click above to watch in-studio footage of Rabbi Sol Solomon’s Zoom interview with Ted Greenberg.click above to listen (audio only).
Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with comedian TED GREENBERG
Topics include: Wall Street, The Complete Performer, taxis, Late Night with Dave Letterman.
Segment aired May 16, 2020 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” podcast program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of October 23rd, 2011.
So all these people without an occupation are busy occupying. They’re occupying Wall Street, they’re inhabiting Zuccotti Park, they’re occupying cities and colleges across America because the have-nots are getting a bissel sick and tired of the haves.
It was ever thus, people. Before we all were born, a handful of upper-class hoity-toities looked down on the rest of us. If they were in a generous and tax-deductible mood, they donated a library or slipped a few bucks to charity.
Everyone hates the rich because…they’re rich. And we’re not. Life sucks, then you die.
But now we have a growing segment of the population who are fed up with the status quo and think they can change it by…showing up somewhere and not leaving. Hey, it beats violence, and protests certainly did have an impact on the Vietnam War, racial segregation and the roll-out of New Coke.
Still, I am bothered by two aspects of this “Occupy Somewhere” movement. The first is the “and then what?” factor. Okay, so you shout at the rich, you rail at the corporations, you run the CEOs out of town on a rail – well, more likely a Lear Jet. And then what? What do you replace them with?
If the protesters are saying, “make college affordable, or at least make it so I’m not paying off my student loan with my Medicare and reverse mortgage.” Okay.
If the protesters are saying, “change the tax code,” fine, I’m all for it. Tax the rich until they’re poor, tax the poor until they’re dead, and give the middle class a break for once.
If the protesters are saying, “don’t let stockbrokers, bankers and corporate bigwigs get away with rampant fraud,” I’m for that, too. Let them get away with just enough fraud so that they keep jobs in America instead of farming them out to Uttar Pradesh.
The problem is we don’t know WHAT the protesters are saying except, “we can’t get jobs, the jobs we get don’t pay anything, and the pay we get goes to buy imported crap because we don’t make anything.” Republicans and social conservatives keep wanting to liken the occupiers to Soviet Communists. Well, guess what? Those old Russians were rebelling against the gentry and landowners who controlled everything and gave nothing back. Sound familiar? Communism didn’t happen because the poor wanted to give Fox News talking points, it happened because the peasants found it unpleasant watching the czars eat pheasant.
These hippies and democrats and college kids and ukelele players, they don’t care about words like Marxism or capitalism. They just want their piece of the pie, and they’re not blind; they know that out of ten slices, nine have been gobbled up before the pizza even gets delivered.
So if you ask where my sympathy lies, it is with these demonstrators, even if the only thing they’re demonstrating is how easy it is to get really grimy after three days sleeping in a park.
What I do take issue with is the whole theme of the protest – “occupying.” The organizers took their motif from the so-called Arab spring. You know, where young Arabs got tired of their corrupt, totalitarian leaders so they staged relatively peaceful rebellions that will ultimately bring in corrupt, fundamentalist Muslim leaders? Anytime you look to the Arabs for a moral compass, you’re pretty much gonna float into an iceberg.
The anti-Semitic undertones of this movement are very minor, but they’re there. From the usual grievance that Jews comprise the evil one percent oppressing the other 99 to the idea of that loaded word: “occupation.” Even though the protesters are, themselves, the occupiers, you can bet many of them are weeping for the Palestinians supposedly displaced from the sliver of Israeli land they absolutely have to live on.
And yet, and yet. There is a positive impulse here, and I hope President Obama – and whatever clown the Republicans pull out of their sidecar – I hope they listen to these rebels and take to heart the idea that American wealth, enterprise and future security have been stolen by a handful of families and corporations.
When everybody gets to eat, but some people eat a lot better – so it goes, that’s the world. When people are starving and Marie Antoinette is still eating cake, that’s when the knives come out. Or worse, in this case – the bongs and bongos.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches.
Click above to listen to the episode (audio only).
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 – 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.
Click above to listen to the episode (audio only).
Here is the 25th episode of the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By, which aired on WGBB-AM March 23, 2003. More info: davesgoneby.com
host: Dave Lefkowitz guest: broadcaster Michael Artsis
Featuring: Dave chats with broadcaster Michael Artsis, Goes Off on Wall Street, gets political about Life During Wartime and sings “When Bushie Goes Marching In.” Plus: the satirical News Gone By.
00:00:01 DAVE GOES IN – Life During Wartime 00:05:00 DAVE GOES FURTHER IN – Spontaneous Talk 00:17:00 NEWS GONE BY (Code Orange Again; Bulldozers n’ Tractors; Pretzels n’ Goldfish; Light Cigarettes and Hot Ash) 00:45:00 DAVE GOES OFF on Wall Street 00:57:00 GUEST: Michael Artsis 01:16:00 DAVE GOES OUT
March 23, 2003 Playlist: “When Bushie Goes Marching In” (Dave, 55:00), “Shut Up, Be Happy” (Ice T w/ Jello Biafra, 2:00), “Masters of Revenge” (Ice T), “A-B-C” (How Now Dow Jones original Broadway cast).
