My thesis and my learning

My thesis and my learning about the US, Venezuela and the world

Felipe Pérez Martí

April 4, 2021

Presentation and summary

This essay answers this article and other similar attacks against my ideas and my person: https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2021/01/09/from-chavismo-to-trumpism-the-felipe-perez-marti-case/

After an introduction on the problems that a change of era in human history implies and where we are going, I raise the thesis that there was indeed conspiracy and fraud in the US elections. Donald Trump is postulated to be the legitimate president, and Joe Biden is a usurper of citizen power. That country would have experienced such a strong shock that it has been infected with the Venezuelan virus, the curse of abundance, with a new strain: rentism. In this system, a cartel of rent-seeking mafias captures the public powers and their lobbyists become the public official heads. In this case China, in alliance with the MSM, Big Tech, Big Pharma and big financial corporations of the world, assume control of the national executive power of the United States through a puppet in that country.

Of course this is amazing and seems crazy to many people. But here I narrate that the conspiracy theory in Venezuela also seemed amazing to me and I denied it, making the same mistake made today by those who believe that in the United States there was no conspiracy and massive fraud. To motivate my thesis I will tell you about my experience in Venezuela including my learning process beginning with the mistake of believing for too long that the opposition leadership represented the interests of the vast majority of Venezuelans. The great enigma of why Maduro did not fall when expected, shared by world analysts, is revealed with my thesis applied to Venezuela: the mafia cartel of rent-seekers of the curse of Venezuelan abundance capture not only the government, but also a key part of the opposition. And that opposition was not interested in endangering the system, but only accessing power within it to share the benefits it implies. But the criminals in power logically did not want to share it without anything in return, or without enough de facto force (since we are not in a de jure regime, a democracy) to remove them from the leadership of the mafia cartel.

Faced with the disqualifications that I have been subjected to, I defend my performance as an analyst, a head of the economic cabinet under Chávez (2002-2003), and as an activist for the civil rights of the common citizen, and relate it to the foundation of my Venezuelan conspiracy theory. This experience and knowledge is what allows me, as I argue with reasons to justify it, to better understand what is happening in the United States and the world. In addition, I show how my religious beliefs allow me to see when the world began to go wrong: during the so-called enlightenment, in which rationalism and materialism, hand in hand with both liberalism and communism, rose up as idols, leaving aside the spiritual dimension of humankind.

I note the interesting fact that the worst of capitalist liberalism and communism are now directly linked through the alliance between China and private world corporations. I conclude with my proposal for the world in the new era that must come after an apocalyptic transition: The Solidarity Way, which takes up the spiritual dimension with natural and social harmony, on the one hand, and transcends capitalism and communism, on the other.

Introduction.

In this essay I take the opportunity to open a debate that tries to shed light on the true Venezuelan and world situation. I have been attacked in public and in private because of my predictions and insights about that and I have not only been branded as wrong and as having the confirmation bias (exhibited by those who only see the things that confirm what they want to see), but as crazy. However, I am convinced that I am right and here I explain why.

I believe that the situation has been so difficult to unravel for the common citizen, and even for the experts, because they have not gone to the root of the problems, as I have tried to do. At that fundamental level everything is better understood, since the power games that are behind the media and cultural veil can be clearly appreciated, as in Plato's allegory of the cave: the political, economic and geopolitical interests in dispute. One of the few good things that has emerged from all this tragedy, Venezuelan, American, and global, is that important cracks have been exposed to that system of interests and their agents behind the scenes. Some light has filtered to the cave through those cracks. What I propose is to make the most of it and take action from the common citizens' interests point of view, who are the ones who suffer the consequences of this cultural, economic, political and geopolitical domination.

In a way, I offer the red pill of The Matrix, the movie, since what people see is what they are programmed to see by the rent-seekers, the ones who move the threads in our times, where the information and cultural arenas are the main battle fields in this new gen war. That is why my approach has been so shocking to some people. My enemies, related directly or indirectly to the system of rentism, attack me either because they know I am dangerous because I reveal their lies, or see me as a competitor analyst, but many citizens do not believe in me because they live in The Matrix and do not know it.

It's not really that the mafia cartel is completely organized and has everything coldly calculated. It is also about spontaneous forces based on erroneous ideas about the human being, conceived as something merely material governed by his ego, which is in conflict with the world to get the best of it and be in the best possible position in front of other people and nature. That is why what is happening is not only the will of a cartel of world mafias, which exists, but a process of entropy of self-achieved criticality. Our Matrix therefore has a part of human will, but also of the expected evolution of negative principles, "machines" that are very autonomous and anarchic and play on their own logic, unlike the film where everything is centralized and planned.

In any case, in a world with these two forces at work, that of the international mafia cartel and those of entropy, the strong have more power to direct the course of events. And they are China and the big international corporations, including the MSM, the Big Tech, the Big Pharma and the financial ones. In this sense, ordinary citizens are the human slaves, the batteries cultivated like cattle in the movie, used by both machines and the powerful throughout the world in order to exploit their energy, both the machines (which are like demons that possess people, literally speaking), as well as the powerful throughout the world fabric. That is why the spiritual dimension is also fundamental to understand all this, and to seek the solution, as I propose below, which require the liberation, empowerment and redemptive salvation of the common citizen on a planetary level. In fact, the forces that drive the powerful are, most frequently, their egos, the misconceptions that act like demons possessing their minds in order to look for profit beyond what they need. Instead of acting as administrators of their wealth and power, they become their slaves and worship them as gods, which is a spiritual disease that is difficult, but not impossible, to heal, as Jesus pointed out (Mark 10: 25-27). Those powerful people and organizations also need, then, spiritual as well as social healing.

I suggest that you take me as a whistleblower about a purposely hidden crime that also rattles the cat, since I have also been in The Matrix: I was head of the economic cabinet for a year under Hugo Chávez (2002-2003). On the other hand, it has also witnessed the corruption of the Venezuelan opposition leadership for a long time, because they tried, in an ambush together with the then vice president of the Chávez government, to corrupt me when I was the anti-corruption czar as president of the National Commission of State Transformation. On top of that, I have used my training at The University of Chicago to analyze all my experience with economic tools, in particular from Game Theory. On top of that, I have used my training at The University of Chicago to analyze all my experience with economic tools, in particular from Game Theory.

So please consider my approach as a contribution to the debate, for which I am open to learn from all of you, as I have also learned from my mistakes in this whole process which I take as a search for truth and for what is convenient for humanity in these apocalyptic times.

In that regard I propose “The Solidarity Way" as a solution to our troubles for the times to come. In that model of society I put the people at the center of power as the sovereign, who chooses, in a learning process over time, what combination of market and state is good for their nation, given their circumstances (that include capabilities), their history, and the normal and convenient disputes regarding proposals between the politicians and analysts, who should serve the people, not use them, as it has happened for a long time, specially now.

My proposal is an alternative to the prospect of China domination together with the world's private corporations, which is scary, to say the least. Instead of being able to control and save the world, that “Deep State” system would witness the demise of the human race on earth, since it would not be able to stop the mortal decay of our civilization. We know, as examples, how inefficient China is regarding the environment (including the depletion of the seas, not only air), for example. And how Bill Gates behaves regarding software and technology, since I am a witness of their mafia-like behavior of Microsoft while trying to promote from the government in Venezuela the principle of "as much free software as possible, as much proprietary software as necessary" for the public and private sectors. Similarly, the mafia-like and rent-hunting behavior of Smartmatic in our country, when our team of hackers was originally hired to implement a system of transparent, efficient and economic elections. Then they broke in and convinced Jorge Rodríguez, the head of the electoral council at the time, and who has been signaled as having a lot to do with the fraud in the US, to put our team aside and go with them, with large amounts of money involved to buy their software and hardware.

In my model of society, on the other hand, science and technology are liberated because the solidarity mode of production of free knowledge is more efficient socially and even as a business model than that of private science and technology. For example, vaccines against Covid 19 would not have patents, but their production would be “generic” and therefore they would reach the poor and poor countries. Knowledge would be democratized throughout the world, with citizens rescuing the truth from the fake news of the powerful wanting to enslave them through propaganda, the culture of cancellation, and bots on privately owned social media. The dominance of private banks and central banks over citizens and investors would also be minimized with their ability to create private and public money. The citizens, on the contrary, would create their own financing and exchange mechanisms, not subject to theft by default from private banks or inflationary taxes from governments, in their nations and in the world, as in the case of the dollar. Harmony with nature would be reestablished too.

There was, indeed, conspiracy and fraud in the US.

On the subject of conspiracy and fraud, there should be no longer any doubts about it among connoisseurs, despite the political diatribes and the deceptions that the MSM try to impose, now trying to divert attention to other issues, are always biased in favor of the illegitimate president, Joe Biden, despite his disastrous performance in such a short time.

I did a detailed and rigorous analysis, as far as I can tell, on the matter

https://www.quehacer.wiki/wiki/Conspiracy_and_fraud_in_the_US_elections

and my conclusion is that the conspiracy and massive fraud are true. The legitimate president is Donald Trump, while Joe Biden is an usurper and a puppet of an alliance of large private corporations with countries like China. Venezuela played a role in that result, as I originally said.

My analysis is based on the use of powerful economics tools, such as Principal-Agent theory and Signaling Games, which allow us to make inferences about the guilt or innocence of a politician based on his public performance, assuming the worst possible scenario for variables treated as completely unobservable, such as fraud and conspiracy. In my analysis, theoretical rigor and well-documented empirical evidence prevail, but the theory is quite simple to a knowledgeable person, as well as the evidence used to support it.

I assumed the task to explain it to people without academic training, fooled by the media and the politicians. But since it is about social sciences, I might be wrong even in such a simple setting, and I would love to know if any analyst finds errors in my contribution to the frank and serious debate I propose in order to look for the truth on this topic once and for all. It is time for honest and knowledgeable people to study this issue, since the consequences are devastating, not only for the United States, but for Venezuela and the entire world.

Beyond the discussion of whether or not Trump is better than Biden, my findings confirm what I said in the article that Ross criticizes, which I reproduce here for reference:

https://www.movimientolibertadores.com/doc/MessageUScitizensv2.pdf

Rent-seeking, the curse of abundance, and rentism in the US.

As the disqualification of myself is crucial to the conclusions of those who criticize me, I will focus on that now for its more general implications, given my theory of the contagion of a new strain of the Venezuelan virus to the society of the United States.

I begin with a fundamental mistake made by some who criticize me when I make the parallel between Venezuela and the United States, saying that it is unthinkable that the latter country suffers from a disease of the former, the curse of abundance. This disease has been documented as a socio-political and economic disease in the literature for petro-states and other countries whose governments depend heavily on income from property of commodities such as diamonds, gold, copper, etc. But the United States does not need to be that kind of state in order to fall into the disease of rentism, which is closely related to but differs from the curse of abundance.

In any democratic country without these two diseases, the rent-seekers are, by definition, those who use their connections in the government, through lobbyists hired by them to extract benefits from those political influences that, since they do not come from economic productivity, are called rents. Hence the name of the disease. Rentism occurs when the rent-seekers go so far as to capture the government through puppets, with which the public institution goes from serving the citizens, the legitimate sovereigns, to serving their new de facto owners. Its lobbyists from the past become elected officials now, which is exactly what has happened in the United States and puts it on a convergence course towards Venezuela, with their differences that we will mention now.

The economic symptoms of the curse of abundance, macroeconomic instability, and the Dutch disease do not occur in rentism, but only in the Venezuelan variant of the illness. The instability comes from the exogenous volatility of the prices of commodities such as oil, while the second symptom comes from the overvaluation of the currency. But the political symptoms that I have described, derived from the formation of the mafia cartel captured by the government, do also occur in rentism: rentistic populism, administrative and territorial centralism, militarism, endemic corruption, de facto instead of de jure regime. And they occur in regimes with dictatorships, but also with false democracies: a de facto regime does not have to have a military dictatorship, for example, but it can be a sophisticated dictatorship, like the one we have described for the US now.

The conflict is not between right and left, but between good and evil.

This connects with my alleged populist extremism that places everything between good and evil. First of all, it is true that Trump was something of a populist. But Biden is even more populist, even judging by his few days in office and by the fact that, as I have explained, rentier populism is an essential symptom of rentism that allows the dominant mafia cartel to maintain power through rigged and bought elections. This actually happened in these elections when the rent-seekers were not in complete control, but were organized to reach it. As I have explained in the essay, they won’t stop at the executive national power. They want the whole pie, the whole nation. And anyway, when rent-seeking mafias are in power, populist rentism becomes a normal occurrence, particularly during elections, to help buy the conscience of citizens who are underprivileged for some reason as in Venezuela, with its specific social and political conditions. In the US they use issues of race, gender, deaths from Covid 19, health insurance, social condition, infrastructure, climate change, etc.

The contradiction between good and evil is not, then, a matter of dictatorship or populism versus democracy. This statement also does not take into account the nature of the disease of rentism in the sense that those who pull the strings in a regime like that, as has been demonstrated in Venezuela and is already being seen in part in the United States, also capture a key part of the opposition regardless of its ideology, in addition to the ruling party. It does not matter if they are from the left or from the right. It does not matter if they are from the government or from the opposition.

In Venezuela, the opposition leadership and presumably knowledgeable analysts have started from an erroneous conflict map, as if in Venezuela we had a conventional dictatorship. Using the fact that strength is in union, a successful concept in a confrontation, they have promoted the unity of the opposition unit. With that they have tried to impose on us, those of us who promote the strategy of courage, that we join an opposition leadership that is also captured, judging by their performance, by the puppeteers in the country. This has also happened in the US in this election, as we have observed by the behavior of some RINOs.

If the conflict is really, as I have been insisting for a long time to correct that error, between the corrupt, grouped between puppets and puppeteers, and the rest of Venezuelans, the correct unity is that of the honest regardless of their ideology, be it left or right. For the rest, just as the correlation between those who play courage and are honest has been clear throughout this political process, the one between corruption and cohabitation is also evident. Those variables, courage and cohabitation, which are observable, are what we have used to drive management decisions in Venezuelan politics, in order to be able to know who the real enemy is and to be effective in this conflict, even though we are aware of the errors (type 1 and 2) that you commit when you do it, and that you have to learn in the process in which you make mistakes but correct them as you go.

If you start from the wrong conflict map in a war, you lose it right away, which is what happened in Venezuela. We do not want it to happen in the United States as well, a determining ally for us and the Western world and that is why we are alerting about it, since the enemy is very skillful at hiding their true nature, as we have seen already in this US election. Unity in the United States must then be the same: between patriots, be they from the right or left, black, Asian, Latino or white, women or men, to fight for their nation, which is in grave danger.

Of course, ideological conflicts exist, and must exist, in a normal democracy. What I'm pointing out is for cases like Venezuela, and now, although in an incipient but strong way because it involves the highest spheres of power, in the United States.

My mistakes in predicting the fall of Maduro and the mistakes of other analysts.

In relation to my failures to predict the fall of Maduro, it has to do with the fact that I myself made the mistake of believing for some time that the contradiction was between the government and the opposition. But as I am going to explain, it must be put in context, because it was due to the fact that I trusted too much in the opposition leadership, believing that I was going to play courage in the game of the hawk and the chicken four years ago:

https: //www.lapatilla.com/site/2016/10/18/felipe-perez-marti-obediencia-constitutional/

It was a natural prediction, since it is the only Nash equilibrium if you have relatively superior forces. By playing cohabitation, the opposition leadership ended up favoring the misgovernment of Maduro, as by now many mistaken analysts also know it, some without acknowledging their mistake and speaking only about mine.

The game did not fail; and it is one of my contributions to the current Venezuelan reality, since the game is de facto, by force, and not de jure, by elections, as many analysts now recognize. If you have more relative strength, you must play courage, not cohabitation. And we had that superiority at that moment: the armed forces, mostly against Maduro (according to the best experts in the field), the population in its vast majority, the international community (with Trump, Colombia, Brazil at the head), and the political forces.

It is interesting that my mistake was the same as that of those who do not want to admit at this time that in the US there are rent-seekers that pull the strings and captured in preparation for the elections, part of the government politicians (in that case Republicans, the RINO's) and part of the opposition (Democrats). For my part, I corrected that error a long time ago and now I predict that with the alliance with Joe Biden, Maduro will not be removed from power, much less the rent-seeking system:

https://www.movimientolibertadores.com/doc/QueHacerBidenGuaido. pdf

But most Venezuelan analysts, including the Caracas Chronicles, have not yet corrected that error. However, they attack me for this prediction failure and they do not correct theirs, which does not allow them to see that with that Venezuelan opposition, and more with Joe Biden in the US, Maduro and his regime are going to remain in power, now strengthened after the weakening of the opposition by the Consulta. It was the same opposition that also supported Biden and stood against Trump. Not by chance: they are both with the international rent-seekers.

The error of the analysts who proposed the cohabitation strategy was much greater than mine and that is not mentioned by the Caracas Chronicles, one of the proponents of that strategy, since they predicted that with it the opposition would win this confrontation against Maduro's misgovernment, which I knew was completely false and I said it from the beginning.

In fact I ended up being the one who was right, because that cohabitation strategy has not worked since, as I repeatedly denounced, it did not even imply a Nash equilibrium in the factual confrontation game that we were playing: if the enemy gives the signal that he is not going to confront, the Maduro regime has incentives not to cooperate and deviate from the supposed agreement, playing the strategy of courage and thus take over (maintain in this case) the entire territory, which is what happened.The paradox is that some of those same analysts who criticized me (and only some!), now claim that with those criminals in power you cannot get away from them with elections and dialogue: the correct thing is the strategy of courage. They do not acknowledge their mistake either, but instead blame the victim for their mistakes: me, and the Venezuelan people, whom they have betrayed time and again.

In short: my mistake was to believe that the opposition leadership was going to play hawk, the courage strategy in the chicken game. If it had happened, Maduro would have fallen. But the other analysts were also wrong, because they believed that the cohabitation strategy, which they advised, would outs Maduro, which did not happen. Now many of them are still wrong, including the Caracas Chronicles, and they assume that with this strategy of dialogue, led now by the US ambassador, James Story, they will oust Maduro, which is false again. On the other hand, others who were wrong at the beginning now recognize that the correct strategy is that of courage, but they do not recognize their mistake either. The only one wrong was me, and they and the media repeat it over and over again. Does this sound familiar to you?

My contributions to the Venezuelan debate related to the rent-seeking mafia cartel.

Many analysts and politicians of the false opposition have used that error to disqualify me, which is an ad hominem fallacy. But they are also using the straw man fallacy to question my authority, since they only look at one aspect of my performance, and not everything else, which sheds light on my resume and my knowledge of Venezuelan reality as a point of departure for the analysis of the American and world reality.

Hyperinflation

I predicted hyperinflation when no one thought of it as possible, relating it to the public policies of the misgovernment mafia cartel when oil revenues fell and fiscal deficits became very large and endemic. It was also clear to me that at that time the ties of submission with China, Russia and Iran increased, in exchange for giving them part of part of national sovereignty.

Somalization

I predicted the Somalization-Africanization of Venezuela when no one believed that to come and now we see it clearly. As a consequence of the drop in oil income, the dirty businesses of the rent-seeking mafias also increased, such as drug trafficking by the corrupt military copula and increased the public policies that tightened the belts of citizens and maintained the bonanza for the powerful. The quality of basic public services such as water, electricity, gas, roads, security fell more rapidly. All of this produced what we have called “misgovernment,” which led, among other things, to that somalization and loss of national sovereignty in part of the territory (with the Colombian guerrillas as well), and with neighboring countries, such as Guyana. In this context, the police and national guards, seeing their income diminished, began to collect "taxes from citizens, and became extortion mafias. The same as mayors and governors throughout the territory.

False democracy: how rent-seekers correct their mistakes.

I predicted the exact composition of the 2015 National Assembly that gave the opposition supermajority, a misgovernment miscalculation to wash its face, typical of rent-hunting regimes that wash their faces as false democracies through elections that do not affect. Then the misgovernment completely neutralized it as an independent power.

Game of the hawk and the chicken and the optimal strategy.

I formulated the aforementioned theory that implies the strategies of courage and cohabitation to get out not only from Maduro but from the rent-seeking system.

De facto game, credible threat, release of hostages and safe passage.

I formulated the theory of the kidnappers and the hostages, and the winning strategy by enclosing them, with a credible threat and offering a silver bridge, the safe-passage. A strategy against a de facto regime, like the one that is beginning to take shape in the United States.

Bilateral bargaining with asymmetric information.

I formulated the essential theory to evaluate the dialogue and its outcome on solid political and strategic bases, adapting the classic theory of conflict and negotiation to Venezuela. The main bases are two: 1. representativeness of the citizens, not of the opposition mafias; 2. Sufficient bargaining power. None of this was fulfilled, so the dialogue failed, as it is going to fail now, for want of both.

Caesar's wife must appear honest, not just be.

Desenmascaré la falsa presunción de inocencia de los políticos corruptos de oposición usando la teoría del Agente-Principal. Ahora está pasando en EEUU con la cultura de la cancelación: se está negando el derecho a la libre expresión de los ciudadanos, como en el caso de Sidney Powell y Michael Lindell: https://www.quehacer.wiki/wiki/Powell_not_liar_but_heroin

The real conflict map: between corrupt politicians and the rest of Venezuelans.

I characterized the real conflict map: it is not between right and left, or between government and opposition, but between rent-seekers and their political puppets, including opponents and the rest of Venezuelans.

The alliance of those of courage: the Republican Pact.

I introduced managerial and strategic criteria to Venezuelan politics to design a winning coalition, that of the honest with the strategy of courage, against the corrupt of the regime and the opposition, with the strategy of cohabitation.

The plebiscite of July 16, 2017: world precedent.

I proposed the idea of the original 16J plebiscite in 2016 in Lewis Pérez's group and from there it spread nationally and was held in 2017, in which I participated. With that occurred a historic event by world standards of a peaceful citizen election against a criminal regime. It was betrayed by the opposition leadership captured by the rent-seekers.

Liberators Movement: citizens' association, such as those of consumers.

I promoted the recovery of the Liberators Movement, which implemented the Plebiscite, after the MUD used it and betrayed the citizen's decision.

Proposal for a new plebiscite type 16J: to arm the Hummer against the Volkswagen.

We proposed in 2020 the holding of another plebiscite as primaries to unify the opposition and as a mechanism to strengthen the National Assembly as an institution and election of a Transitional Board. The opposition leadership did not agree because they would have lost that election to a leadership of courage. With that we learned with more reason that that opposition leadership did not want to leave the rent-seeking system.

National Consensus Plan and its rejection by Fedecámaras and the opposition.

I promoted the National Consensus Plan during my stay in the Chávez government back in 2002, which was rejected by Fedecámaras, the main private sector association, and the opposition leadership. Instead of accepting the opening for a dialogue with a market system, they promoted the oil strike to try to depose Chávez, and with this they sent him into the hands of Fidel Castro. There I learned the first signs about the rent-seeking behaviour of the opposition leadership.

My market exchange regime and its success.

I implemented the best exchange rate regime that Venezuela has had in the oil era: clean, pure market float. But the opposition did not want the market but rent-seeking, and that led Chávez to ally himself with Cuba and with socialism and Islamism at the world level: China, Russia, Iran.

My market exchange regime.

The last point connects with the false information that I am the author of the change control. On the contrary, since the exchange control regime has served to enrich the rent-seekers more and impoverish other citizens, as I have repeatedly denounced. On the contrary I led as head of the economy the implementation of the best exchange rate regime that Venezuela has had in its oil era: market. Clean float with wide bands that were never touched because the market endogenously kept the rate within them. The oil strike led by Fedecámaras, the union leadership and the opposition to depose Chávez produced, towards the end of that event, a run against Bolívar politically motivated as the last tactic to try to beat Chávez in the confrontation. They failed to bring down Chávez, but they succeeded in preventing a good pro-market shift from taking shape in Venezuela.

At that moment I tried to defend my market exchange system with a television network chain (all TV and radio stations transmitted my message alive, in real time) to try to control the expectations of flight against the Bolívar and opposing the exchange control proposal of Fidel Castro and Armando León, a director from the Central Bank of Venezuela. But Chávez believed them instead of me, despite the fact that I was the head of the economic cabinet, and imposed control. I then asked, reluctantly agreeing, to go for three months with exchange rate control in order to go back into my system. But Chávez did not accept and began the economic war with exchange controls. He was thrown into the hands of Fidel Castro (that's when the turn towards “Socialism of the XXI Century” began, really) and only the name of CADIVI remained from our proposal for temporary exchange rate control. Here I narrate it, in an essential debate today, after an interview with Sebastiana Barráez:

https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sri5fr

At that moment of the oil strike and its consequences I experienced my first warning about the rent-seeking system, since that the political opposition and economic leadership did not want a market economy and a rule of law, as was demonstrated by rejecting my proposal as head of the economy, and that became clear when they sabotaged my market exchange regime, which had worked so well. Neither did Chavismo later on, as we know, and in that they joined with the opposition about the system, only that they were in conflict over which mafia had power within the rent-seeking cartel.

They are jointly responsible for what is happening today in Venezuela: both Chávez, as well as the opposition leadership and the business leadership. Even if you do not believe it, the disinformation veil is so great in Venezuela that the common citizen still does not know these things, because they have been deceived and divided to support one or another puppet of the rent-seekers. Here you see Venezuela as an excellent example of this as well, of the communicational weapon as the key to rent-seekers. That is why I am clear about what is happening in the United States about the cancel culture: they deceive citizens and divide them among themselves to attack each other without knowing who is pulling the strings in the puppet theater, which is the one who they see and in which they choose to be a fan of some of them. Fortunately in the US an important part of the population is awakening, and is calling for citizen union, regardless of their ideology, for their country.

On the assault on the US Congress and the false parallelism with Venezuela.

Blaming the victim is normal for criminals, as we will see now in relation to Trump too. In this regard, I will comment on the issue of the assault on Congress in the United States and the parallels that Ross makes with the assault on the National Assembly in Venezuela. Totally different and incomparable things. In Venezuela it was true. But it is that the governments of Chávez and Maduro were in power and the National Assembly was the victim. In the United States, the opposite is true: there was massive fraud, as we have shown, and the people felt powerless, robbed of their power as sovereign of their nation. Trump did not call for a violent raid, but for a legitimate and peaceful demonstration, and there was infiltration of the conspirators to blame him: they had everything planned to take the photo and blame them. Anyone who knows about basic politics and propaganda can infer that without a special course in strategic games, and also know that such an event would turn against Trump, so that he did not have incentives to do so.

But even if the violence had been by Trump supporters, the verdict is very different: the perpetrators were the conspirators who committed fraud and those who supported them. The reason is that you cannot blame a stabbing victim if he calls “mother fucker” while the assailant is killing him. The murderer is not justified to make a fuss if the victim behaves in a "disrespectful" manner while being assassinated. This is what the leaders of the murder of the American nation did here: They blamed those who complained for having taken their country, their lives, from them.

The deaths of that incident and the disrespect for the institutions are to be charged on the electoral criminals. And people like Clifton Ross and Caracas Chronicles and the citizens of the United States Democratic Party were turned into guilty murderers without knowing it: they were other additional victims, being also deceived and used in their good faith by the conspirators.

The attacks against my religious beliefs and the origin of democracy.

Now I go to the issue of political disqualification because of my religious confession. The Catholic Church was truly the founder of Western civilization with its democracy, freedom and care for the underdog. Also of natural sciences including evolution, genetics, astrophysics, technology, universities, and so on. New historical research shows that this occurred during what liberals and communists have called contemptuously "the dark ages," the Middle Ages, in contrast to their "enlightenment," which attacked the spiritual realm of life and praised the rational and material ones. Modern democracy, beyond the Greek and Roman, is based on the concept of full equality of each person before God, regardless of their social condition, their race, their gender, their ideology, or citizenship. It came from the monasteries and later it was extended progressively to the whole society, which was christian. The parliaments, the rule of law, the condemnation of absolutism and the right to rebellion of the people come from that, as well as the end of feudalism.

The modern degeneration of Western civilization is rooted in the abandonment of the spiritual dimension of humans, I have no doubt; in the idolatry of rationalism and materialism and the arbitrary separation of the social and political aspects of life from the spiritual one, things in which liberalism agrees with communism.

Another condemnation of the Catholic Church came from the historical misrepresentation of liberalism and communism about what happened in the crusades, in the inquisition, and in the colony. I do not want to stir up the hornet's nest, but this is full of historical fake news of the "enlightenment", which hide that the crusades was an act of legitimate defense against the Muslim invasion of Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the Holy Land (Palestine-Israel). In the inquisition, it was not the Catholic Church that committed genocide and witch hunts, but other churches and states. In the colony, Catholicism was the religion that brought respect and equality to indigenous populations, unlike other religions that justified the oppression, enslavement and domination of indigenous populations. As in the modern issue of pedophilia, of course there were cases of exes, crimes and errors of the Catholic Church in these historical episodes. But the issue is to statistically compare their case with that of other religions. There are no doubts about it, according to the latest studies that we know (on this see the history of the Catholic church of the priest Carlos Ruiz de Cascos).

Saying this is important, not to turn this into a fight between religions, but to realize that behind all this there are political, economic and geopolitical reasons, again: the imperialist exploitation not only of some countries, but also large international corporations that began long before in history. Not by chance the perpetrator, again, accuses the victim of being the aggressor. To think about the future, you have to be honest with the past. But the only way to be successful in what is to come is to recover the spiritual aspect of humanity, and the political foundation in the principle of equality, and brotherhood, of humans and their harmony with nature.

Something that must be said about the religious topic, because it is so relevant, is that Masonry, with its secret styles and its networks of economic and political power, has a lot to do with what happened during the Enlightenment and is happening now, to the surprise of many. The reason is it is behind the scenes in this new agreement of world domination that unites, paradoxically, the worst of capitalism (private, rentistic corporatism) with communism (the curtailment of freedom through state and totalitarian domination of the privacy of each person, including the mental one).

The degeneration into idolization of material wealth, ego, hedonism, and the separation of man from nature have led the vast majority of humans to a new form of slavery, exploited and encouraged by the powerful.

Those who dominate in that world are those who have economic and political power. It is a delusion that this global rent-seeking alliance is in favor of women, blacks, the underprivileged, the excluded. Rather, they use them, as has happened in this conspiracy, literally possessing and manipulating their minds to use them politically and keep them enslaved panoptically.

So the "illustration" of liberalism and communism, now united, represents the true dark age, which needs enlightenment in what is to come, which must be characterized, under penalty of extinction of the human race, by a return to harmony and balance between the spiritual and the material: natural science, including the issues of sexuallity, nutrition, resting (not the alienating leisure) and quality of life, on the one hand; and social sciences, including politics, labor, production, the proper use of natural resources and respect for nature, on the other.

So the matter at hand is spiritual, at its most fundamental. Kurt Gödel, with his incompleteness theorems of mathematics, made clear the ridiculousness of the idolatries of rationalism and materialism, which has only led to the apocalyptic period in which we are living. Believing that we are only matter and reason is like believing that the earth is the only object in the universe.

It is to notice that the Catholic Church is also in crisis. For example, Pope Francis, although I follow him spiritually as a Catholic that I am, is wrong about politics in Venezuela and the United States. In Venezuela it is badly advised, because the strategy of cohabitation, the false peace, is wrong, as I explained. It is as if the shepherds imposed a domesticated slavery on their sheep, so that the wolves are ablee to kill them and they do not complain, while that shepherds boast of being peaceful, as supposedly the owner of the sheep (Jesus) taught them. If they realize what they are really doing they will know God's anger, because they are not behaving like good shepherds. It is unethical to force an oppressed people to turn the other cheek. Self-defense struggles are fully justified, as happened in the crusades, for example. In the US, on the other hand, Biden is not a good Catholic, but a false one, run by the evil forces described above.

I am sure that these errors will be corrected and a movement of internal renewal in the church must also come to solve them, as it has happened throughout the centuries by divine inspiration: This renewal includes using the social sciences taking into account also in the human sphere the logic of God, as it has done in natural laws, of which they were precursors in the Middle Ages. In this way, the Catholic Church will be able to resume moral leadership for the changes that must come in the social, political and economic, in addition to the spiritual.

The Solidarity Way: my proposal for the world of the future.

This connects with the criticism of my proposal of the Solidarity Way, as something utopian. They should have cited my original proposal: http://que-hacer.org.ve/wiki/La_V%C3%ADa_Solidaria#La_v.C3.ADa_solidaria and not relying on absurd and bug-ridden claims found on the Internet, like the one that I propose communism. What is absurd and false is to deny the altruistic mechanism as a complement to the market and the state. In a harmonious family the mother does not charge the baby money at a price for the milk with which she feeds him; the grandmother does not pay her grandson to take her to the doctor; one brother does not charge another, unemployed, for the help he gives him; the father does not collect taxes from family members to subsidize the payment of transporting the children to school.

My proposal, embodied as The Solidarity Way, is that citizens, based on their families and solidarity networks, have all the power to decide in what combination they use the market (proposal from the right) and the state (proposal from the left) as tools, not as dictators or gods who ideologically and in practice impose themselves on them. It breaks with capitalism and socialism and puts the person at the center, who on his side is in harmony with his spiritual, material, family and community essence. Knowledge, information, technology is liberated in that model in a mode of production similar to that of free software, as a public good by nature that is, contrary to the notion of patents and private licenses, less efficient both socially and in terms of business model. Which is based on services, not in the product, which hackers (in the good sense of the word) of all kinds, including scientists, researchers, analysts, journalists, would produce and give away as a way to signal their capability in the job market for those services. Nothing to do with arbitrary utopia, populism or Chavism: it is the most real, natural, as well as convenient and democratic social organization you can imagine, which has already great examples in real life, which are in momentum, as the one of free software, free technology (including reneric heald drugs and recipes).

Neither Trumpist nor Chavista. My expertise in Venezuela and the US.

I end by saying that it is false that I am either Trumpist or a Chavista. Trump is an ally of Venezuelans, the US citizens and the Western world, although it is true that he has many shortcomings. Regarding Chavismo, I was the one who introduced the term "Supreme Commander", because when Chávez asked me to help him in the government, I told him that if there were contradictions between us in public policies, I was going to follow my conscience, not his guidelines as president. He agreed to that, and it turns out that it happened several times, as I have commented elsewhere. That term was later changed and the Chavistas wrongly assigned it to Chávez.

Finally, what Ross says about my ignorance about how the US works is not so true. On the contrary. As Robert Lucas, my thesis advisor in Chicago, told us, "If you study a topic constantly and consistently, using good research methods and learning from your mistakes, you end up being the best in the world in that area." Our experience in Venezuela, methodically studied, has allowed me to become a world expert, not only in our affairs, but also in what is happening in the United States, because there the Venezuelan virus of the curse of abundance is spreading with another strain, that of rentism. Modesty aside, I know the Venezuelan virus and its remedy. But I also know the US virus, that mutation converted into a new strain, and its remedy. I dare to say that I know the illness of the world, and propose a remedy, The Solidarity Way. That is why I wrote my original article, and the next one that I quote at the beginning of this third essay on these matters. It is true that I am ignorant of many things about the United States and the world, of course, but on this issue, which is vital, I believe that I know enough to make a contribution to the necessary debate.

In that sense, evaluate you, dear readers, on who is right and what is the reason in all this to generate that necessary debate proposed at the beginning of this essay. We know that in social studies two plus two is not four, but approximately four. If you are wrong above or below, you correct with learning. It is what I have tried to do, and therefore I will also do it this time. Please send me your comments and suggestions to correct, improve, interact and join citizens forces driven by morals, light and love.

But let's be clear about something: the truth for citizens is not necessarily the same as for rent-seekers and their agents, including many media outlets, analysts, pollsters, academics, politicians, business leaders and unions. If not, let's see the great confusion that has been on the subject of the pandemic, vaccines, fraud, social networks, etc. Our truth cannot be that of the interests outside the citizens. My bet is that the world of evil will lose the fight to the world of good. The light conquers the shadows, and to the attentive eye, that light is coming in Venezuela and in the US, among other places, through the movements of resistance and regeneration with their new leaders who act with moral and spiritual bases.

Cordially,

Felipe.

@Sabiens; [email protected]