Nick Paumgarten’s article on Spain’s economic woes provides predictable explanations: wild housing speculation, the weakened euro, the colossal failures of public-works projects, the collusion of banks with power-hungry politicians (“The Hangover,” February 25th). Yet in his reporting Paumgarten seems to rely on interviews with powerful people. I found one example particularly disconcerting: that of the businesswoman at a dinner party in a flat on La Castellana (an avenue not known for its cheap rents) who declared, as the Rioja flowed, that the solution to the economic crisis would be to fire half the public employees and dissolve the autonomous community governments. In the U.S., this would be tantamount to abolishing all state governments. Paumgarten describes the Indignados, comparable to Occupy Wall Street, trying to encircle the Parliament building, but he does not provide them with a meaningful voice. This movement, in its indignation and insistence on bottom-up democracy, is arguably the only redeeming aspect of this entire mess.