For centuries, a battle has raged in the United States over the issue of which Americans should bear the brunt of paying taxes to maintain public services. Although the advent of the federal income tax shifted much of the burden to those with the greatest wealth (and therefore the greatest ability to pay), in recent decades wealthy Americans and their corporations have managed to subvert progressive taxation and, in a growing number of cases, to evade taxation entirely. As a result, campaigns to enact tax-the-rich legislation are flourishing in numerous states and in Congress.
Published Articles by Lawrence Wittner
Donald Trump's war of choice in the Middle East is but the latest indication that the system of international law -- which provides guidelines for the behavior of nations in world affairs -- is crumbling and being replaced by a might-makes-right approach. But there are ways to bolster international law and, thereby, halt the return of nations to their traditional practices of war and imperialism.
In January 2026, as the World Economic Forum opened in Davos, a report by the charity Oxfam revealed that a fourth of the world's population was afflicted by hunger and nearly half lived in poverty. Meanwhile, billionaire wealth jumped by over 16 percent in 2025 to $18.4 trillion -- its highest level in history. The world's 12 richest billionaires had more wealth than the poorest half of humanity (or more than four billion people) and lived in fantastic luxury and extravagance. Can this massive economic inequality possibly be justified?
Given the termination of nuclear arms control agreements, the escalating nuclear arms race, and the increasing threats of nuclear war by leaders of the nuclear powers, the hands of the "Doomsday Clock" of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists were recently set at the most dangerous level in its 80-year history. Even so, as in the past, it remains possible to stop the drift toward annihilation.
Amid widespread revulsion at the behavior of the second Trump administration and its Republican loyalists, there is a curious tendency to claim that the Democrats have failed to resist the slide of the United States toward fascism. But, in fact, Democrats -- at the grassroots level and in Congress -- have repeatedly displayed overwhelming opposition to the rightwing Republican onslaught. By contrast, Republicans have almost uniformly backed Trump's priorities.
There is a widening gap today between global possibilities and global realities. The possibilities are enormous, for -- thanks to factors ranging from increases in knowledge to advances in economic productivity -- it's finally feasible for all of humanity to lead decent and fulfilling lives. And yet, powerful forces intent on building an unjust, lawless, and violent world have left us far short of these possibilities.
Although Donald Trump's Department of Labor announced in April 2025 that "Trump's Golden Age puts American workers first," that contention is contradicted by the facts. In reality, Trump has taken the lead in reducing workers' incomes, fostering unemployment, undermining worker safety and health, and terminating collective bargaining rights for more than a million federal government employees. Trump's second term in office might have provided a "Golden Age" for the President and his fellow billionaires. But it has produced harsh and challenging times for American workers.
A key factor that plays a role in the bromance between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump is their embrace of great power imperialism. In this connection, they are behaving like sophisticated mob bosses, attempting to avoid conflicts with one another by staking out different territory -- Putin in Europe and Trump in Latin America. But there is an alternative to this descent into the crude imperialism of the past.
Donald Trump has claimed that "every policy" of his administration has been "designed to lift up the American worker." The reality, though is that, since his return to office in January 2025, he has acted consistently to undermine workers' chosen representatives, America's labor unions. His actions include terminating union rights for more than a million federal government employees (1 out of every 14 unionized workers in the United States), paralyzing the National Labor Relations Board, and limiting the operations of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. The president of the AFL-CIO concluded that "this has been the most hostile administration to workers in our lifetimes."
Although the world is beset by severe global crises -- including horrific wars, worldwide climate catastrophe, massive population displacement, and deepening poverty -- a network of civil society organizations, scholars, policy experts, and diplomats launched a campaign in September 2025 that has the potential to address these and other global challenges. Article 109 of the UN Charter, they observe, provides for a Charter Review that can upgrade the international organization into a major force for a better world.