lummi island wine tasting sept 6-7 ’24
Hours, September 6-7 ’24
Friday 4-6 pm Saturday 3-5 pm
the doodad pole on Blizard Trail
added a couple of very old watch cases
to the hundreds of charming charms already there…
NO Friday Bread This Week! 🙁
Look for next week’s offerings in your email Sunday afternoon!
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 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 Wine Tasting
Natura Rose ’21 Chile $12
Cold-soaked before pressing and cold-fermented on the skins to develop rich and nuanced aromas and flavors of grassy lime, tropical fruits, and lychee, with a crisp, lingering finish…a long-time local favorite.
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.
La Vielle Ferme Rouge ’22 France $11
Great drinkability, with seductive bouquet of red fruit, spices, and cherries, well balanced palate full of delicacy, freshness, and very soft tannins.
Metis Red Blend ’21 WA $30
Lively aromatics of blueberry and jam with notes of kalamata olive, black tea, engaging tannins with notes of cedar and leather for a lingering palate of fruit and spice.
Economics of the Heart: Inflation: When the Crumbs Aren’t Enough
Jesus expels the money changers from the Temple…
A friend just invited our attention to this article in Salon, which takes a lengthy dive into the devolving relationships among capital, labor, government, environment, and fairness across our national economy. While it doesn’t come right out and say it, the basic message is that since Reagan officially initiated “Supply Side Economics” in 1981 with the help of the Heritage Foundation, Big Banks, and Republican tax cuts, the wealthiest corporations and individuals on the planet have had $iv’s plugged into the veins of the bottom 99% and are still sucking.
Since those policies were initiated under Reagan, and institutionalized under Bushes I and II, some $50 trillion has been transferred from the lowest-income 99% of Americans to the top 1%…with most of it going to a tiny fraction of that 1%.
We all remember the curiously timed “subprime meltdown” that triggered the economic Crash of 2008, just as Dubya was leaving office. It came at the end of a long string of “financial innovations” involving complex private equity “products” like subprime mortgages and various “derivatives” of mortgages, all intertwined and interdependent…and with very little “There” there, a house not even of cards, but of the flimsiest paper. And Bush’s Fed had been dropping interest rates for years “to stimulate the housing market.”
Oh, and by the way, around that time we had a very happy visitor to the wine shop around then who was a broker in NY who had just invented a new derivative that was about to hit the markets and make him a bazillionaire. Hmm, I wonder how that turned out…?
Many of our friends here on the Island had bought their homes with the “new mortgages” available then (to stimulate home ownership) with lower down payments, but higher interest rates and lots of fine print and hidden risks. Countless defaulted properties were repossessed at that time under various unfavorable terms that basically took away any equity that had been earned. Lots of those home owners got dumped back into the rental market, the direct victims of the private equity robbers who had both ripped them off first with bogus mortgages and then by pushing rents up and up.
And that’s not all. On top of all that, these private equity firms then just sat on the repo’d properties for years while they continued to generated massive tax write-offs for them while also limiting supply and keeping housing prices high. The 2008 crash then brought economic ruin for lots of ordinary people but built Scrooge McDuck money bins for the billionaires.
It is hard to imagine how exactly these thieves imagined an actual economy could survive either this kind of wealth concentration or the financial power concentration that would most likely go with it. Of course, maybe that’s the secret plan– building Utopia and then just turning over the keys to the survivors? Hmm, doesn’t seem likely, does it?
In any case here we are two months from the election that will decide whether there will even BE a future of any kind. We are seeing and feeling the winds of change all around us in a way that is beginning to feel almost hopeful, and that feels comforting in tentative sort of way. And each day we see more signs that the Tweetster is shriveling before our eyes.
Maybe these Project 2025 guys don’t need him to govern; they just need him long enough to give them their Authoritarian Amerika, and they can take it from there without him.
Scary stuff.
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2072 Granger Way