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Here is the 364th episode of the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By, which aired on UNC Radio, Oct. 22, 2011. Info: davesgoneby.com.
Host: Dave Lefkowitz
Guests: singer Barb Jungr and actor-singer Jason Graae
Featuring: Dave chats with singer Barb Jungr and actor-singer Jason Graae. Plus: a Saturday Segue remembering Bert Jansch and Jagjit Singh, Inside Broadway (reviews of Intringulis and Follies), Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflections on Occupy Wall Street.
00:00:01 DAVE GOES IN 00:31:00 GUEST: Barb Jungr 01:24:00 Sponsors 01:35:00 SATURDAY SEGUE: Bert Jansch 01:45:00 GUEST: Jason Graae 02:22:00 INSIDE BROADWAY (Follies (02:22:00) & Intringulis (02:37:00)) 02:44:30 Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Rabbinical Reflection #26: Occupied 02:52:00 DAVE – Friends & Weather 02:58:30 DAVE GOES OUT 02:59:00 DAVE SAYS BYE – Jagjit Singh
October 22, 2011 Playlist: “Things Have Changed” (00:09:30), “Sara” (00:14:30), “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (00:19:30), “Sugar Baby” (00:23:30), “Blind Willie McTell” (00:40:30), “Man in the Long Black Coat” (01:09:00) & “Forever Young” (01:19:30; Barb Jungr); “Come Sing Me A Happy Song to Prove We Can All Get Along the Lumpy Bumpy Long and Dusty Road” (01:22:30), “The Bright New Year” (01:37:00), “Alman” (01:41:00) & “Tree Song” (01:42:30) (Bert Jansch); “No Love is Sorrow” (01:38:30; Pentangle); “You I Like” (01:45:00), “It Only Takes a Moment/Loving You” (02:05:30) & “I Promise You a Happy Ending” (02:19:00) (Jason Graae); “Waiting for the Girls Upstairs” (02:22:00; Follies, 1998 Paper Mill cast); “Don’t Look at Me” (02:35:00; Follies in Concert); “Sarakti Jaye Hain Rukh Se Naqab Ahista Ahista” (03:02:30; Jagjit Singh).
Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon, with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of August 21st, 2011.
It’s 12pm – do you know where your money is? First it’s up, then it’s down, then it’s up, then it’s down. If you have your money in the stock market, your portfolio is bouncing up and down faster than a hooker on an epileptic.
I go away for a few weeks, take a little time off, and what do I miss? Oh, nothing. Just America going bankrupt.
How does that work anyway? If we’re supposed to pay three billion dollars to Brazil, and we don’t have it, what do they do? What can they do? Send some guy to the White House – “Hola. My name’s Jorge; I’m supposed to break the President’s legs. If you give me one billion now, I can just break his toes.”
I mean, what does going bankrupt really mean? China won’t loan us any more money? Why are we borrowing from them in the first place? I don’t even like Chinese money. You spend a hundred yen, an hour later you feel like shopping again.
But seriously, if the United States crashes to the floor, every other country crashes to the sub-basement. So maybe they can forgive a loan or two; give us another year to pay off. Let us get to that middle period between our current recession and our next corporate fraud.
You gotta love the arrogance of Wall Street. Last month, all the politicians get together, frantically making a deal to raise the debt ceiling. They’re borrowing from Peter to pay Paul – or, in my lingo, borrowing from Faivel to pay Moish – just so we’re spared embarrassment, shame and having to raise goats and churn our own butter.
America stays solvent, and what happens? Two days later, the stock market plummets a thousand points. We go from a triple-A credit rating to double A. What does that mean? What, we have to get our parents to co-sign a loan – fine, dig up George and Martha Washington, will that be enough?
All the topsy-turvy turbulence of the Dow Jones has nothing to do with jobs or debt or wages or social security. It’s all about rich people playing a game with money that doesn’t exist. That’s all Wall Street is – monopoly played by frat-boy pricks. Which is why, even when 90 percent of us are suffering, 10 percent are making money by the bucket and paying taxes by the thimble.
As for the double-dip… Remember what I said half a year ago about gas prices? Go look it up, I’ll wait. But I’ll also refresh your memory. I said that the country would be fine and recover from the George Bush years – unless gas prices went up. If they hit four dollars, we’re shtupped. So what happened weeks ago? Gas prices zipped past 3.50, people shut their wallets, businesses got scared, supermarkets jacked their prices – voila! economic downturn.
The only good news? Now that the market’s in a lull, oil prices are taking a hit. Sure enough, people will start to spend again – so long as they’re not spending it all on the brown crap the Arabians pump out of the ground.
You want houses to sell again? Make it so it doesn’t cost 500 bucks a month to heat them in the winter. You want folks to take vacations? Make it so the airlines don’t have to charge 50 bucks for luggage to offset gasoline they’re just gonna dump over the Atlantic Ocean anyway. You want Americans to have jobs? Make it so you’re not paying people a measly minimum wage to fry McNuggets and scrape canola from a fryer. Come to think of it, we don’t have to frack in Pennsylvania to strike oil; just hit the kitchen of a Denny’s.
Maybe the answer is: instead of borrowing money, we should just borrow oil. Borrow it, use it, refine the waste product back into petroleum, and then return it to OPEC with a few quarts of ethanol for interest. Of course, it still doesn’t pay the Arab world back for 9/11 but, like with everything else nowadays, we’ll write them an I.O.U.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches.
