Clintonville’s Rag-O-Rama – a hipster destination for resale clothes – shut down this past weekend, leaving employees in a lurch and another remnant of Columbus’s soulful and non-corporate past in the proverbial back-alley garbage dumpster.

The Free Press often reminisces on Columbus of the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, when it was more a hip and quirky college town than a lame playground for young professionals and their corporate overlords.

“I’ve been going there for 25 years. After Bernie’s, Surly Girl, Larry’s, Mamas, Outland, Lil Brothers, King Avenue Coffee Shop, Atlantis, Blue Danube, Tee Jayes, Short North Coffee House, and almost all the entire Short North art district, etc. with nothing ever replacing any of it, Columbus is culturally dead,” wrote Michael Moore on the Crazy Mama’s remembrance page on Facebook. For those not in know, Crazy Mama’s on South High off-campus was Columbus’s answer to the punk, new wave and garage band “underground” which emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.

Sustainable ecological value monetized will have profound four-fold global benefits. Creating sustainable ecological value is the easiest path toward quickly mitigating climate change, expanding ecological global economic growth, pursuing a radical reduction in pollution depletion and ecological damage, and sharply reducing rampant global inequality. It is the basis for the pursuit of the New Wealth of Nations.

Including ecological value in global market dynamics is the missing piece needed to enable the price system and the pursuit of profit to help radically diminish the attraction of externalities by making the market send price signals realistically valuing and rewarding sustainable conduct to increase profit. Regulatory schemes and taxes on polluters have not stopped the global march toward ecological catastrophe. Monetizing ecological value is both a recognition of the inescapable importance of the global ecosphere under catastrophic assault, and a crucial improvement in the incentives of the price system embracing ecological sanity in the name of profit as well as survival and justice.

Introduction

This post raises the question of whether President Biden’s quest for re-election in 2024 will be negatively affected by his pledge to continue America’s support for Israel and its war on Gaza.

President Biden has put his 2024 re-election at risk by supporting Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza.

Early in this war, Biden unequivocally supported Israel’s military response to the Hamas attack on southern Israel. In just over a week after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Biden met with Netanyahu to express his and America’s unequivocal and unconditional support for Israel

(https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206832708/biden-israel-trip-mideast-peace).

Perhaps the primary value of war – from the point of view of national leaders and their loyal followers – is that it places 100 percent of the blame for whatever’s wrong on the other guy: the enemy. And thus there’s no alternative but to kill “him,” which nowadays amounts to slaughtering and dismembering anybody and everybody who lives in his sector of the planet, including children . . . though that part isn’t said out loud.