" ... Out, too, goes the law that said only a place where bakers mixed ingredients, kneaded dough and produced fresh loaves could call itself a bakery and avoid the “bread sales outlet” definition of just selling defrosted and pre-baked loaves.

“The benefit from abolishing the definition would be the enhancement of competition by creating quality differentiations and by offering a broader choice to consumers,” said the OECD, which also wanted bread sold by the kilo rather than, as was the case until very recently, in standard, fixed-weight loaves. ..."

(from an article on Greece in today's Guardian)

Note the weasel phrase: "the enhancement of competition by creating quality differentiations and by offering a broader choice". Translated it means the opportunity for unscrupulous producers to sell sub-quality produce thereby undercutting (& eventually forcing out of business) decent people who make & deliver a genuine bread in the name of giving the customer "what they want". The law of diminishing returns to everyone (other than the said unscrupulous producer). "Choice"? You mean it's a choice to buy crap?

& it coincides nicely with the phrase I read in the current LRB about the Euro crisis concerning the empowerment of "legally and politically unconstrained expertocracy".

Greece, essentially, is being seen as a wonderful plunder zone - licensed financial rape by bankers & investors in the name of 'getting real' & learning to knuckle down. You Greeks, really ... cloud cuckoo land. What an extraordinary shift of culpability.

This is yet another example of the (absurd, inhuman, immoral) 'logics' we live by. Is it any wonder that there is a growing swell of support for Jeremy Corbyn in the UK? Whatever his electoral potential here, at least, is someone who seems to represent an alternative way of living & thinking.

Little by little even the possibility of thinking otherwise is being annihilated. Democracy? Dream on. (You see - those damn Greeks again).