Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago and one of Obama’s crisis opportunists, wrote an op-ed in the September 4, 2026, Wall Street Journal, headlined, “Lessons from Clinton to Cut Child Poverty,” marking Rahm’s 20th recent WSJ op-ed. It reads well and spins the Clinton-era welfare reform, which might have kept going in the right direction if the American people did not keep tinkering with our Constitution, here referring to Presidential term limits. Was “W” really an improvement over what could have been slick Willy’s 3rd term? Part D, Medicare, and Big Pharma, and let us not forget shock and awe and the other W/Cheney fiascos, which have gotten us to just exactly where?
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Graphic: X Post
But lest I be topic-wandering, I really am trying to think about where we are and where we are going. Global trade was enhanced by the invention of the container ship. When Adam Smith wrote his trade theories, nations were just variants on oligopoly. Just a century later, the division into Marxist Fascism versus various democracy experiments and free trade evolved into “let’s get cheaper goods from fewer free peoples and hope that makes them more free,” instead of creating the level of wealth necessary to conquer us into total death or extinction.
As yet another unintended consequence of 20th-century “free” trade, the expansive movement of goods and materials around the globe helped various species like the emerald ash borer, believed to have entered the US in the wood used as packing material and then spread to wipe out shade trees in cities that left picturesque city streets barren of shade for many summers. Various other insects are carried from one continent to another, but that is just background to the much worse wholesale destruction of the US textile, furniture, and other industries by cheap labor nations. Under both Democrat and Republican Presidencies, those industries have been crippled by labor from unfree nations that do not have to include workers’ comp, Social Security, and so on, in their labor costs.
Yet the debate was commonly called “free trade” when it was anything but free and nothing but shifting labor to countries unburdened by American workers’ rights and entitlements passed by Legislators who so often claim to be fighting for us but are really fighting against us.
Would we not all be happier and safer if our politicians worked for us rather than fought against us? And it’s not just us. Look at government borrowings here and elsewhere, as the so-called developed world ignores sound economic principles.
After becoming Obama’s Chief of Staff, Emanuel, in a meeting at the Wall Street Journal on November 19, 2008, quipped:
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“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
The character for crisis in Chinese can also mean a turning point, and some have said it means opportunity in discussing political tactics. A crisis is often a surprise that leads to wheels within wheels, concealed agendas, and October surprises before critical elections. Is there another October surprise or two in our future?
November 2026 is just around the corner, and from here we can already see November 2028. The new-new lefty Dems say, louder and louder, that we have to have more free stuff by making Americans pay more and more.
Who are “we the people” anymore? Are we any longer one people, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all? And is Rahm Emanuel the man to answer that question?
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