Our Strategy

As part of our broad Christian mission, we follow a triangular strategy composed of a corporate strategy, a religious strategy and a political strategy. While these three strategies actually constitute a single integrated strategy, we make it a point to keep religion, politics and business strictly separated. As such we do not do things such as advocating for a political agenda through one of our businesses, even though at a higher level our various platforms fit into a single integrated strategy as explained in the rest of this page.

Our corporate strategy

As a closely-held family-owned organization, the Bonita Foundation is a long-term player. While we are proficient at delivering fast-paced business value for our clients and partners needing to meet market timelines, as far as our own organization is concerned, our overall focus is not on business quarters but on family generations.

We have three goals for every generation of the family (1) identifying the unique vision and calling that God has for this generation, (2) ensuring that the generation fulfills this God-given mission toward markets, communities and the Church, and (3) ensuring that the generation passes more equity to the next generation than it has received from the previous generation.

We have two parallel strategies to help us materialize these goals: one long-term strategy having a 50-year outlook and one short-term strategy having a 10-year outlook. And in addition to these two group-wide high-level strategies, each of our companies also has a 5-year operational strategy defined in partnership with the foundation.

Our long-term strategy provides us focus and describes the point where we want to be 50-years from now and how we want the world to look like as a result of our impact. But in addition to defining the specific outcomes we want to achieve, the long-term strategy also defines the steps that we will follow to achieve these results. This means that the 50-year strategy defines in advance the five 10-year strategies that will need to be followed.

While we sometimes communicate on certain aspects of our 10-year strategies, our long-term strategy is a well-kept family secret and is often the source of much curiosity and speculation.

Our short-term 10-year strategies provide us operational focus as we operate both our commercial and non-commercial organizations. Then the 5-year strategies specific to each organization (and developed in partnership with their senior management) connect our 10-year strategic vision with practical operational realities.

In terms of portfolio, as a general rule, the Bonita Foundation is not involved in any form of real estate speculation. While real estate is a common investment and hedging strategy, we choose not to use real estate interests as part of our asset management strategy for religious reasons. We totally respect asset managers fulfilling their fiduciary duty towards their clients by dealing with the world as it exists today and not as their wished it was, we are therefore not saying this to judge anyone.

However as far as we are concerned, we consider that gentrification, rent increases and property taxes are both robbing and oppressing the poor by constantly removing the ground from under their feet. We therefore do our part by not participating in this system to the largest extent we are able to. We particularly hate gentrification as it robs people from the equity they have built through their very existence and their very life. Gentrification robs the substantial equity that people create by living and existing somewhere while this equity is the only equity that a poor person has: the way they have raised their children and helped their neighbors to create a high quality community. We think that the dynamics of gentrification are largely a measure of the way a nation perceives human value.

We think that governments should recognize the vast intangible equity created by the fact of living in a place peacefully. We think that the extent to which a nation recognizes this equity determines the overall justice and quality of this nation. We therefore hope that one day, selling a residential unit for more than construction cost will not be allowed except in specially designated areas. And similarly, we hope that renting residential units will not be allowed because people should never be robbed of the equity they create and that the equity built by existing peacefully in a home should prevail over any other type of equity. We think that people should be able to enjoy the equity of the communities they have built as their inheritance instead of being priced out of their neighborhoods and robbed of this equity.

Speculators should focus on commercial real estate to speculate, and entrepreneurs passionate about building should explore alternative business models, such as selling exclusivity licenses to retailers to allow them to service the people living in their buildings. People needing to stay in a city for a few months only can stay in a hotel (like they used to do decades ago). In a sound system, the market would be incentivized to build new neighborhoods around attractive areas instead of being given the tools to progressively gentrify. In a sound system, the housing market should be such that people are able to build a brand new home for the equivalent of 1 to 3 years of salary considering the pivotal role of housing in life and society. In such a sound system, the overall society would doubly benefit as asset managers would have to exclusively deploy capital on productive positions instead of keeping capital idle in real estate at an excessive degree.

From a different perspective, while it is totally understandable for a sovereign fund having 1 trillion in assets to hedge some of it using real estate, we want our future family members to be productive members of society being able to add value to the life of millions through entrepreneurship. We value entrepreneurship as entrepreneurship requires caring deeply about people in order to understand how to help them, how to serve them and how to persuade them. By contrast buying a residential building, increasing the rent by 10% and reselling the building for twice the acquisition price a few years later creates equity for a very small group of people at the cost of destroying vast value for communities and the overall public who hereby see their purchasing power and the value of their savings reduced while no actual value has been created for them.

For the value they have created is literally siphoned out from them as only high net-worth players are able to access financing – after having driven the market up using once again their privileged access to financing to speculate (no poor person will ever be granted financing for a multi-million dollars deal).

Therefore, as a family and as an organization, staying clear of all forms of real estate speculation also allows us to train generations of high-quality entrepreneurs focused on wisdom, love for others and value creation. This policy helps us keep our members focused on God’s justice and value creation.

When we have real estate positions, it is always to support a business infrastructure for our companies and not to hedge a portfolio. Even when we need to have third party sellers in a building, we seek a percentage on their revenue and similar forms of partnership rather than charging them a rent. To put it simply, even when we have real estate positions, we are not in the real estate business.

While hostile activism has become commonplace in this world whenever people do not appear to start from the same perspective, as far as we are concerned these are not methods we tolerate and, as matter of fact, we do not lobby against the residential real estate industry. On the opposite we build businesses supporting them to help them build a better world in a bottom up fashion, by opening their eyes to the many ways they can safely transition their business model while multiplying shareholder value and having the added benefit of protecting their business from the frequent fiscal and political disruptions that are commonplace nowadays. We work hard to help them, so much that we ironically often seem to be their strongest lobbyists. Following the example of the Lord Jesus-Christ, we make their problem our problems and come to them with compassion, humility and solutions rather than hostily, arrogance, and blame. And this is always the approach we follow: this is the Bonita Approach to building a better world, a Christian approach focused on setting stones instead of casting them.

We think differently than most people and do things very differently than most people, and this is one of the reasons we are able to see opportunities that most people are unable to see. Because while many people are unable to understand the merits of original points of view, we understand all point of views, both traditional ones, original ones and radical ones. This provides us a substantial market reading advantage as well as substantial innovation and value creation tools.

Finally, while we have positions in a wide array of industries, we are not pursuing a diversification strategy. On the opposite, we are following an integrated strategy as part of which we are involved in a variety of industries to better support our companies, affiliates and strategic partners. We therefore develop a deep expertise and a best-in-class operational infrastructure in each of the industries in which we are involved. For we are long-term players and are committed to our positions for the very long term. As such, while we have developed a wide array of positions over the years, these positions are very integrated both from a strategic perspective and from an operational perspective as they participate in our long-term vision.

Our political strategy

Despite appearances we are strong free-market proponents. We believe in the liberty of the individual and in free trade. However we do not consider ourselves libertarians because unlike libertarians, we consider that people do not vote for economic purity but for leadership, solidarity and protection. Moreover, as Christians, seeking the well-being of the most vulnerables is our top concern. We consider that people do not vote for economic purity but for social leadership, political leadership and - to a large extent - religious leadership, even in these days when people want to convince themselves that they are atheists.

As far as atheism is concerned, we call atheism the religion without name. We call atheism the religion of those wanting to pass their religious opinions as objective science to ridicule critics and coerce others to live a certain way while avoiding to compete with other religions. If people weren't expecting religious leadership from their politicians, people wouldn't ask them to regulate family life and to legislate on things such as the criminalization of prostitution, which are fundamentally opinion-based religious topics. But religion should be assumed and never be disguised as objective science, otherwise social tensions follow. Based on our research, a religion is any thought system providing an answer to each of the following questions:

Answering these questions defines a religious view for life as these questions - leading to a very prescriptive way of life - are purely a matter of personal preference and personal opinion. We have determined that the above questions are the only questions defining a religion. And the fact is that every man has an answer to these questions, even atheists, therefore every man has a religion. We think that if atheism is recognized as a religion, many of the political challenges that can be seen today would be solved because most of the political tensions we can observe today are caused by the fact that the atheist religion has become the state-sponsored religion of our times persecuting others and coercing them to accept it.

Indeed, most of what is seen as political tensions nowadays truly are religious tensions. For most of the political discomforts that can be seen today actually are religious discomforts being looked at with the wrong lenses, with lenses of social science trying to mascarade religious opinions as supposedly objective science and hereby making people feel deeply uncomfortable in their religious consciousness. For this reason, recognizing atheism as the religion that it truly is would solve most political tensions by restauring the separation between the state and religion and by leaving religious determinations to the family sphere.

This is one of the many reasons the Bonita Church and our upcoming family platform along with the Organization for the Development of Nations are such strategic and important platforms being tightly aligned and strategically integrated.

We think that Austrian Economics are the essential foundation that is needed to build a sound, well-advised and truly free society. But we think that while this foundation should not be compromised and patched up with progressive ideology, one should see this foundation as a framework upon which to build rather than as a sufficient agenda because the reality is that people want leadership, they want comprehensive leadership and someone to look after them and to protect them. For the vast majority of people do not want to be exposed to the dangers and complexity of the world. As such, telling these people: "here is the sound theory you need to navigate the world on your own" is not what these people want.

One of the many benefits of assuming the atheist religion and organizing it openly and honestly is that this gives more flexibility to fill the deep leadership void within the ordinary man without compromising the soundness of governance frameworks. For what ordinary people want is a leader taking care of them and giving them direction and meaning. But these people constitute the overwhelming majority so they will always get this leader, no matter how unwise, how unfair, how oppressive and how unsustainable his theories are.

In this context, our approach consisting in building upon sound foundations without compromising them can for example be seen in the way we approach the topic of real estate and gentrification that we have previously mentioned. For instead of patching up progressive policies upon Austrian Economics, we solved this challenge by working within the Austrian framework by recognizing a natural, genuine and inalienable property right: the equity that an individual creates by living peacefully somewhere. And because this right is genuine, intuitive and taught by nature and is not an ideological fiction, the results are sound, consistent and powerful.

For the same reason, while progressive taxation is incompatible with fairness, freedom, and the respect of the property rights of indidividuals (in addition to being counter-productive since progressive taxation discourages wealth creation. And with this regard while people like to caricature the wealthy, this is even more a reality among poor people as they are afraid of losing their welfare benefits should they earn as little as one dollar above the welfare threshold), we believe that while they are rarely the best option, flat-rate taxes can be an acceptable interim measure while mindsets are changed.

For the same reason, we also think that benefits should be universal and not progressive and that for this reason society should not be embarrassed of giving a lot to anyone meeting certain criteria being independent from their wealth and income. For no sound policy can be based on the relative wealth and income of companies or individuals. For not only such a policy cannot be a sound policy but, in addition to this, progressivism promotes governmental greediness for intrusion in individual privacy. And this greediness leads to even more cancerous policies being driven by populism, envy, jealousy, and the stigmatization of whole categories of people from the poor to the rich, who supposedly do not work hard enough or are not deserving enough because of populist, emotional or religious reasons. In light of this, one can say that progressivism is a cancer, it is a degenerative disease and this disease takes its roots in representative democracy.

For while democracy is essential, representative democracy is a cancer leading to an inevitable race-to-the-bottom in terms of governance and public policy. Nowadays, this race-to-the-bottom has been greatly accelerated by real-time communications and this technological breakthrough has exposed the unwise nature of representative democracy to an extent that people still do not dare to recognize and digest. For today's political landscape is a circus, today's democratic shows are all about providing therapeutic entertainment while hidden agendas are being implemented. But a system of government based on lies and keeping appearances can never last, especially in the era of real-time communication and massive leaks.

To save the system, priority must therefore be given to replacing the lies and appearances at the heart of the current democratic model with an approach grounded in truth, and to do so in a way such that 1) people can accept the message and 2) the current order can be preserved without disruption (and even be amplified with orders of magnitude more freedom and flexibility). This goal is the spirit of our political agenda and of our political work. For real-time communications made lies and emotional manipulation the business as usual method of governance. But while governments believed that this method was some sort of superfood, this food is actually cancerous and has been allowed by heavens only to accelerate the fall of the system beyond what people understand. For by the time people will ask "what are we doing?" and seek a medical diagnostic, the disease will already have reached terminal stage.

In this new information age, any of the millions of stories happening every day can be instrumentalized to justify one policy or its opposite because the fast-pace of information has moved behaviors from analysis to passive consumption of information. But there is an even deeper problem as everyone has already lost control of the situation and politicians themselves are now forced to play the populism game to get elected. They are now forced to appeal to the ordinary man who owns nothing apart from jealousy and hatry.

Sometimes such a man has common sense but no wisdom, sometimes education but no knowledge, sometimes a job but no wealth, sometimes passion but no compassion. But what these people always have is jealousy and absolute intolerance toward those who succeed, or are different, or live radically differently than them. Such men having the intolerance and jealousy exacerbated by a lack of wisdom, a lack of vision and a lack of diligence for their own business, such men will always be the majority and it is a fundamental mistake to grant these people any kind of importance in a system of governance beyond the right to be alive, to eat and to mind their own business.

A sound system of governance should only strive to give everyone a roof, basic food and the opportunity to acquire knowledge and wisdom freely and easily for the few who will seek it. And only those having risen themselves to the level of wisdom, justice and love should have any sort of political relevance. A sound system of governance would simply seek to ensure that even a poor person can lift himself through knowledge and wisdom, but a sound system of governance should make no attempt at giving political power to the ordinary man. On the opposite the integrity of the system should be actively protected from the ignorance and the futility of the mob and from their lack of intellectual and spiritual development.

If the ignorant mob cares about a cause, they can start a business or volunteer at a non-profit organization to serve others so that they can derive their influence in others people's life from their service to them, instead of influencing politics by casting a ballot for hate and forcing wise politicians to compromise wisdom and roll in the mud with them. In a sound system of governance, political relevance should be a measure of wisdom and service to others. The more wisdom one has, the more that person should be made politically relevant by the system. Moreover, it is not only automatic but also sound and appropriate that the more people a person helps through his charity or businesses, the more that person will be influential because of the impact he has on a large number of lives.

However impact through service should not be the only path to political relevance so that the poor acquiring wisdom and knowledge can also have a level playing access to political relevance since the son of the son of a wealthy man will always have an advantage when it comes to impact through service. However this reality should not be perceived as evil, because whether a person is rich or poor, political relevance should no longer mean having the power to decide for others, but should instead mean having more power to make decisions for one's own life. Some of this power will be naturally derived from the financial emancipation accompanying wisdom (80% of it), but some of it can also be granted by the political system (20% of it).

This is exactly the opposite of what Representative Democracy promotes and this is why Direct Democracy is the only genuine form of democracy, because it is the only form of democracy focused on empowering people. Direct Democracy should not be looked at using the lenses of Representative Democracy as is too commonly done. For Direct Democracy is not about passing laws by referendum, it is first of all about removing the need for referendums on most topics because people are empowered to live their life the way they want. For a system like Representative Democracy giving low-level people the power to decide for others cannot be a sound system. Low-level people should - more than any other person - focus on putting their life together instead of trying to manage the world's affairs and wanting to decide for others.

Ordinary people do nothing original and nothing meaningful beyond looking for their own comfort and their own life. All they care about is getting more for themselves and their children while being exposed to as little risk as possible. Their focus is not on sacrificing their life to give and serve, and for this reason their waters have become like a dead sea taking water in without releasing water out only to die in bitterness and kill whoever drinks from them. As a result, no tree can grow from their waters. For their thoughts, envies, jealousies, outrages and passions are pure poison for any system of governance. These people must not be allowed to decide for others, let alone the Republic.

For low-level people are easy to manipulate and do not have any interesting idea. They also do not have anything to hide which is the reason they are happy for the government and any company to spy on them. They even readily boast about it by saying: "I do not have anything to hide" like a pupil playing the teacher's pet to be offered a candy. However, someone not having anything to hide should not have the right to vote. For someone not valuing privacy is the enemy of individual freedom and in that sense is the enemy of democracy.

Someone not valuing privacy is a corrupt agent in a democratic nation, because this attitude is akin to providing intelligence to the enemy. A person not valuing privacy is taking the whole nation one step closer to totalitarianism. Because at the beginning of oppression, is the monitoring of what people own, what people have, what people say and what people think. Therefore anyone being prompt to be monitored is fundamentally the enemy of freedom and should not even be worthy of being called a citizen in a democratic country. Those having nothing to hide have nothing to hide because they are nothing themselves. They have no intelligence, they have no wisdom, they have no spirit, therefore they do not deserve any political power either. For before anything else is even considered, a citizen should be measured by the degree at which he values privacy, because refusing to walk around naked is the beginning of common sense.

And despite popular belief, monitoring the population is never required even to prevent terrorism. For wire transfers do not cause explosions, posing bombs causes explosions. Yet posing bombs can be prevented using an extensive network of on-field spies. Spies will always work, they have worked for thousands of years and will continue to work despite technological breakthroughs because the human factor will always be the main cause of human interactions. Therefore large scale monitoring of the population for security reasons is at best a cost-cutting measure. If given the choice, the intelligence community would greatly prefer being given an army of millions of spies worldwide, over being given surveillance tools (that will never really work), especially since they understand that these short-term (and limited) gains are undermining the sustainability of our democracies. The truth is, strong privacy laws are the guarantee that only intelligence agencies will ever have the budget required to have intelligence through their unmatchable network of spies (especially in their own country but also abroad). But this reality requires a certain degree of intelligence and long-term thinking to be understood.

And while it is true that law enforcement agencies have developed some sort of laziness and increasingly expect to work from the comfort of their offices, while the intelligence community happily rides this train, the truth is that the biggest sponsor of the security pretext are politicians seeking to create the infrastructure required to support a progressive taxation agenda. And they do so by playing on the fears, the infantility and the intellectual laziness of low-level people who have been unduly empowered by Representative Democracy. For a progressive tax is three things: (1) a political hack to patch a problem and pretend that something is being done about a situation, (2) a seed investment in what could become a political platform for tomorrow, (3) a way to extend political control to more aspects of society.

Yet low-level people without intelligence insist to have a misinformed opinion on everything. Some imagine that the 5 dollars of taxes they pay give them the right to decide how much taxes the billionaire must pay. Some imagine that having a home somewhere in the country gives them the right to decide who is allowed to immigrate into the country even though the tentative immigrant can support himself or be supported by a family relative. And even though these strong-opinion people do not own and did not finance any of the roads, and public infrastructure that this immigrant will use (but according to some, the 5 dollars of taxes they paid financed all of that). Some imagine that having divorced twice gives them the right to decide how people should marry and who they are allowed to marry.

In a sound system of governance, these people, these 90% should be made irrelevant. They should not be allowed to disturb the reasoning of political leaders and the businesses of productive people, and the love of serving people. Only the 10% elevating themselves to the level of knowledge, wisdom and love should have political weight and political input. In a sound system of governance, a political leader should never have to sell or mascarade his wisdom to appeal to low-level people, except if it is to demonstrate compassion for them (as long as he does so without robbing from individuals or appealing to vile passions using progressive pretexts).

But instead of this, in a representative democracy, every event making headlines leads to an extra law being created. And for this reason, all special interests try to make headlines which results in a permanent circus in the public forum. Nowadays, there are so many laws that anyone is breaking at least one of them every day. Even the way most people raise their children would be deemed illegal if they were being constantly monitored. The autocracy of selective enforcement has replaced sound, predictable and reasonable policy that any citizen can understand without needing a lawyer.

But even without all these practical forfeits, at its very essence representative democracy is biased against genuine individual empowerment in that in order to be taken into account, one must be heard while it will always be much easier for the wealthy to be heard by millions than it is for the poor. For without even talking about access to political networks and lobbying, the rich has no difficulty to run nationwide ads to put any topic he wants in the public debate but a poor can hardly do the same.

Therefore Representative Democracy can never work for a poor person, voting hate from one's sofa is a destructive illusion from which no one benefits. In the past, there were much more individual freedoms, law enforcement capacity was limited, and laws were enacted slowly, but this is no longer the case today so the vices of representative democracy are revealing themselves to an unprecedented extent. Nowaways ordinary people have simply internalized resignation, they have internalized the fact that they have to be happy with whatever is being proposed to them. They have internatilized the fact that they have to be happy with "choosing progress" even though they have no input on the question being asked to them. But at some point, they will explode, seemingly without reason, out of frustration and fatigue. And despite appearances even the wealthy is not happy with representative democracy. Because Representative Democracy subjects him to the tyrannic rule of the mob since the dynamics of Representative Democracy entice jealous people to tax him at 90%, even though taking away from him never adds a single dollar to their pocket.

And how could it be since beyond kitchen-table economics - which are unfortunately the only economic theory that ordinary people know - taxes only constitute a small contribution of the budget of wealthy economic areas. In these areas, most of the economy is financed by monetary creation. To a certain (and largely overstated) extent, taxes play a technical role to adjust the availability of money in the economy and therefore inflation. But for the most part, complex progressive taxation schemes are mainly useful in that they allow politicians to play politics. Taking away from Paul to give to John and tweaking arbitrary taxation numbers gives them political leeway.

Therefore, representative democracy solves no problem, but leaves everyone unsatisfied with toxic dynamics and one-size-fits-all laws. In our democracies, it is indeed an accepted fact but a every evil one that someone's life is routinely blocked and compromised because the majority does not care about an issue that is of interest for him while that person could have been able to live the way he wanted without hurting anyone. A system promoting such a destructive way of life cannot be a sound system of governance, and certainly isn't a democratic system of governance giving power to the individual.

One-size-fits-all policy is an anti-democratic ideal. There should never be one-size-fits-all policies, only one-size-fits-all principles. And getting to this place should be the goal of a genuine democracy. For there is no power of the people if people do not have the power to set their own rules for their own lives. And one thing this era of digital and instant communications has made clear is that Representative Democracy will never allow people to be in charge of their life. It is absurd to even believe that people can have power as a group when no one has power as an individual.

Instead of representative democracy, what is therefore required is Direct Democracy. But direct democracy can only be achieved by promoting individual freedom and the system of Austrian Economics. Everything therefore forms a whole and this is the reason the strategy of the Bonita Foundation is an integrated strategy.

Representative Democracy promotes one-size-fits-all legislation while in a Direct Democracy the emphasis is instead put on minimizing the scope of common laws in order to maximize the scope of private laws. Private laws are the business contracts, the family contracts and the religious contracts that each individual can freely enter into to create his own legislative realm. The benefits of this approach is that everyone is free to live their life based on the principles they want while a common law is there to define a common denominator, broad humanist, democratic and cooperation principles. For democracies to survive, Direct Democracy cannot be seen as an option. Direct Democracy must become the goal of Representative Democracy, for the current situation is not sustainable and the system is already starting to collapse.

We believe that it is with this approach being on the one hand respectful of sound theory, and on the other hand focused on providing comprehensive solutions matching both the true needs and the true desires of the people, we believe that it is with this approach that the world can prosper and that sound policy will become mainstream within our lifetime. And making sound policy and sound Christianity mainstream in record times is what we consider to be our mission. And we are grateful to God that He has blessed us with a spirit of wisdom and an unique holistic understanding of science, technology, business religion and governance to make it happen. And that in addition to this He has provided us with the vast ressources required to materialize our vision.

As we work diligently to fulfill this mission, we are always happy to work in intimate partnership with like-minded families having a commitment for the cause of freedom, and with institutions having an agenda aligned with our mission for one reason or another.

And these are only a few examples of the governance and policy research work that we conduct through the Organization for the Development of Nations. For what we have briefly touched here constitutes less than 2% of the work that we conduct through this far-ranging political platform. And as we have now reached a new stage in the implementation of our strategy, our integrated political platform will play a defining role in years to come.