The Failure of Human Rights Watch in Venezuela and Haiti

    Joe Emersberger

    The way Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on Haiti and Venezuela in its 2008 World Report reveals an underlying assumption that the U.S. and its allies have the right to overthrow democratic governments.1 The Venezuela section of the report said nothing about ongoing attempts by the U.S. to overthrow the Chavez government.  It is a […]

  • Peter Hallward Untangles the Truth about Haiti from a Web of Lies

    Joe Emersberger

    DAMMING THE FLOOD : Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment by Peter HallwardBUY THIS BOOK In Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment, Peter Hallward meticulously explains how, on February 29 of 2004, the U.S. managed to “topple one of the most popular governments in Latin America but it managed to […]

  • Haiti’s Debt

    Jeb Sprague and Joe Emersberger

    Despite being the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti lags behind many countries in the Americas in obtaining debt relief through a program run by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. A hard-hitting paper published in December by the Washington D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) argues that […]

Also By Joe Emersberger in Monthly Review Magazine

  • The Guaidó Era June 01, 2021

Books By Joe Emersberger

  • Extraordinary Threat: The U.S. Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela July 04, 2021

Monthly Review Essays

  • US Imperialism in Crisis: Opportunities and Challenges to a Global Community with a Shared Future
    Sam-Kee Cheng A late 1940s Soviet poster showing a US military service member lounging on top of a German factory, smoking a cigar. The text beneath reads DER DOLLARIMPERIALISMUS [dollar imperialism].

    1. Introduction The predominance of US economic, political and military power in the world was established at the end of the Second World War.1 With just 6.3 percent of global population, the United States held about 50 percent of the world wealth in 1948. As the only power which had used nuclear weapons on civilian […]

Lost & Found

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    Robert W. McChesney Bob McChesney on Saving Journalism

    Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.

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