“Demand Nothing, Privatize Everything!”: UCMeP Announces its Bold Campaign for ASUC

UCMeP's Executive Board Candidates for ASUC (from left to right): External Affairs VP Brandon Woolf; Academic Affairs VP Jessica Smith (UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof standing in for Ms. Smith); President Mandy Cohen; Executive VP Shane Boyle

Announcement of UCMeP’s Candidates for ASUC

For decades UC Berkeley’s student government (ASUC) has been a frat-tastic refuge for the future autocrats and investment bankers of our once-golden state. Week in and week out, these precocious living products of our glorious hedge-fund society have bravely ventured into the hallowed halls of Eshelmann Hall to ardently pretend they were doing something worthwhile with their time. In return for sitting by quietly as administrators, state officials, and corporate executives systematically dismantled public education before their very eyes, these irreproachable individuals got to add a killer line to their resumes.

We here at the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP) are, of course, thankful to ironically named student parties like “Student Action” and “Cal-Serv” for doing their part to aide the destruction of public education by doing nothing to substantially resist the privatization of the University of California. But as we all know, we stand at the dawn of a new era, and this new era calls for — nay, demands! — new blood to course through the clogged arteries that constitute Berkeley student government.

Let us be clear, there still exist significant obstacles in the path toward fully privatizing the UC. All of the challenges that cannot be resolved by the swing of a baton or the shock of a taser will need heroic leaders brave enough to implement policies that go against the interests of most of those enrolled or working at UC Berkeley.

With this said, UCMeP is proud to announce its brave decision to run for every single office offered by ASUC.  UCMeP’s campaign will be guided by the bold, forward-looking slogan: “Demand Nothing, Privatize Everything!”

We have assembled a formidable slate of candidates who will steadfastly walk the party line set by the UC Board of Regents while refusing to waste time by participating in substantive debate. With less than a third of students even bothering to vote in student government elections, ASUC is far from a democratically elected body (even by the Regents’ standards). But like any paper tiger worthy of the name, ASUC maintains an aura of authority that administrators never hesitate pointing to when arguing that there do exist legitimate channels on campus for students to lodge their concerns. We hope to (literally) capitalize on the Ponzi-Scheme that is ASUC and push through many modest proposals.

We are immensely proud to reveal UCMeP’s slate of candidates for ASUC:

President:

Mandy ”Yark Mudof” Cohen

Executive Vice President:

Shane “Higher Fees Please” Boyle

Academic Affairs Vice President:

Jessica “Bond Collateral” Smith

External Affairs Vice President:

Brandon “Wanna be the Governator” Woolf

Student Advocate:

Danny “Criminals not Students” Marcus

Senator:

Jessie “Padding my Resume” Hock

Senator:

Alex “Privatize Everything!” Dubilet

***********

Click here to view UCMeP’s Full Campaign Platform

Go here to view UCMeP’s Impressive Qualifications (including endorsements!)

Mark Yudof is not More Incompetent than a Broken Picnic Table!

We find the facebook group “Can this broken picnic table get more fans than UC President Mark G. Yudof” to be a disgusting example of free speech.

Let it be known that we are adding to our blacklist the names of the thousands of people who have become  fans of this group over the past two days. You can all expect an irate phone call from Dean of Students Jonathan “Let’s Suspend all the Students” Poullard  any day now.

UCMeP Rolls out the Red Carpet for Scabs on March 4!

On the March 4 Day of Action to Defend Public Education, UCMeP’s highly elite Strategic Counter-Activism Brigade (SCAB) bravely positioned itself on the front lines of the class struggle — against all those rabble-rousers selfishly demanding accessible and affordable public education.

Without concern for their own safety, members of SCAB (literally) rolled out the red carpet for anyone willing cross the March 4 picket lines.

Please enjoy the following photos and video (made by a loyal fan) of this heroic day of action.

Photo album (click the image to view the entire album):

Video of “UCMeP Rolls out the  Red Carpet for Scabs!”:

EXCLUSIVE Video Interview with UCMeP’s Head Honchos!!

For your viewing pleasure, here is an exclusive video interview UCMeP recently gave to the Daily Cal.

You’re welcome.

Professional Protestors Should be Furloughed

The following is a letter UCMeP recently sent to the the creme de la creme of the University of California administration. The short memo presents a number of concerns raised by recent revelations (intrepidly broken by CBS 5) that UC Berkeley employs a professional-managerial class of protestors.

Dear Recently-Resigned President Mark Yudof, Chancellor Robert Birgeneau, and Executive Vice President Nathan “Let’s Mortgage the UC” Brostrom,

Recently, the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP) came across a disturbing story from CBS news that reports “Professional Protestors” are among those involved in campus activism at UC Berkeley:

While we maintain 110% confidence in each of your abilities to do your part to efficiently dismantle public education in the state of California, news of this professional-managerial class of protestors employed by UC Berkeley has raised some eyebrows among even your most loyal constituents. In what follows, we present what UCMeP finds to be three of the most pressing questions this revelation brings to mind. We look forward to your responses.

Question #1:

What types of compensation packages do these Professional Protestors receive annually from the University of California? Do they receive healthcare benefits? And what about pension plans? We have asked various members of the UC administration for more details about the compensation of these employees, but everyone remains very tight-lipped. Since we – like yourselves – are by no means advocates of budget transparency, we fully understand if you prefer not to share these employment details. We assume the lack of publicly available information on these employees is probably due to the fact that they are outside contractors. While we concur with CBS news that it is simply immoral for non-students to participate in protests to defend public education, we certainly value the UC administration’s continued practice to contract out work that could be done much more cheaply by existing employees. As always, we respect the administration’s decisions to screw over union employees to the fullest extent possible. On this note, might we recommend that in order to cut costs (and get the most out employees) the UC consider instituting a furlough policy for Professional Protestors comparable to that of other campus employees?

Question #2:

Why does the University of California deem it necessary to pay people to protest on campus?

Advice for Students Struggling to Pay Tuition

In a recent interview with the Golden Gate X-Press, the Chairman of UCMeP offered the following inspiring advice for those students struggling to cope with the privatization of the University of California and the entailed 40% increase in student fees instituted over the past year:

What about students who can’t afford to attend a private university?

CHAIRMAN: Tough luck. They should have been born into a wealthier family.

Peter Robinson = UCMeP’s New Hero!

“In the midst of the Great Recession California students protest in favor of themselves.” -Peter Robinson

We here at UCMeP have been struggling for the right words to describe the March 4 protests to defend all levels of public education in the state of California.

We have searched far and wide for an appropriate way to defame the selfish attempts of certain “people” who want to ensure that kindergartners have the opportunity to learn to read in a classroom with proper heating (and maybe even an asbestos-free ceiling).

This is why we are immeasurably thankful to Peter Robinson (a former speech writer for Reagan – bonus credibility points!) whose insightful words in a recent edition in the Wall Street Journal hit the nail smack dab on the head.

According to Robinson, the March 4 calls to increase funding to beleaguered public schools are nothing but “a resource grab.” And as he so eloquently puts it, a “crass,” “self-pleading” one at that.

While we aren’t sure where people like this come from, we are sure happy they are out there heroically fighting on our side!

For more from Pete, check out the thrilling How Ronald Reagan Changed my Life: The Story of a Love between two Men that the GOP would not let be.

The Golden State’s Me Generation
“In the midst of the Great Recession California students protest in favor of themselves.”
from the Wall Street Journal
By PETER ROBINSON

During the “Strike and Day of Action to Defend Education” on Thursday, tens of thousands of students, teachers, professors and administrators marched in California and some 30 other states to protest cuts in education spending. David Patterson, a librarian at Cañada College, a community college in Redwood City, proved typical.

What we Learned from March 4: Privatize the Streets!

If we learned one lesson from the sickening display of students, teachers, and employees taking to the streets during the March 4 nationwide day of action to defend public education, it was this: we must extend the privatization struggle to the roads and highways.

For a long time now, the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP) has hesitated to endorse such a controversial privatization project. After all, compared to the relative ease with which education officials and politicians throughout the State of California have heroically sold off our universities to the highest bidder (all the while gloriously driving K-12 schools into the ground), privatizing our roads and highways could be a fairly difficult endeavor.

The reasons for this are multiple and we would hate to feed the populist fire that vociferously defends the publicness of roads and highways by going into specifics.

But this much is clear: there is nothing to lose by privatizing our streets and everything to gain – including hella cash (for certain people).

What we witnessed on March 4:

On the afternoon of March 4, members of UCMeP’s Strategic Counter-Activism Brigade (SCAB) bravely marched undercover with anarcho-terrorist teachers, students, and other misguided citizens who broke off from the official rally in Downtown Oakland.

After marching past the UC Office of the President to say “Hi!” to the recently resigned UC President Mark Yudof (who we hear was busy inside the building watching the latest episode of Lost on Hulu.com), this rowdy crowd of rabble-rousers made their winding way through the streets of Downtown Oakland to the onramp of the 980 freeway.

Throughout the whole ordeal, SCAB anxiously fed information on the protestors via Twitter to the disappointingly disorganized (albeit impressively armed) riot police.

Before we knew it 130 (or so) protestors clad in black rushed onto the freeway onramp with flares and began an ill-fated, not-so-long march through the East Bay’s highway system.

As we watched – morally outraged of course – these hooligans take one of the Bay Area’s busiest freeways during rush hour, all we could think was the following: “Wow, all this could have been avoided had there been toll booths on the onramp!”

What we determined:

Friends, if we want to prevent protestors from ever again taking to the streets (and also literally taking the streets) we must privatize our roads and freeways!

If we farm out the streets to private contractors, they will be able to charge exorbitant tolls that no students or low-paid teachers could ever afford to pay. As a result, there will be no more street protests, let alone highway occupations.

The logic is simple.

If students and teachers can’t afford to get on the streets, then there will be no way for them to protest the dismantlement of public education in the streets!

Additionally, these private contractors could hire private mercenary firms returning from Afghanistan and Iraq to do the job that the Oakland Police Department (which almost outnumbered the freeway protestors) failed to do Thursday: stop a slow-moving group of unarmed students and teachers from occupying one of California’s busiest freeways during rush hour.

And the fact that such mercenary firms are (often) even more ruthless than the Oakland Police (hard to believe, we know), might just get all those selfish students to think twice about protesting for accessible and affordable public education.

March 4: UCMeP at your Service

Today promises to be a very scary for those of doing our darnedest to ensure the swift and efficient privatization of the world’s premier public university.

UCMeP’s Strategic Counter-Activism Brigade (SCAB) will be out in full force throughout the Bay today to help you through all the strikes, rallies, marches, etc.

We implore you, do your best to keep business going as usual.

If you choose to cross a picket line today, please try to ignore the moral, ethical, and political consequences of your actions.

And we hope the following tips for avoiding picket lines can be of assistance:

UC President Mark Yudof is Resigning…

Dear Friends,

We have sad, sad news to report.

On March 4, 2010, President Mark “I got into public education by accident” Yudof will be resigning his post as President of the world’s premier public university. This heart-rending news was slipped to us by trusted sources. You can find President Yudof’s full resignation letter on www.MarkYudof.com (we have also pasted it below in its entirety).

As we all know, President Yudof has been an ardent defender of the privatization struggle, often taking extraordinary measures to reduce student diversity, enlarge class sizes, and  expand the autocratic administration of the University of California.

While President Yudof bravely slashed the jobs of campus employees by the thousands, gave professors an 8% pay cut, and instituted furloughs for everyone else, he heroically increased top administrator earnings and refused to take a pay cut that would reduce his salary to what the President of the United States receives annually. And who could ever forget all those nifty fee hikes he oversaw!

Despite his goofy appearance, President Yudof has served as a model spokesperson for the UC even once likening it to “a graveyard.”

We thank you President Yudof for forcing your courageous vision for the UC (as tunnel-like as it sometimes might have been) on students, faculty, and campus employees without taking into consideration their thoughts or concerns.

The immense success of your tenure at the UC has reaffirmed our belief that portly old white men really do know what is best for everyone. Your respect for the word “sovereignty” has inspired us all and we will miss you dearly.

My Decision to Resign

March 4, 2010

To the members of the U.C. Community and beyond:

I want to be the first to inform you of my decision to resign as President of the University of California. It has become clear to me over the past several months that my service as president is detrimental to the future of public education in the state of California. As of today, March 4, 2010, I hereby resign my tenure as President.

This was not an easy decision. After considering the future of public education in this state, I have come to believe that efficiency may not be the only factor worth considering in terms of how to run the U.C. I have been struck by the vibrancy of the student occupations and the energy around organizing against the budget cuts. It is clear to me now that we must all do our part to avoid social death. In that spirit, I have decided to go back to school to study the history of social movements.

It is not enough to demand lower fees for students and proper funding for top notch research. We must rethink the entire structure of the University as the first step in rethinking the way our society itself is structured. I look forward to working together with you on this important project.

Sincerely Yours,

Mark Yudof