• More On The Chinese Domino Fundamentally Changing The World’s Economic Outlook

• Irish Banks Turn The Screws On Debtors, Up Interest Rates On Mortgages

• Jim Rogers Explains The Crisis That Could End The China Boom

• Bankrupt Nations Try To Stop The Future From Happening, Fail

• Hoenig Urges Fed to Raise Interest Rates to Encourage Saving

• Add The Middle East To China And India As Another Source Of Surging Gold Demand, Says Jim O’Neill

• Eleven million low and middle-income workers’ pay will ‘flatline’ until 2015, experts warn

• Past Peak Oil – Why Time Is Now Short

• Peak oil and the Fall of the Soviet Union: Lessons on the 20th Anniversary of the Collapse

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• Gil Scott-Heron, credited with inspiring rap, dies

Poetic anger. Gil Scott-Heron took anger to the edge of violence in song, poetry and ‘spoken word.’ But you didn’t have to raise a fist or a gun. You could nod you head up and down, ‘uh huh.’ – “Makes you want to holler sometimes, throw up both of your hands” (from the track, “Inner City Blues”).

The first time I heard GSH I was dozing off to sleep listening to WRVR Jazz. I was 15 or 16 at the time and living in extremely white Westchester County when “My sister Nell got bit by a rat . . . And Whitey’s on the Moon,” this GSH classic, burst through the speakers and I got hooked. Poetic anger. Beautiful rage.

I was so impressed and curious about GSH’s street view of life that in 1979, after my first year of NYU, I moved from a flat on Fulton St. way downtown to 145th st., way uptown. The contrast between life on the Greenwich Village campus of NYU and life on Sugar Hill ‘uptown’ was a revealing mix of privilege and poverty. Black and white. Haves and have-nots. And Broadway ran the entire length of it. What I learned was that at each end of the No. 1 Lexington Ave. Line – the 145th st. stop I got off uptown – or the Sheridan Sq. stop downtown – people craved justice – and that craving intensified the higher you went above 125th St. ‘Since there are no cops uptown, people have to be honest,’ was a phrase I heard repeated often. Street justice. Respect. You had to carry an obvious sense of self-respect with you uptown to avoid being marked as weak. You had to be willing to go to the line separating rage and violence and be willing to step over that line. After awhile, you realize that everyone is living on that edge and the forces of emotion and indignation sculpts individuals into who they are for real. If you live in the ghetto long enough you become who you are for all to see and from this transparency comes art occasionally. Sometimes an individual comes along who not only turns street justice into art but transforms it. GSH gave street life, street justice, street poetry a funk beat and his view of justice and the rest is history.