Subsidies to Public Sector Units Hurt Education in Pakistan

[Riaz Haq]

"...under 1.5% of GDP [is] going to public schools that are on the front line of Pakistan's education emergency, or less than the subsidy for PIA, Pakistan Steel, and Pepco." Pakistan Education Task Force Report 2011

Pakistan has ordered 5 Boeing 777s and 75 train engines for its state-owned companies in a bid to catch up with rising passenger and cargo service demands, according to media reports.

Boeing, the American aerospace giant, has announced the $1.5 billion deal with Pakistan International Airline (PIA) which includes a firm order of five 777-300ER (extended range) jets as well as the purchase rights for an additional five, according to Fox News.

Separately, The News is reporting that Pakistan Railway is purchasing 75 Chinese-made train engines for $105 million.

Highways have now become the most important segment of transport sector in the country, according to the Economic Survey of Pakistan. At the time of Pakistan's independence in 1947, transportation by roads accounted for only 8% of all traffic. Today, it accounts for 92% of national passenger traffic and 96% of freight.

The last decade has seen major competition coming from first-class private bus services now operated on modern motorways in all parts of Pakistan. The best known of these is Daewoo bus service with its comfortable luxury coaches and stewardesses offering meal services. With the construction and expansion of national highways and motorways, the trucking industry has also grown by leaps and bounds in the last few decades.

In mid-90s, Pakistan Railway had 10.45% share of passenger traffic and 5.17% of freight traffic, which has declined to 9.95% and 4.72% respectively by the year 2006-07, according to Economic Survey of Pakistan.

Pakistan Railway has been weighed down by heavy expenses of payroll and rising corruption and incompetence. As a result, a large number of engines are no longer operational and there have been big cuts in service.

After gaining domestic and international traffic market share for several decades after independence, Pakistan International airline has been losing it in recent decades because of serious problems of corruption and mismanagement by the cronies of the ruling politicians. PIA is now losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year while being hit by lean and mean domestic private airlines and international competition from rising Gulf giants like Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways.

Today, PIA's employee to aircraft ratio of 450 is more than twice as much as some of its competitors. "Politically motivated inductions have been the major cause of the significant increase in human resource burden in this organization," the State Bank of Pakistan said recently.

Pakistani taxpayers are heavily subsidizing the national airline at the expense of much more crucial public sectors like education. Last year, a Pakistani government commission on education found that public funding for education has been cut from 2.5% of GDP in 2007 to just 1.5% - less than the annual subsidy given to the various PSUs including PIA, the national airline that continues to sustain huge losses.

The latest example of the use of public funds to buy support for the government is Rs 366 million given in "discretionary development funds" as reward to senators for passing the 20th Constitutional Amendment with more than two-third majority, according to Pakistani media reports.

The crux of the issue for the bloated public sector units like PIA, Pakistan Steel Mills and Pakistan Railways is the reprehensible system of political patronage which puts the wrong people in charge of them. The sooner PIA, PR and other PSUs become privatized, the easier it will be to revive them for better service and improved profitability. It will turn them into a source of much needed revenue for the public treasury, just as the denationalization of banks did in the last decade.

From an after-tax loss of Rs. 9.77 billion in 2001 (when MCB, Habib, UBL and Allied were government owned) the earnings of these privatized banks rose to a profit after-tax of Rs. 73.115 billion in 2007. Higher earnings meant increased tax contribution by these banks to the government from Rs 10.8 billion in 2001 to Rs. 33.8 billion in 2007, according to data provided by former State Bank governor Mr. Shahid Kardar.

Even if privatization of the heavily subsidized public sector units does not yield higher tax revenue from them, it will at least free up public funds for more pressing needs like education, health care, energy, water and public infrastructure development.

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[Riaz Haq]

There are some who are concerned that Nawaz Sharif will gift state-owned companies like PIA and Pak Steel to his buddies like Mian Mansha.

Regardless who they are sold to at whatever price, Pakistani taxpayers will be better off. These state-owned companies are used by politicians for political patronage by hiring large numbers of incompetent and corrupt people. These enterprises are sucking up a lot of tax money year after year.

http://www.riazhaq.com/2011/07/political-patronage-trumps-public.html

[Riaz Haq]

Here's a WSJ report on Pakistan's privatization plans:

From India to Bangladesh to Afghanistan, much of South Asia this year will be focused on elections and uncertain, sometimes violent transfers of power. An exception is Pakistan, where Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took office last summer in the country's first transition from one elected government to another. This year Mr. Sharif has the opportunity to deliver on a longstanding promise to privatize Pakistan's state-dominated and inefficient economy.

Pakistan's problems are legion, from terrorism and lawless territories to power shortages and polio. Privatizing state-owned dinosaurs isn't the sole solution, but the sooner Islamabad can stop hemorrhaging 500 billion rupees (nearly $5 billion) annually on budgets, subsidies and bailouts for failing enterprises, the better.

Spurred by a $6.6 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, Mr. Sharif's government committed in September to begin privatizing more than 30 public energy, transport and infrastructure corporations over three years. These include Pakistan State Oil, Pakistan International Airlines and Pakistan Steel Mills.

To lead the process, Mr. Sharif appointed a 15-member privatization commission last month headed by Mohammad Zubair, formerly IBM's IBM +0.26% chief financial officer for the Middle East and Africa. Mr. Zubair should have the expertise and political independence to push his mandate aggressively, starting with the partial privatization of Pakistan International Airlines by December.

Reform prospects further improved last month when Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry reached retirement age and left the bench, ending a career distinguished by aggressive interventions in politics. In 2006 he blocked the privatization of Pakistan Steel Mills, arguing that the government wanted to sell the enterprise for less than its true value.

That helped lead to a showdown with then President Pervez Musharraf, who tried to banish the chief justice from power but ended up provoking a popular backlash that cost him the presidency in 2008. Reinstated in 2009, Mr. Chaudhry became more aggressive, reliably quashing or deterring government attempts to cut subsidies or reform state-owned enterprises.

Even assuming a less powerful and more business-friendly high court, Mr. Sharif's reforms will still face resistance from organized labor and Pakistan's two major opposition parties. "We are against privatization 100 percent. This is not privatization, this is personalization," says Pakistan People's Party chief Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who accuses Mr. Sharif of plotting to enrich his fellow industrialists.

Overcoming such opposition will be a challenge, but the prime minister has the bully pulpit and economic arguments that can resonate. In September, Gallup Pakistan found 70% of the population in favor of privatizing Pakistan International Airlines....

Mr. Sharif also has to reassure investors that if they bid on properties their ownership rights will be protected. One cause of continuing concern is the unresolved spat between the Pakistani government and Etisalat, the United Arab Emirates' largest telecom firm, over payments from a 2005 privatization. Resolving that dispute could help make future privatization tenders more appealing.

Little noticed amid headlines about terrorist horrors and slowed economic growth, Pakistan's benchmark stock index rose 49% in 2013. More economic good news will likely follow this year if Mr. Sharif can deliver on his privatization promise.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303448204579338...

[Riaz Haq]

Here's Reuters on Pakistan's ambitious privatization plan:

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Mohammad Zubair was on a cruise dinner with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in Thailand when he was offered the hardest job of his life: privatizing a huge chunk of the economy while fighting resistance from the opposition and trade unions.

When the prime minister left the table, a colleague of former IBM executive Zubair rushed to his side.

"Are you mad? Three privatization ministers have gone to jail and most have corruption cases hanging over their heads," he said. "Don't take this job."

But Pakistan's new privatization tsar is determined to find buyers for 68 public companies, most of them loss-making, including two gas companies, an oil company, about 10 banks, the national airline and power distribution companies - all within the next two years.

The government sees the sell-offs as a life saver for Pakistan's $225 billion economy crippled by power shortages, corruption and militant violence. Successful privatization is Sharif's top political and economic goal.

"We lose 500 billion rupees ($5 billion) annually because of failing enterprises," Zubair told Reuters. "Every day a file lands on a bureaucrat's desk and he has to take a decision he isn't qualified to. This can't go on, no matter what."

Pakistan can raise up to $5 billion in privatization revenue in the next two years to ease pressure on strained public finance, Zubair said.

Last September, the International Monetary Fund saved Pakistan from a possible default by agreeing to lend it $6.7 billion over three years. In return, Pakistan must make good on a longstanding promise to privatize loss-making state companies.
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Asad Umar, an opposition lawmaker and former chief executive of one of Pakistan's largest conglomerates, said privatization was being pursued on an unrealistic time frame and the criteria for identifying entities was inconsistent.

For Umar, it makes no sense that on the list with a bleeding airline are Oil and Gas Development Co. Ltd and Pakistan Petroleum Ltd , which made profits of 91 billion and 42 billion rupees respectively in 2013, and have zero debt.

Not all sell-offs are expected to go smoothly.

A nine-year dispute between the government and Etisalat, the United Arab Emirates' largest telecoms firm, over payments from the privatization of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd, is seen as a discouragement for investors.

But Zubair says no plan is without risk.

"There is no magic wand to ensure that all these ventures will be successful," he said. "But the bottom line is that I'm not going to hold off privatization for anyone."

http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCABREA110M520140202

[Riaz Haq]

Here's a WSJ story on progress in Pakistan privatization:

Pakistan expects to complete a series of large privatization transactions this spring, the country's finance minister said....

In addition to billions of dollars in revenue from state asset sales, the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, which came to power in June, is also looking for as much as $5 billion from auctioning off third- and fourth-generation mobile-phone licenses, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar told The Wall Street Journal. Another plan in the works is to split into two companies the loss-making flag carrier, Pakistan International Airlines Corp. PIAA.KA +0.37% , ahead of selling a stake, he said.

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The economy has since shown signs of reviving, even though growth barely keeps up with the birthrate. The IMF this month acknowledged the tentative turnaround, especially in the large-scale manufacturing and services sectors, and raised its forecast for gross domestic product growth this fiscal year to 3.1% from the previous estimate of 2.8%. The government is much more optimistic, expecting growth of some 4.4%.

"I am quite happy and satisfied that things are moving the way they should be. We are right on track," Mr. Dar said. "We are pursuing and taking the most difficult decisions, a few of which are politically unpopular. But, to fix the economy, those stabilizing measures as well as structural reforms were necessary."

In part because of interference by the country's activist judiciary, which questioned a number of government appointments, reforms have been relatively slow so far, especially on the privatization front, many critics say. Soon after taking office, Mr. Sharif's government pledged to sell stakes in 31 state-owned companies. Many of these, however, are still in the process of selecting new management teams.

"It's all entangled in this sense of going cautiously, which in turn has adverse impact as far as economic expectations are concerned," said Ishrat Hussain, the director of the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi and a former governor of Pakistan's central bank. "The investors don't see anything happening of a dynamic, vibrant nature. If they see a few privatization transactions successfully completed, they will bring in their money and invest. They are waiting for privatization to take place before they go for greenfield projects."
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"The government is very keen on privatization, but I'm of the opinion that it will lose a lot of political capital on it," said Hussain Dawood, a tycoon with interests in the fertilizers, chemicals and power industries. "There is going to be a political backlash because all sorts of people have vested interests."

This backlash, however, isn't necessarily insurmountable. "When there are privatizations, you can't satisfy all the participants," said Mr. Siddiqui of JS Bank. "But if the will is there to privatize, and the intention is to do it in a transparent manner, they should not be afraid of criticism."
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In addition to privatizations, the government is planning to raise money this fiscal year through the long-delayed sale of 3G and 4G mobile spectrum. Pakistan is the only major country in the region that still doesn't have 3G service—overtaken even by war-torn Afghanistan to the north.

The government has yet to decide whether to auction off just 3G, or 3G and 4G spectrum together, Mr. Dar said. Selling just 3G licenses could raise between $1.2 billion to $2 billion, and bundling them with 4G spectrum could generate between $4 billion and $5 billion, Mr. Dar estimated. He added that the government is considering issuing more licenses on top of the four cellular providers that currently operate in Pakistan....
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304899704579390...

[Riaz Haq]

Pakistan's federal government and Sindh provincial government are close to a deal with Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to finance a modern mass transit system befitting the megacity of Karachi with a population of nearly 20 million, according to a Pakistani TV Channel.

The mass transit project will feature modern trains with automatic signalling and telecommunication system. An automatic train control (ATC) system will be set up. The train stations will feature computerized ticketing and vending machines, automated ticket gates and elevators. It will be run by Karachi Urban Transport Corporation (KUTC).


http://www.riazhaq.com/2014/02/japan-to-finance-and-build-modern-ma...

[Riaz Haq]

LAHORE: Railways Minister Khawaja Saad Rafique has said Chinese investment and supply of coal will play a significant role in boosting performance of Pakistan Railways.

Addressing a news conference in Lahore‚ he said China will invest 32 billion dollars in Pakistan. Out of this amount‚ four billion dollars investment will be made in Pakistan Railways.

He said no recommendation regarding privatization of the Railways is under consideration.

The minister said private investment will be welcomed in Pakistan Railways through a transparent manner.

He said steps are underway to utilize Railways land in a proper way.

http://paktribune.com/news/China-to-invest-4-bln-in-Pakistan-Railwa...

[Riaz Haq]

Some of the world’s biggest consultants, PR firms and accountants, as well as a handful of boutique banks, are competing for a tough assignment that’s only gotten harder in recent weeks: Running the sale of a minority stake in Pakistan’s money-hemorrhaging state airline, Pakistan International Airlines.
PIA, as the airline is known, dates back to the creation of Pakistan itself, when it was formed at the urging of country founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah. For most of the last decade, though, it has been losing money, thanks to combination of mismanagement, political turmoil, and general economic woes. Pakistan agreed to sell off 26% of the airline last year, as one of many conditions attached to loan of nearly $7 billion from International Monetary Fund.
Now five consortia are vying to run the PIA sale. The list of players includes more than two dozen different advisers, including Ernst & Young, McKinsey, Deloitte & Touche, Apco, Freshfields, Jefferies, and Rothschild (a full breakdown of the five groups was reported by Pakistan’s Express Tribune earlier this week).
The winning group is tasked with finding a strategic partner that can take managerial control—in other words, turn around an airline that has been run into the ground. They may have a tough time—PIA’s losses are getting progressively worse:

Losses have been mounting in part because of the challenging “law and order” situation in the country, PIA said in its 2013 annual report. What’s more, because it cannot afford to buy new aircraft, the number of flights are dropping:

PIA downsized its business again significantly in early June, cutting 26 foreign and domestic flights a day because it did not have enough planes to service them.
As if the business challenges weren’t difficult enough, there has been a recent surge in violence at Pakistan’s airports. Pakistan’s Taliban staged two attacks in early June on Karachi airport, killing several people. On June 24, a PIA aircraft was hit by gunfire as it was landing in Peshawar, killing one. Because of the attacks, several airlines that had pledged to lend PIA planes—which could have helped it restore the routes it trimmed—have rescinded the offer, Dawn reported today.
Still, managing PIA the stake sale may be attractive to the banks and accounting firms because Pakistan is planning to privatize billions of dollars worth of state-owned assets, including oil and gas companies, power companies and banks in the coming months. The country hopes to raise as much as $4 billion from privatizing state assets in the fiscal year that started July 1, despite recent aggressive attacks by the Taliban.
The consortium that can sell off a stake in money-losing PIA in this challenging environment stands to win a lot more of that business.

http://qz.com/229765/pakistan-couldnt-have-picked-a-worse-time-to-s...

[Riaz Haq]

Here's an FT story on Pakistan plans to raise $2 billion through privatization:


Pakistan expects to raise at least $2bn by March next year through the international sale of shares in Pakistani energy and banking companies, according to the man spearheading the privatisation drive.
Muhammad Zubair, chairman of the privatisation commission, signalled the country’s return to global equity markets following what the government says is the end of a political crisis marked by weeks of demonstrations in the capital, Islamabad.


“There was uncertainty that the prime minister will be forced to resign, the parliament will be packed up,” he said, referring to the protests led by Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician, and Tahirul Qadri, a moderate Islamic leader. “By mid-September, it was clear that the prime minister was staying and the parliament will remain intact.”
Demonstrators remain camped outside the parliament, but other political parties, including some opponents of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, have backed the government’s right to run the country until its five-year mandate expires in 2018.
Mr Zubair will share his message of returning political stability on Thursday when he meets potential investors at the start of a roadshow beginning in London to sell a 7.5 per cent stake in Oil and Gas Development Co. Analysts say the offer through global depositary receipts should raise more than $800m.
This will be followed by the offer of government shares in the privately run Habib Bank, which analysts said could fetch up to $1.2bn in the first quarter of next year. HBL was privatised in 2003 when 51 per cent was sold to the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development.
Mr Zubair said a successful outcome of the two deals would build investor confidence and help pave the way for privatising other public sector companies. He said at least nine electricity distribution companies and six generating companies would be privatised.
Pakistan International Airlines, the lossmaking state-owned carrier would also be offered for sale. In the past week, Pakistani officials have said the government was planning to split PIA into two, offering its international operations to a Middle Eastern airline while selling ageing aircraft and domestic routes to a local investor.
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Mr Zubair said the privatisation programme had the support of every mainstream political party. “We have met with 60 international equity funds. At least 90 per cent are convinced that political stability will remain in Pakistan . . . We now have to demonstrate we are back at work.”
Mr Sharif was elected prime minister for the third time in May 2013 and is seeking to revive confidence in an economy ravaged by corruption, poor management and attacks on official and civilian targets by Taliban Islamist extremists.
As the scion of a prominent business family in the populous Punjab province, Mr Sharif has advertised himself as a business-friendly leader eager to privatise lossmaking state groups.
But some analysts are sceptical about the likely extent of privatisation, warning that even a successful sale of OGDCL and HBL shares will not necessarily lead to the sale of struggling electricity groups.
“Getting credible foreign investors has historically proven difficult, especially when it comes to taking charge of public sector companies,” said Sakib Sherani, a former adviser to the finance ministry.
“These assets include those that are heavily overstaffed and have run in loss for a long time. The real test will come when these assets are put up for strategic sales along with transfer of management.”
Nor is political stability guaranteed, with Mr Khan and Mr Qadri repeating their demands for Mr Sharif to resign and trade unions likely to flex their muscles.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/029b3250-487a-11e4-ad19-00144feab7de...

[Riaz Haq]

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan plans to split ailing national flag carrier Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) into two companies and sell control of the core business to a global airline over the next 18 months, but political opposition to the sell-off will be intense, the country’s privatization czar said.

Financial advisers are now in talks with several airlines about taking over cash-strapped PIA, which has some 17,000 employees but just 36 aircraft — and 10 of them are grounded due to a lack of spare parts.

Mohammad Zubair told Reuters in an interview during a visit to New Delhi that no decision had been taken on the buyer, but he mentioned Emirates airline, Etihad and Qatar Airways — the Gulf giants that dominate the regional sector — as possibilities.

“It’s going to be the most difficult sale,” said Zubair, who is aiming to raise around $4bn this fiscal year from the sale of stakes in several companies, anticipating demands that the government hold onto PIA and nurse it back to health itself. “If we are saying that for 25 years PIA has been going from bad to worse, we can’t claim that we are business-savvy and we can turn it around. Anyone who thinks that the government can fund it is living in a fool’s paradise.”

Zubair, a former IBM chief financial officer for the Middle East and Africa, was tapped by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to take charge of a central plank of economic reforms promised by Islamabad in return for an International Monetary Fund bailout. Pakistan announced this week that it will seek to raise about $815mn through a sale of shares in Oil and Gas Development Co (OGDC), its largest offering in eight years.

Zubair said investors are returning to Pakistan after weeks of anti-government protests in Islamabad that have now fizzled out, and the OGDC deal representing 7.5% of the company’s share capital would be a test of their confidence. The OGDC sale is part of a sell-off drive to raise capital for an economy that has been crippled for years by power shortages, corruption and militant violence, and to staunch huge losses from dysfunctional companies. Zubair said the losses of power distribution companies alone are equivalent to one-sixth of the government’s fiscal revenues.

Next on the block will be the government’s 40% stake in Habib Bank Ltd, which will be sold in two stages between November and next March, for around $1.2bn. Also ahead is the sale, targeted at domestic investors, of the state’s 7.5% stake in Allied Bank Ltd, for around $150mn, Zubair said.

Over the years, critics say, governments have manipulated state Corps like PIA for political and financial gain, giving jobs to so many supporters that the size of the workforce has become unsustainable in the face of mounting losses.

Zubair said that PIA’s employee-to-aircraft ratio, at around 600, is one of the worst in the world and keeps going up as more planes are grounded. Under his plan, the airline will be spun off as a separate entity and PIA’s other interests — such as ground-handling, catering, hotels and even a poultry business — would go into a holding company that would be retained by the state.

To avoid mass layoffs that would run into political opposition the holding company would absorb all the employees, keep a share in the airline to earn dividend income and then sell off each of its interests individually over time.

Zubair said he could not proceed with the sale of PIA as quickly as other companies, partly because parliament may have to approve legislation allowing it to pass into private hands. “It’s more politically sensitive,” he said. “PIA is not going to be sold just like that.”

http://www.eturbonews.com/51147/pakistan-talks-several-airlines-abo...

[Riaz Haq]

NY Times: PIA flying feckless in Karachi:

KARACHI, Pakistan — It was a scene out of a cinema farce. Pakistan International Airlines Flight PK-370 was scheduled to take off from Karachi to Islamabad early one evening in September, but it had been delayed for two hours — a mechanical problem, the crew claimed.

Then a crew member confessed: The plane was waiting for a V.I.P. passenger. When a senator from the opposition Pakistan People’s Party, former Interior Minister Rehman Malik, finally showed up to board the flight, passengers mutinied and booed him away from the plane’s door. As if to keep things even, Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, a National Assembly member from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s governing party, showed up even later, reached his seat, and was then chased off the plane by the passengers.

A video of the episode went viral on social media the next day, and many Pakistanis applauded the vigilante justice against V.I.P.s who use their status to lord it over ordinary citizens.

At the same time, the episode pointed to the malaise that has overtaken P.I.A., once a national asset whose crack pilots and sound management helped establish dozens of international routes. The state-owned airline is now all but lost in a morass of financial liability, political favoritism and technical disrepute. The pressing question: whether P.I.A. has passed the point of no return and can no longer be saved.

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It wasn’t always this way. P.I.A. began flying internationally in 1955 as the country’s government-run carrier and received early technical assistance from Pan American World Airways. It quickly became a regional leader — the first Asia-based airline to operate jets, in 1960 — and it helped Singapore Airlines, Emirates and Royal Jordanian Airlines, among others, to establish their own fleets. In the 1960s, Pierre Cardin designed its flight attendants’ uniforms, while travel posters showcased exciting destinations and the romance of international travel.

P.I.A. showed profits back then, and being nationally subsidized, it could promise job security for all employees. But the future was slowly being compromised. Ticket prices were artificially low, the airline paid high taxes on jet fuel, and its flights were not allowed to sell alcohol. Then, in the 1990s, the first Gulf War drove fuel prices and insurance rates sky-high. Subsequent tensions with India and the war against the Taliban led to repeated closures of Pakistani airspace and airports.

But not all of the airline’s problems can be laid at war’s doorstep. One of the largest is overemployment: With only 36 planes and about 17,000 employees (who fly free with their families), the airline has a ratio of employees to aircraft that is reportedly among the highest in the world. This is not a managerial strategy: It is a result of the government’s using P.I.A. as an employment reservoir. Plum jobs go to well-connected people, reflecting a larger governmental ethos of nepotism, favoritism and corruption.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
Meanwhile, poor maintenance has rendered some P.I.A. planes inoperable, limiting the number of routes P.I.A. can fly. In September, according to the newspaper Dawn, 10 of the airline’s 36 aircraft were grounded for lack of spare parts. Departures have been scaled back or eliminated on unprofitable routes. These factors allowed officials to report that P.I.A.'s annual loss — about $310 million last year — is estimated to be about $175 million this year. But those numbers indicate that the airline remains a huge drain on the national exchequer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/bina-shah-flying-feckless...