Professor Anatol Lieven gets over-excited:

A fraction of the trillion and a half dollars now spent on rescuing western economies from the consequences of their elites’ greed and recklessness would have been enough to have greatly reduced African misery, stabilised Pakistan and other Muslim states – or put a human being on Mars.

In fact, whatever was left over from the west’s relentless pursuit of material satisfactions has been largely burned up by the Bush administration’s tax cuts and by misconceived and appallingly executed American wars.

Well, it’s certainly one viewpoint.

Though maybe as well as ‘elite’ greed one should throw into the greed pot the wider greed as represented by sprawling public payrolls and unaffordable public pension systems, not to mention the massed greed of US Big Three car workers unions, plus the greed of EU subsidy systems such as the CAP, and the greed of MEP expenses.

And the greed of Harvard and all those other Universities including Prof Lieven’s King’s College in London ? Were they happy or sad to rake the money in as the good times rolled?

And all the other greeds wallowing around, including the greeds of the African elites who are busy plundering their countries so that we are expected to spend our money ‘rescuing’ Africa.

Or are they all the ‘elite’ now?

There’s more:

The latest crisis has dealt the coup de grâce to the Anglo-American economic model – summed up in the “Washington Consensus” that was preached with near-religious fervour and dogmatism in the 1990s.

Given the damage that this ideology did when forced on the former Soviet Union, Latin America and parts of Asia, it is easy to sympathise with the anger with which people in these regions see the model being abandoned in its heartland.

Hmm. I seem to recall the people of central and Eastern Europe not so much angrily recoiling when this ‘ideology’ was ‘forced’ on them but rather stampeding to demand it after decades of communism.

And, by the way, what ‘damage’ did this do anyway, other than stop ending the damage done by communism, close down value-subtracting industries, end socialist ecocide and give most people some sort of better life?

What I really objected to in this article, however, was this:

It is essential, however, that the EU use the widest possible range of both carrots and sticks to make sure that former communist countries admitted to the EU do not slip into chauvinist authoritarianism.

This applies with special force to those EU members with unsolved ethnic tensions. In Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania and elsewhere, we have already seen disquieting signs in recent years that large parts of the population have been by no means fully converted to pluralist democracy.

What on earth is he on about?

Which are the ‘unsolved ethnic tensions’ in Poland?

Insofar as Poland has a problem with ethnic tensions these days it may be that it has too few of them because of the depredations of Hitler and Stalin.

And what exactly are the ‘disquieting signs in recent years’ that ‘large parts of the population in Poland’ are ‘by no means fully converted to pluralist democracy’?

Thanks in good measure to the Kaczynski twins, the vote for the formerly significant Right/Left populist parties has gone down to the point of squeezing them from Parliament altogether.

How do bafflingly confused articles like this get into the FT?

Have we entered a new phase wherein supposedly serious people can talk radical nonsense and the rest of us are expected to be too tired to complain any more?