Although Donald Trump's Department of Labor announced in April 2025 that "Trump's Golden Age puts American workers first," that contention in 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.
Published Articles by Lawrence Wittner
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.
This year, when legislators in both houses of the U.S. Congress introduced resolutions calling upon the U.S. government to lead a global effort to halt and reverse the nuclear arms race, the action was largely a response to the efforts of the Back from the Brink campaign. Begun in 2017 by Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Union of Concerned Scientists, that campaign -- spurred on by an escalating nuclear arms race that is rapidly spiraling out of control -- has secured the endorsement of a significant number of major national organizations and government officials. And it has some prospects for success.
Although Albert Einstein is best-known as a theoretical physicist, he also spent much of his life grappling with the problem of war. Appalled by the threat to human civilization posed by unrestrained nationalism, he called repeatedly for the building of a peaceful world. "We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking," he wrote, "if mankind is to survive."
When nations face sharp xenophobic and racist divisions within, they do have governments that can take action to counter them. But the situation is quite different in the international arena, which more closely resembles a lawless wilderness in which nations can engage freely in criminal violence. In addition, the absence of effective governance on the global level cripples efforts to tackle other major world problems, such as the nuclear arms race, climate change, and disease pandemics.
In recent months, U.S. immigration authorities deported about 80 Russian asylum seekers, shackled and handcuffed, on ICE planes to Moscow, where they were turned over to the FSB (the dreaded Russian Security Service). They were among about 1,000 other Russian antiwar and democracy activists seeking sanctuary in the United States who can expect a cruel fate in Putin's Russia.
Donald Trump has repeatedly proclaimed himself a nationalist and a keen supporter of an "America First" policy in world affairs. In line with this nationalist approach, he has worked to undermine the United Nations -- sharply slashing its funding and withdrawing from its key agencies, including the World Health Organization, the Human Rights Council, and UNESCO. By contrast, polls show that most Americans have a favorable view of the work done by the United Nations and its agencies and want their country to engage closely with the world organization.
Ever since the atomic bombings of Japanese cities in August 1945, the world has been living on borrowed time, for major governments have been too committed to traditional thinking about international relations to resist the temptation to build nuclear weapons and threaten their use. Even so, thanks largely to popular pressure, governments have accepted some degree of nuclear constraint and nuclear war has thus far been averted. With a revival of public pressure and the implementation of measures to ensure international security, it still remains possible to safeguard human survival.