Introduction

Welcome to the blog for Bindner Analytics aka Bindner & Associates.  If you are interested in joining our staff or in engaging us in a project, you are in the right place.  Consider this the ultimate writing sample.  We are not some cookie cutter consulting firm.  If you want to do something described in one of our sixteen essays, drop us a line at Bindner.Associates@yahoo.com and likewise if you wish to be one of our cooperative associates.  We will walk the walk here, if you do the work, you get the money.  No one gets more for being in charge - and you know someone always wants to be in charge.  If the last two sentences sing to you, contact us today!

Note: Read the essays from the bottom up, which is standard blog format.  Some of them really were published in the month stated, others are dated for ordering purposes.  Enjoy!_8/10/15

Page Summaries

·     Corporate Governance - ESOPs and Unions

The hierarchical management and pay structures which are natural for capitalist firms do not work for union and employee-owned firms. For union and employee-owners to get the most out of ownership, they must change their mindset. Alter profit distribution to fully compensate employees for their share of the profits of the firm, based on the share of production cost contributed by labor. Represent union workers specifically on boards to the extent that their employees own company or ESOP shares. Distribute ESOP shares to employees equally, rather than as a reflection of income. Start share accumulation on day one, not after a year. Compensate long-term temps with shares of the client company. Staffing services must not be used to rob employees of ownership rights that are due to them. Organized labor then shifts its culture from contention and worker protection to ownership and innovation. If union and employee-owned firms out perform traditional firms, traditional firms either follow or fail.

·     Pay Equity

Management pay and selection change in the new culture of ownership. Managers bid for their positions in open auction, with ties settled by a vote of the employees supervised. Innovations are paid separately after results occur, rather than including the expectation of innovation up front in management or professional salaries. The firm also provides education, with salaries paid to students in training. Shifting the financial risk and training more individuals where there is a shortage equalizes salaries. Pay and benefits compensate for the supply cost of labor for young families and older workers. Families with young children receive higher pay tied to child rearing, while older workers receive pay for longevity through stock accumulation rather than pay increases, ending the perverse incentive to fire the most productive employees as their salaries increase. Financial services, such as payroll lines of credit and employer financed home mortgages are provided to employee-owners as a retention bonus. In a perfectly competitive labor market, salaries are equal and allocation between professions ideal. These structures create that type of market, also ending discrimination in the workplace.

·     Inter Indendence: Cooperative Habitats

Housing is to be provided in different ways to young and to long-term employees. Younger employees are provided dormitories or apartments. Longer-term employees are offered environmentally efficient homes with food production facilities and a shorter day so that they may grow their own food. This philosophy, called Inter-Independence, establishes an interdependent workplace for the purpose of making each worker self-sufficient. Employees who grow their own food decide what they want to eat and grow it. Basement agriculture provides retirees a productive activity. Technology developed for space colonies is adapted for home use, including the conversion of waste into grass into fertilizer, hydroponics and artificial protein synthesis. Small animals are also raised, especially chickens and sheep. The home produces wool and cotton, which is processed with automated equipment. Habitat size is adjusted for growing and shrinking families.

·     Green Transportation Systems

Electric cars eliminate death due to car smog and auto accidents, provided that central control and power are supplied through overhead lines with the entire system partially or fully underground. Fund this system with a combination of public and private investment and integrate it with mass transit, offering drivers the best of both worlds. Cleaner burning coal, nuclear fission and emerging fusion technologies power the system and also provide electricity to individual homes.

·     Cooperative Careers - Mutual Self Ownership

After grade ten, young people either go down a vocational path or an academic path. Students in vocational training are sponsored by future employers and paid a salary. At age 20, after receiving a general education, some academic students enter the workforce, while others seek more advanced study, with training sponsored by future employers to the graduate level in exchange for a service requirement. In either case, students in training are provided housing and enjoy many adult rights, including the right to start a family. Medical students first train and work as nurses, then work more reasonable hours while in their post-graduate residencies because of this experience. Hospitals or health systems sponsor training and enough doctors are trained to influence the cost of medicine.

Mid-career workers are compensated with homes with food production facilities. Longevity compensation is through stock and dividends rather than through salary. Innovation is awarded through both cash and stock. If worker knowledge becomes obsolete, mortgage debts are forgiven and retirement funds fully funded so that retirement begins early. Intervention services are available for employees who under-perform or who lapse into addiction. Retired workers grow their own food, consult and continue to vote their stock, although surviving spouses are required to sell their stock back for an annuity, possibly to be set up through their house of worship. Young people learning how to grow food assist older retirees in managing their homes.

·     Aerospace Firm Management: Mature and Startup

Either established consortia or new startups can use the advanced management practices presented in the discussions on twenty-first century living. Total Quality Management’s goal of driving responsibility to the lowest level is best matched by efforts to equalize pay. Otherwise, workers see through the hypocrisy and the program is doomed. Advanced recruitment and compensation methods are applicable to each type of operation, but in different ways. Older firms have access to capital but have to overcome an entrenched culture. Startups create a new culture but lack capital and have to compromise to obtain needed financing. Space exploration is the ideal venue to try 21st century housing, both for space and land-based personnel. ESOP structures are useful to buy out current owners or venture capitalists.

·     Coopertative Trade

Multi-national firms that become union or employee-owned convert their overseas subsidiaries out of self-interest. These firms seek out talent missed by the current regime and generally attract the best workers. This causes entire economies to shift to 21st Century Economics and a middle class to develop in the developing world. Union-owned multi-nationals develop a common market basket of goods for transfer pricing and to expose exploitation in trade and economic policy. Publishing this information affects currency markets, which stabilizes at a new equilibrium. Stable currency markets lead to agreements on money supply growth and make currency conversion possible.

·     Converting Emerging Economies to Cooperatives

Privatization in Russia failed because the Oligarchs were able to exploit new owners. The precepts of this book are useful to gradually restore ownership to Russian workers. In China, an evolving middle class eventually revolts, leading workers to demand renewed ownership stolen by party bosses. Firms that have not been privatized do so by awarding stock in relationship to tenure and holding it in trust until retirement, with representation on boards by occupational group and profit distribution for both labor and the ownership of capital. Outside capital is procured, but in a way that preserves the value of the worker investment.

·     Budget and Tax Reform Proposals

Our comprehensive four-part approach:

• A Value Added Tax (VAT) to fund domestic military spending and domestic discretionary spending with a rate between 10% and 13%, which makes sure very American pays something.
• Personal income surtaxes on joint and widowed filers with net annual incomes of $100,000 and single filers earning $50,000 per year to fund net interest payments, debt retirement and overseas and strategic military spending and other international spending, with graduated rates between 5% and 25%.  
•  Employee contributions to Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) with a lower income cap, which allows for lower payment levels to wealthier retirees without making bend points more progressive.
• A VAT-like Net Business Receipts Tax (NBRT), which is essentially a subtraction VAT with additional tax expenditures for family support,  health care and the private delivery of governmental services, to fund entitlement spending and replace income tax filing for most people (including people who file without paying), the corporate income tax, business tax filing through individual income taxes and the employer contribution to OASI, all payroll taxes for hospital insurance, disability insurance, unemployment insurance and survivors under age 60.

·     The Real Social Security Crisis

The solutions to the Social Security crisis offered by both parties involve increasing the savings rate, although the Republicans divert funds from Social Security taxes to do so while the Democrats offer incentives for additional savings and investment. Neither solution works in the long term, as the nature of the Social Security crisis is demographic rather than financial. To put the program on an even keel and to end the tragedy of abortion, alter the tax code to take the financial hardship out of having children and shift the responsibility for funding college from parents to future employers.

·     Social Security and Ownership

If President Bush had been serious about reforming Social Security he would have compromised to get his reforms past the Senate. Several of the possible compromises improve the program, although they would have alienated his base. First, link the employer contribution to average income, rather than individual personal income, and credit it equally for each full-time worker. Second, give workers the option of investing their personal retirement accounts in an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, rather than in an index fund, and require that representation on ESOP trusts and corporate boards includes factional representation for each type of employee (union, management, professional). Third, let Unions, rather than government sponsored brokers, manage the Personal Retirement Accounts of their members. Finally, since transition costs are most likely to be borne by wealthier taxpayers, either the personal income tax must be raised or the income cap on contributions to the trust fund eliminated.

·     State and Local Government Finance

The 2001 tax cut and the collapse of the tech boom have led to a financial crisis at the state and local level. This shows the inadequacy of state and local tax arrangements. In the future, align taxes more closely with the social purpose of spending programs. Income taxes, which are redistributional, fund redistributional activities like education, aid to families, social services and even corrections. Sales taxes fund services to business, including a portion of public safety, and urban revitalization, while property taxes fund infrastructure and a portion of public safety. This proposal is particularly useful in Virginia, where taxes are generally inadequate to fund needed services. Linking taxing and spending demonstrates this. Business income/value added taxes are another alternative to replace income and sales taxes, especially if the federal government acts first. In Virginia, taking the lead on this reform requires a state constitutional amendment and repeal of the anti-Catholic Blaine amendment barring direct support for religious schools.

·     Civil Service Reform Comments to Volker

Giving federal managers more discretion to promote non-competitively ends the extreme waste of time many applicants go through in applying for positions where the winning candidate is already pre-selected by management. Another reform designed to increase recruitment is to delete questions on past drug use from the Personal Security Questionnaire while pre-employment drug testing is be made universal. Failing a drug test leads to treatment, not to dismissal. The current drug-testing program is draconian. Sick leave rules are modified, with the introduction of disability insurance, so that employees do not build up huge leave balances in this area. Annual leave is brought more in line with the private sector, with a lowering of the leave entitlement and the introduction of holidays in the week between Christmas and New Years. Armistice Day is replaced with Black Friday and Columbus Day is abandoned. Finally, it is past time to mirror industry and reduce the workday for federal employees and contractors to 37.5 hours a week and eventually 35.

Later Topics

Professional Sports Teams and the Entertainment Industry

Celebrities still make big money in Cooperativism. The purpose of increasing equality is not to tear down the stars but to raise up new talent and support personnel. Teams are be bought out by their current and retired players in partnership with their home cities, to the extent that they play in publicly financed venues. Employee-ownership and a stronger team ethic increase pay equity. The entertainment industry also benefits from employee-ownership in the same way. A business income/value added tax credit is established for contributions to broad-based arts education, as well as for the training of up and coming talent. Ownership also helps prevent young talent from being exploited.

Education, Welfare and Religion

To effectively educate children, first make sure the parents are literate. All adults have a basic human right to literacy and to full financial support while they attain it. Tie public assistance to the pursuit of education, with social services available only through the schools. A system of Catholic adult education and vocational high schools can best provide these services. Vouchers are not the answer to school reform. The secret to reform is to organize the public school system the way that private schools are organized, with autonomous Principals reporting to school boards for each institution. Most functions are to be decentralized. Once this reform is enacted, private religious charter schools are funded through an increase in income taxes. School prayer in charter schools will be less of an issue, as will teaching of the “Intelligent Design” theory. This paradigm is more about religion than science (and is taught there with private funding). Teaching it in science class brings the debate on the interpretation of the scriptures to the realm of public decision, where the religious right will not really want it to be given the Sumeric origins of the creation myth found in Genesis.

Drugs, Mental Health and Crime

The War on Drugs is waged as much for cultural reasons as for public health. Like alcohol prohibition, it has not worked. A better alternative is mandatory treatment for addicts, as well as for the mentally ill. Mandatory treatment is preferable to using the prison system as the largest provider of mental health care services. Most crime has its roots in addiction, mental illness or illiteracy and is better treated in those arenas. Replace the insanity defense with a plea of guilty by reason of insanity. Non-acceptance of this plea by the prosecution must be reviewable. The state has proven itself incapable of providing mental health services. The Catholic Health Care system is a natural choice to step into the void, bidding as the prime contractor for private prison contracts for non-violent drug offenders and for the criminally insane.

Proof of God

We first examine the proofs of the existence of God that I find most convincing. The surest proof of God is on a personal level, the experience of grace. While this cannot be offered as evidence to another, if enough individuals share such a common experience it is best not to ignore it. Of course, all proofs come down to a personal choice as to whether the universe can exist on its own or is created, moment-to-moment, by a God who sustains existence itself.