Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR.org writer Joe Emersberger about sanctions under Covid-19 for the April 10, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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Janine Jackson: A lot is going on under the cover of the coronavirus, precisely what Naomi Klein is talking about about with the frames “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism.” Besides gutting environmental regulations and throwing money at over-served corporations, we see the Trump administration attempting to use the pandemic to justify existing economic sanctions on Venezuela and on Iran.

Immiserating civilians of other sovereign countries to openly pressure them to choose a government more to the US’s liking is not new, sadly. Doing it in the face of a pandemic is just further evidence, were it needed, that the cruelty is the point.

Canada-based writer Joe Emersberger has been working on this. He’s written about it for FAIR.org. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Joe Emersberger.

Joe Emersberger: Thank you very much for inviting me.

JJ: Let’s start with Venezuela, I guess, where readers will be now hearing that Maduro is a drug dealer, or they’re a narco-state? What’s happening in Venezuela now with regard to US actions, and why now?

JE: Yeah, it seems like the United States was coming under pressure, with the coronavirus, and all the fallout all over the world; it’s a pandemic. They are coming under some pressure, to at least ease, if not temporarily lift, the sanctions they’ve imposed on so many countries, including Venezuela.

I wrote a piece mentioning that the IMF rejected an emergency request by Venezuela for a loan, for a $5 billion loan—this special emergency-type loan that they’ve made available to countries for helping them through the coronavirus crisis. So Maduro’s government, of Venezuela, immediately applied and got rejected very quickly by the IMF, which is typically run by the United States government’s Treasury Department. I mean, they have the veto for loans to middle-income countries.

So it seemed like shortly after that, the United States reaction to the pressure to ease the sanctions was to double down, just to basically go on the attack, and put out indictments on Maduro and several other former and current officials of the Venezuelan government, Maduro’s government, saying that they’re involved with drug trafficking. In Maduro’s case itself, it said that he had a strategy of trying to flood the United States with drugs to weaken the United States, which is just ludicrous.

But when you demonize a country—typically, the United States, what they do, is they portray the country, whatever leader they’re after, as not just evil but also totally irrational, so that you can believe anything about them.

Like Saddam Hussein: obviously, in that case, he was a brutal dictator, but he wasn’t irrational. He wasn’t hiding weapons of mass destruction. But they managed to convince people that all these guys are against us, so, therefore, they’re not really rational, so you can believe any allegations.

In fact, what’s funny, though, is that actually Venezuela would have much more reason to issue indictments, and charge US officials, because one of the people they singled out with these indictments, is a general who was living in Colombia, and he just recently came out publicly, saying that he was working with Guaidó and US advisors to try to organize some kind of armed uprising, which would probably include the assassination of Maduro. So based on that alone, Venezuela could be prosecuting US officials, and trying to extradite them to Venezuela for that, but obviously that just doesn’t happen, because it’s all a matter of who has more firepower, not who has an actual legal case, you know; that has very little to do with these kinds of situations.

When you get to the drug-trafficking allegations, too, of course, and this is just based on the DEA’s own statistics, the overwhelming majority of drugs is of course produced in Colombia and consumed in the United States. And if you look at even the path that it takes to get to the United States, according to the DEA—there’s images that VenezuelAnalysis and other people have published online, that show that most of the transit is even through governments that are typically aligned with the United States.

So it’s just another way to show how outlandish, how politically motivated the allegations against Venezuela are. Because if this was a legitimate drug-trafficking concern, of course, they’d be all sorts of Colombian officials, and even US entities, maybe officials or other entities that allow the money to get laundered and everything in the United States.

JJ: The Trump administration has been so transparent in their desire for “regime change,” if I can say it softly, in Venezuela, that it just seems like, oh, wow, now you’re bringing out a drug charge? Their goal is so transparent—

JE: Right.

JJ: —that one wonders why you would take any particular iteration especially seriously, and yet we have media engaging it. I guess I would also ask you, just, the sanctions have an impact, they have an impact on human beings, right? I mean, we can’t forget that.

JE: Of course not. You know, even if everything they said about Venezuela’s government was true— and it’s not; I mean, Venezuela has a democratically elected government. That has to be said, because even from well-intentioned people, sometimes you don’t get pushback on that particular point, because it’s just been so internalized, repeated so often, that people just maybe give up, or maybe think they have other things to say, but that’s huge: Venezuela’s government is democratically elected. That’s what makes it so especially horrifying. It has as much right to call itself democratically elected as any country—the United States, Canada or anybody else. But it’s still being openly targeted.

You know, usually the United States has a kernel of truth; any propaganda, there’s some kind of truth at the heart of it, even if it’s embroidered with lies, like, for instance, Iraq. I mean, Saddam Hussein really was a horrible dictator. And that was a truth. But of course, that didn’t mean that everything else they said was true.

And also, in the case of Saddam Hussein, the sanctions: You had UN officials resigning, top-level UN officials resigning in the ’90s, late ’90s, Hans von Sponeck and Dennis Halliday, over the sanctions. Because even though, yes, Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, even the most brutal dictatorships still provide essential services to its population; they still have civil servants, trying to do their best to provide healthcare and sanitation, all the basic stuff that a government does.

And if you slash the government’s revenue, then you slash the government’s ability to import essential things: yeah, food, medicine, but also spare parts for things like the sewage system and electricity grid and all that stuff. So there’s no such thing as reducing a government’s revenue deliberately through sanctions and not hurting the general population, even if the government is, like in the case of Saddam Hussein, a dictator, a brutal one and all that.

But still, when you hurt a government’s ability to buy essential products, if you think about it, the worse the government is, the more that’s going to be the case. I mean, the more likely the government’s just going to transfer as much pain as it can get away with to the population, and spare the privileged sectors it looks after.

So in the case of Venezuela, Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs estimated that by the end of 2018 alone, just between 2017 and 2018, when Trump really ramped up the financial sanctions, by then they had already been linked to like 40,000 deaths. Now you can debate whether that’s high or low, but that’s only till the end of 2018.

Now, in the beginning of 2019, they constantly increased the severity and intensity of the sanctions, trying to make it illegal for Venezuela to sell its oil and for anyone to buy it from them. They kept ramping it up. So that is killing thousands of people. If there were an opposition movement in countries like Canada and the United States and Europe, the demand wouldn’t just be, “You gotta stop this”; the demand would actually be, “Hey, we’ve got to prosecute the people involved with this. This is killing people. This is a crime. People should be facing legal consequences for this.” But it’s hard enough just to get to the point where you can just tell them, “Stop.”

JJ: Absolutely. And so many premises that go unquestioned: that the United States has the right to do this, to exert pressure to harm the civilian population of a country. And the idea is meant to be, “Well, if we starve them and make them suffer enough, then they’ll change their government. And we want them to have a different government.” I mean, it’s just assumption on assumption on assumption, and all of them are outrageous.

I wanted to ask you about Iran; you can link them together. It’s also a case where people are suffering, but if you read US media, it’s all for a point. And it’s just hard to see what that point could be.

JE: In the case of Iran, it’s a little different. They’re not trying to claim that Iran needs to democratize; they’re saying that Iran has a so-called nuclear program that threatens the region, threatens the United States. So it’s more similar to the lies against Saddam Hussein. But there is no nuclear weapons program; I mean, there is a nuclear energy program. There is a country in the region that refuses to put its nuclear weapons under international control, and that’s Israel, of course. But they can’t even talk about that, because that’s an ally, so they can do what they want.

Canada, as well, is sending arms to Saudi Arabia—and also some military support and everything—for them to commit horrific crimes in Yemen. I mean, the threat to the region is really the US and its allies, but Iran is singled out; as everyone knows, it’s been long regarded by the United States as an enemy.

And Iran also applied for the same IMF loan that Maduro recently applied for, and they took a bit longer, but it looks like it’s finally been rejected because of the US pressure. The IMF, like I said, is basically run by the US, especially when it comes to making loans to low- and middle-income countries. And the Europeans push back very softly, when they do push back.

So that’s an important point, Janine, the complicity of countries like Canada, and the EU; it’s basically a group of roughly 50 countries—it’s a minority of countries in the world, but they tend to be rich and powerful; and they tend to be the ones that play along with the United States in its aggression abroad.

JJ: I was noticing that it seemed like a big deal that other countries were, under threat of sanction from the United States, still engaging in trade or still having communication with Iran, even though the United States took its exceptionalist position to say that they weren’t allowed to do that. But it’s not enough and doesn’t amount to standing up to the US’s bludgeoning.

JE: Right.

JJ: Let me just ask you for final thoughts on coverage in particular that we are likely to see going forward. I mean, this “narco-state Venezuela” thing seems to be just getting started. Who knows what media are going to do with that? What should we be keeping in mind as we look at coverage of US sanctions?

JE: It’s always about what they say and about what they don’t say. It’s important for us to go back to the whole premise I mentioned, that people have not pushed back on, even well-intentioned people, in my opinion, have kind of forgotten sometimes, and maybe even me, I’ve forgotten sometimes, to push back on the fact that Venezuela has a democratically elected government.

In 2018, one of the big complaints for saying that Maduro’s government wasn’t legitimately elected was saying that basically two of his top rivals were disqualified. OK, now they were involved in multiple coup attempts, and they would never have been allowed to participate, certainly would have been in jail, in any other country.

But it’s worth remembering, right now in Ecuador, for instance, Rafael Correa has been sentenced to jail, for 25 years, not allowed to run for any public office in Ecuador. But that’s a US ally. So nobody’s going to cite that as an example, and say, “Hey, they’re not a democracy.” Lula da Silva in Brazil was in jail when Bolsonaro won his election. And these are countries, Brazil and Ecuador, they’re not facing an external threat, like Venezuela is.

So it’s very important to keep in mind that the kind of so-called abuses that Venezuela is accused of are just routine stuff in countries that are allied with the United States. An even more striking example: Bolivia, where you have an outright dictatorship right now, because the democratically elected president, Evo Morales, was overthrown in a coup based on bogus electoral allegations made by a compliant OAS bureaucracy that’s funded mainly by the US.

So all these attacks on Venezuela, on Iran, they’re all based on the premise that what US allies do is OK; they can do all sorts of things and nobody reports them in a way that says, “Hey, that’s not right. That’s not democratic,” or “That’s actually a war crime” or whatever. But if Venezuela or Iran do anything, it just gets amplified all over the place. And this idea is reinforced in people’s heads that these are evil governments. I mean, we can critique the way the United States brings them down, but it’s basically, they’re on the right side by being against them.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with writer Joe Emersberger. You can find his piece, “Media Struggle to Defend Washington’s Cruelty Toward Venezuela and Iran as Coronavirus Spreads” on FAIR.org. Joe Emersberger, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.