Good question. I follow all your articles with great interest as I do my favorite inequality economists. These are the days. We used to need a GP and a mechanic on speed dial. Now we need a constitutional lawyer and an inequality economist.

I am what they call an "alien" here: a Brazilian citizen with US permanent residency. For almost 50 years living here on and off I hadn't realized the US doesn't have a public health system. Now I do but it is still hard to understand why even the liberal Americans think it's impossible to have one.

It also baffles me that most of my colleagues here fail to make the connection between having a largely privatized prison system and the largest incarcerated population in the world; between outsourcing military operations to PMCs and having more and more unacceptable military conflicts. All this drains their "taxpayer money", the one they don't want going into healthcare or education.

I am pessimistic about this American spring. For 40 years after Reagan, democrat president after democrat president failed. Mergers and cartelization created monstrous corporate organizations. These things are too big to confront and they are not people. We can't just explain to them that they are committing suicide. They will keep merging, growing and supporting authoritarian rule.