lummi island wine tasting march 14 ’25
Wine Tasting Friday Mar 7 4-6 pm
shown: today’s Brunelli Rosso di Montalcino
a little wine can brighten some of these dark days…
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Seeded Multi Grain Levain – Made with a sourdough culture and using a flavorful mix of bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat and rye. A nice mixture of flax, sesame sunflower and pumpkin seeds and some oatmeal adds great flavor and crunch. And just a little honey for some sweetness. A great all around bread that is full of flavor – $5/loaf
Polenta Levain – Also made with a levain, known as sourdough, in which the sourdough starter is fed and built up over several days, then mixed with bread flour and polenta in the final dough mix. This bread is a nice rustic loaf with great corn flavor. – $5/loaf
and pastry this week….
Black Sesame & Candied Lemon Brioche: A delicious brioche dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. Filled with fresh lemon zest and candied lemon and as if that wasn’t enough, topped with a black sesame streusel before baking. Ooh la la, what’s not to like…? – 2/$5.
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday the Bakery emails the week’s bread offering to the mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday (and not already claimed!) will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Contact us at least two weeks before your visit to get on the bread list .
This week’s $10 Wine Tasting
Vielle Ferme Blanc ’23 France $12
Flavorful blend of bourboulenc, grenache blanc, roussanne, ugni blanc, & vermentino delivering seductive aromas of jasmine, hawthorn, and pear with flavors of blood orange with delicate saline notes.
Garzon Tannat Reserva ’21 Uruguay $18
Deep purple color, fresh spicy aromas of plums and raspberries, full-bodied palate with ripe tannins and minerality make for a terroir-driven wine of unique identity.
Brunelli Martoccia di Luca Rosso di Montalcino ’20 Italy $24
Classic, dignified structure with approachable, wonderfully bright fruit; bright nose of cranberry, cherry, and slate; smooth, integrated tannins, and thoughtful, composed finish.
Economics of the Heart: Ego => Karma
In 1965, a typical CEO got paid about 20 times what an average employee earned. In those days the top goal of a company was to maximize the return to shareholders; executive focus was on quality, reliability, productivity, and customer, client, and employee satisfaction. But by 1980 CEO focus was starting to shift away from long-established goals of maximizing productivity, product/service quality, research and development, which slowed innovation and started reducing product/service quality and reliability.
Instead, because CEO compensation was becoming increasingly tied to a company’s share value on the stock market, board rooms became more concerned with keeping share price high and costs (including employee compensation) low than in keeping quality high. These same forces are responsible for turning Boeing into something of a poster child for the purposeful decline of a highly respected company with the disastrous series of failures in its rollout of the new 737 Max a few years ago. Hundreds of people died and a highly regarded, iconic company’s reputation was trashed; but the CEO still makes millions.
The forces behind these shifts in long-term American business pride and practices can be traced directly to the changing focus of top business schools over the same period, as students were taught to extract resources instead of creating value. Of note is that in 1985 Harvard Business School deliberately shifted its curricular focus by hiring a graduate of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago School” for a top position. Friedman long championed the idea that only when markets were completely unregulated could the magical forces of the market’s “Invisible Hand” lead inexorably to the optimal allocation of scarce resources in which all players would thrive. Btw, Friedman is the guy who made famous the line “there’s no such thing as a Free Lunch.” (My personal feeling was always that Friedman was only believed because the corner of his mouth turned up in a perennial little smile…but we digress…
The problem that we resource economists have always had with Friedman is that he refused to consider significance of the vast number of ways in which markets consistently reward unfair labor practices, price gouging, monopolization, pollution, environmental damage, over-extraction of resources, and gross inequality in economic outcomes. Business schools went all in for deregulation of markets, and Reagan and his merry band of Heritage Foundation financial advisors launched the ongoing war on economic efficiency, social fairness, environmental protection, and the worthy goal of modest economic security for every citizen. It also led to the deep recession at the end of 2007. Btw, it is no coincidence that for some decades we have seesawed from Republican administrations looting and crashing the economy to Democratic ones that get it back on track. Dubya crashed it and Obama fixed it. Tweetster crashed it and Biden fixed it. At the moment the Tweetster is on track to crash the entire world economy. So how did we get here?
Starting in the 1980s, consistent with the 1000-page Heritage Foundation’s “Plan” for the Reagan administration, business schools began a long transformation in philosophy and orientation that reflected shifts in business practices and in the economy at large. In 2016 William Lazonick saw that changes in the core teachings of business schools would ensure that firms would not give workers a fair shake. At that time, Wall Street was taking off and American businesses were becoming increasingly “financialized” —meaning that executives started to base their business decisions more on the goal of boosting their firms’ stock prices, and turning away from investing in the productive capabilities of employees, which had long been the cornerstone for rising American living standards.
For 40 years these wealth-concentrating practices have been squeezing millions of households between decreasing wages and higher prices for everything. People are hungry and homeless not because they are lazy, but because those who are already financially secure are not spending enough of their earnings to keep the economic circular flow economy going. Many well-educated workers can barely make ends meet, while more and more less-educated people cannot afford housing even if they work full time.
The basic fact is that everyone on the planet is by necessity both a worker and a consumer, and ultimately the purpose of an economy is to manage household income and expenses optimally. It is the basic Circular Flow: at the end of each day, the total amount spent by everyone has to equal the amount received by everyone. If anyone is hoarding, then someone is starving. If lots of players are hoarding, lots of people are starving. We are all in this together.
Congressional Republicans are curiously united in their reticence on these developments and thereby are declaring war on our Constitution just as we should be planning the celebration of its 250th birthday. Let’s be clear: this Administration has been spitting in the face of the Constitution all day every day since before Inauguration. All of their actions demonstrate their commitment to replace our Constitutional government with an authoritarian dictatorship, realign our country away from our traditional allies and trading partners, and realign it with Russia and its ilk, in defiance of the very specific oaths all have taken to support and defend the Constitution.
Let’s be clear… this is not “politics as usual.” Every such action by a Congressional Republican or Cabinet member in direct contradiction to the Constitution is a conscious, deliberate act of treason, and should be treated as such. They are all already traitors, every single one. Project 2025 Republicans (pretty much all of them) have deliberately conspired to start this new Civil War. We all know at a gut level that everything we have known and loved about our country is at stake, and that we must fight these bozos for it until we win, however long it takes.
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2072 Granger Way
