To the editor:
On May 6, I had the pleasure of attending the Gloucester City Democratic Committee's annual brunch.
It was great to see and reconnect with people and friends from years past.
The event was upbeat and all the speakers — including John Tierney and Elizabeth Warren — did a great job spelling out in great detail, and with an equal amount of passion, just what is at stake in November.
Will we be a country that continues to move forward in repairing the damage nearly 30 years of uninterrupted supply side, a.k.a. "trickle down" or "voodoo," economics have done to our nation's social fabric and economy?
Or will we choose to return, as Mitt Romney and the national GOP seem determined to do, to the failed economic policies of Ronald Wilson Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, and George Walker Bush that led us into the worst economic recession since the Great Depression?
Those were the powerful and profound questions and themes that dominated the brunch.
I was in 100 percent agreement with the speakers that the answer to all those questions needs to be a resounding "no." But I was troubled that no one at the brunch even talked about President Obama's increasingly worrisome and militaristic foreign policy, especially in relation to Latin America.
The morning of the brunch, there was a front-page story in the New York Times about the growing US military presence in Honduras.
That story comes on the heels of President Obama's recent visit to Colombia, where he met with the rightwing Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, to discuss increased military cooperation between the Colombian and U.S. governments to combat the growing influence of international drug cartels in Central American countries.
That meeting sparked concern among many in Central America that Presidents Obama and Santos are poised to implement a policy of military intervention against the cartels in Central America that is, for all intents and purposes, a carbon copy of the disastrous militaristic approach that presidents Felipe Calderon and George W. Bush enacted in Mexico.
As much as I support President Obama's domestic agenda, I have grave concerns about the direction he seems to be headed in response to the "war on drugs" in Latin America.
It's an issue Democratic activists need to be discussing amongst ourselves, and with people such as John Tierney, Elizabeth Warren, and other Democratic candidates asking for our votes in November.
We owe it to ourselves and the people of Central America not to repeat the same mistakes presidents Calderon and Bush made in Mexico.
MICHAEL COOK
Gloucester
