South America’s idiotic socialist leaders have come out with a declaration in which they state that “capitalism is leading humanity and the planet to extinction.” It is yet another sign that Hugo Chavez and his buddies continue to radicalize.

The Heads of State and Government of Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela issued a declaration saying that the Draft Declaration of the 5th Summit of the Americas is insufficient and unacceptable.

1. Capitalism is leading humanity and the planet to extinction. What we are experiencing is a global economic crisis of a systemic and structural nature, not another cyclic crisis. Those who think that with a taxpayer money injection and some regulatory measures this crisis will end are wrong. The financial system is in crisis because it trades bonds with six times the real value of the assets and services produced and rendered in the world, this is not a “system regulation failure”, but a integrating part of the capitalist system that speculates with all assets and values with a view to obtain the maximum profit possible. Until now, the economic crisis has generated over 100 million additional hungry persons and has slashed over 50 million jobs, and these figures show an upward trend.

2. Capitalism has caused the environmental crisis, by submitting the necessary conditions for life in the planet, to the predominance of market and profit. Each year we consume one third more of what the planet is able to regenerate. With this squandering binge of the capitalist system, we are going to need two planets Earth by the year 2030.

3. The global economic crisis, climate change, the food crisis and the energy crisis are the result of the decay of capitalism, which threatens to end life and the planet. To avert this outcome, it is necessary to develop and model an alternative to the capitalist system.

This ‘new system’ is of course a very old one. In fact, it has already been tried by numerous countries, and has led to their own collapse time and again:

- solidarity and complementarity, not competition;
- a system in harmony with our mother earth and not plundering of human resources;
- a system of cultural diversity and not cultural destruction and imposition of cultural values and lifestyles alien to the realities of our countries;
- a system of peace based on social justice and not on imperialist policies and wars;
- in summary, a system that recovers the human condition of our societies and peoples and does not reduce them to mere consumers or merchandise.

It is embarrassing that we actually have to take these people serious, but I am afraid we do. They are powerful, after all, and they influence many hundreds of millions of citizens, journalists, quasi-intellectuals, professors, writers, actors and other ’second-hand dealers in ideas.’ They are leading their own countries to financial ruin, all because they believe an inherently weak and wrong system can help their people become ‘developed.’

Or, at the very least, take developed countries down to their own level.

You would think that the battle between socialism and capitalism (thus free markets) was won when the Soviet Union fell, but no; South America’s leaders are determined to let history repeat itself. They are free to do so, of course; most of them won elections fair and square.

We cannot allow them to take the rest of the world with them, however. Socialism is an expansionist ideology. If you think it can be limited to one country by doing absolutely nothing to prevent it from spreading, you are dead wrong. Ronald Reagan’s strategy used against the Soviet Union was a winner, because he realized you had to fight communism (and its little brother socialism) actively and aggressively. The declaration is nothing less than a declaration of war on capitalism. We have to answer in kind.