Lima, Peru—Evo Morales, the president of the Plurinational Republic of Bolivia, is a superstar politician here at the 20th Conference of the Parties (COP-20) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The press gaggle follows him around like puppies and enthusiastically applauds his unrelenting diatribes against rich industrialized countries. The headline is a quotation taken from Morales' response to being asked at a press conference if he was optimistic about the summit meeting here in Lima? "The deep causes of global warming are not being dealt with here. The origin of global warming lies in capitalism," asserted Morales. "If we could end capitalism then we would have a solution."

Morales further observed, "After thirty years of negotiations, global warming is still going on." He added, "So many people and countries do not act responsibly. They are only thinking about profits, luxuries, and markets. They are not thinking about life, but only of money and how to accumulate more capital."

Capitalism is also the deep cause of great goods like doubled average global life expectancy over the past century; global literacy up from 25 percent of the world's population to 80 percent today; a 23 percent increase in per capita food consumption since 1961; and an increase since 1989 in the proportion of countries that are electoral democracies from 41 to 63 percent now. Just saying.