Happy New Year! Now, Time to Focus

by Errington C. Thompson, MD

I hope that everybody has had a happy and healthy holiday season. Instead of meaningless New Year’s resolutions, let’s come together and resolve to make this world a little bit better. I’ve got a few suggestions for 2012 –

Let’s Come Together to Combat Lies

For some reason, the mainstream media (“MSM”) seems to be very adept at taking lies and passing them on with no filter. The MSM was happy to pass on that Barack Obama was a socialist, a communist, born in Kenya – or was it Indonesia?

They were also very happy to pass on every bad thing that happened at any Occupy event, at Wall Street, in Oakland, anywhere – and maybe it’s just my memory, but I don’t recall any bad news associated with any Tea Party event, even when a “huge” rally of a few dozen people showed up armed to the teeth in a national park. Maybe those Tea Party guys are just nicer, more reliable people.

Oh and according to the MSM, President Obama has done nothing for the economy. Almost no one will remind you that America was losing more than 700,000 jobs per month when Obama took office. For the last 15 months straight, the economy has added jobs. We need to make sure that the American people know the truth.

Let’s Talk About Jobs

I think we can all agree that the most pressing issue in America today is jobs. Twenty-three million Americans are either unemployed or underemployed, and they need jobs. We need to put Americans back to work. We need good jobs that pay well to support our families, jobs that generate commerce and tax revenue that grows the economy.

Some folks would rather focus on silly claims about who loves America more, and if history is any guide, we should expect no help from conservatives, who will continue to yammer on about market principles while encouraging their CEO friends to hoard trillions in unused cash. Market principles seem to be very good at putting food on the tables of wealthy CEOs but not so good at putting food on the table of average Americans. We need to change the rules so that work pays.

Let’s Focus on a Living Wage

Jobs alone are simply not enough. The reason that the United States enjoyed the prosperity that we did throughout the 1950s and 1960s was because we had low unemployment and almost everybody earned a living wage. A single breadwinner could support a family – at least in white America; and many black families moved from poverty to the middle class during that era. So, fixing the jobs problem should only be part of what we are focused on in 2012; we must also work to ensure that every job pays a real living wage.

We Need Broad Economic Prosperity

We need to envision a system in which all Americans can prosper.

Presently, we have a system where a couple of thousand Americans prosper outrageously well, where the six WalMart heirs own as much as the bottom 30 percent of all Americans. That’s right: six people own as much as 100 million of the rest of us*.

Remember when we had a system in which the average working-class American could afford to take a vacation, send their kids to college, and save for their retirement? That wasn’t a pipe dream, or in a Disney movie; that was reality in the United States from the 1950s through the 1970s. It is only recently that the word “savings” has been erased from the American vernacular.

Let’s Fix Our Political System

Today we have a political system in which two parties fight tooth and nail for the hundreds of millions of dollars that will allow them to stay in power. They sell their loyalty – and often their votes – to those who give them the most: Wall Street banks, corporate CEOs, and the billionaire donors to political operations run by shady operators like Karl Rove.

Why don’t we have a system in which both parties fight to accurately represent the American people and the will of the American people? The majority of the American people have wanted to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than five years.

Multiple studies have shown that the American people have supported higher taxes for wealthier Americans. Strong majorities wanted universal health care in 2009. Yet, for some reason, Congress can’t get it done. We’re still fighting in Afghanistan; the rich are lobbying for even steeper tax cuts (on capital gains and inheritances) in exchange for higher taxes on the middle class; and the health insurance bill that passed is mediocre at best.

Even in North Carolina, 72 percent wanted the -cent sales tax retained rather than let it expire, yet the newly elected majority in Raleigh eliminated the tax and used the loss of revenue to slash our state’s long-admired education programs.

We must fight on every front to fix our political system, force our representatives to focus on jobs, restructure our economy, challenge the media to tell the truth and call out lies…in short, we must retake our rightful power as “We, the People.”

This is my to-do list for 2012. I hope that you’ll help me complete it.

*Washington Post, 12/9/11