UCMeP’s Explosive Welcome Back Cocktail Party!!

Welcome back! We here at the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP) anticipate this year to be the most profitable year on record at the UC!

While you doggedly juggled four summer jobs to afford the resplendent 12’x10’ 4-person dormitory high-rise you are currently settling into, your oligarchic overlords in the UC administration, the state assembly, and the Federal government were hard at work.  After long hours in conversation with investment banks, equity firms, and building contractors, they devised a number of creative ways to spend your newly increased tuition (whose official endorsement by the Academic Senate certainly had absolutely nothing at all to do with the recent raises they received… COUGH COUGH).  Just one of the many exciting new educational projects is a state-of-the-art equestrian center to be used exclusively by your Cal football team in the offseason—Go Bears!

To start the year off with a bang, UCMeP cordially invites you to a very special welcome back party this Saturday afternoon, August 27. UCMeP is teaming up with OPENrestaurant and restauranteur Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame (yes, we are serious) to host an unforgettable cocktail party at one of UC Berkeley’s most elite establishments, the Berkeley Art Museum. The cocktail party is the capstone of a daylong event commemorating the 40th anniversary of Waters’ swanky Berkeley eatery.

What better way to celebrate an academic year that promises unprecedented austerity cuts and the pauperization of an entire generation of students than to hold an exclusive mid-afternoon cocktail party in honor of Chez Panisse on the UC Berkeley campus.

Please join us in the courtyard of the Berkeley Art Museum on Saturday, August 27 at 3:30PM for an afternoon affair you will not soon forget.

Here’s just a sample of some of the tasty concoctions UCMeP’s mixologists will be whipping up—all of which are inspired by the increasingly efficient privatization of what once was the world’s premiere public university:

The Sour Debtor

This surly libation is specially suited for the tens of thousands of students and workers at the UC who are looking for a delectable way to stave off any unsavory resentment they might be harboring about the mountain of debt under which the UC and state government are currently opportunistically burying them alive. The Sour Debtor is a tasteful (and tasty!) way to mollify those unattractive inclinations to go out and do something unbecoming to prevent (e.g., protest) your promising future of lifelong debt enslavement. Simply mix even shots of whiskey and 151-proof grain alcohol with a squirt of lime, and presto: you’ve got the perfect fix for all your financial woes! Why become bitter about a life of debt when you can forget about it by throwing back a few Sour Debtors?

The Sasparilla Switch-a-roo

We call this drink the Sasparilla Switch-a-roo, but it’s actually a flexible recipe that can be made with any imbibeable liquid. The key to the Sasparilla Switch-a-roo is not so much the ingredients that go into it, but the methodology behind it—one truly inspired by the way the UC administration and State government are creatively dismantling the world’s premiere public university.

To make a Sasparilla Switch-a-roo, belligerently empty a bottle of any top-shelf liquor or champagne. Make sure to keep the label firmly affixed! Refill the bottle with a vastly inferior substance (we prefer a sasparilla-flavored beverage like root beer, but that’s just us). Next, resell the bottle at an unfathomably increased rate (maybe try 32% at first, and then adjust subsequent hikes according to how your customers react). Meanwhile—and this is essential—make sure you advertise the drink as the exact same product that earned the bottle’s good name.

The Sasparilla Switch-a-roo is more than a metaphor for how the UC Board of Regents and administrators like Dean Christopher Edley are using the UC’s inimitable history of excellence in public education to sell a product of considerably lesser quality at a massively inflated price.  The Switch-a-roo is a toothsome beverage well-suited for any warm August afternoon!

The Molotov Cocktail (á la Chez Panisse)

The name of this drink might raise a few eyebrows… but have no fear. As the parenthetical addition suggests, the Molotov Cocktail (á la Chez Panisse) is just about as revolutionary as Chez Panisse (which is to say, thankfully not at all). While UCMeP is typically wary to support any self-identified (and successfully self-marketed) progressive movement, dropping $500 at Chez Panisse for a “sustainable” dinner for two is just the type of radicalism UCMeP can get behind!

While we will keep the recipe for this concoction secret until Saturday, we promise you, the Molotov Cocktail (á la Chez Panisse) is nothing like the low-class incendiary substance in a bottle so favored by radical degenerates and other expropriated populations. It’s a drink fit for any late evening soiree outside the Chancellor’s house…

Money well spent!!

In a time of unprecedented budget cuts, we here at the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP) are exuberant to hear that the clever folks in the UC administration are still finding ways to pay thousands of dollars to hire private investigators to track student organizers terrorists.

Read the full article here.

Ugh, not again

We here at the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP) are  reporting live from outside Wheeler Hall where a group of ungrateful miscreants have had the gall to ruin the plaintive mood set by yesterday’s inspiring Day of Inaction against Public Education by locking themselves down on the roof of UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall.

We just had the privilege to talk with UCPD police chief Mitch “Make ‘em Hurt” Celaya and Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard about what’s unfolding.

When asked how he planned to get the protestors off the roof of Wheeler Hall, a visibly skittish Chief Celaya said he was going to call in a real police force like the Alameda County Sheriff to handle things.

And Dean Poullard – always an ardent supporter of student rights – said that if he had the choice, he’d use a high-power fire hose to knock them off.

Just chill ya’ll!

The long-awaited Day of Inaction against Public Education is here!!

We here at the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization would just like to wish all of you at the UC a wonderful day of doing absolutely nothing to prevent Dick Blum, Mark Yudof, Jerry Brown, and so many other people from selling off public higher education to the highest bidder.

We look forward to not seeing you anywhere near a rally, protest, picket line, occupation, or half-hearted attempt to burn down Bobby B’s humble abode!

March 2 Day of Inaction against Public Education

The “March 2 Day of Inaction against Public Education“ is just around the corner. We here at the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP) sincerely hope that you will join us in doing nothing to defend public education on this day.

UCMeP understands that for most of you at the UC, doing nothing to defend public education will hardly be a departure from your normal routine.

Following the disgraceful displays of democratic disobedience that marred the 2009-2010 academic year, UCMeP is thrilled to see how easy it was for the UC administration and the California state government to convince so many of you that public education in California is not worth the effort required to save it – but is in fact worth far more (for some people) by gutting and privatizing it.

To all of you once-mutinous professors who have not already wisely jumped the sinking ship of public higher education in pursuit of “greener” pastures, UCMeP would just like to offer our thanks for your new-found resignation and inimitable inaction. You truly are upstanding models for your students.

And all of you students who have turned a blind eye to the once unfathomable transformations currently underway at the UC, well, your self-imposed ignorance and stalwart apathy are truly things UCMeP and Governor Jerry Brown treasure.

With this said, UCMeP would just like to remind you once again, the best thing you can do to destroy public education is to do nothing at all. We sincerely hope you join UCMeP in doing nothing to defend public education on March 2. We only hope that our collective inaction will be an inspiration to our peers in Wisconsin.

And please enjoy the following UCMeP-approved fliers for the “March 2 Day of Inaction against Public Education.”

Mark Yudof to Professor Charlie Schwartz: Mind your own Beeswax!

Read more here.

UCMeP Applies for a Daily Cal Column!!

We write today with exciting news: UCMeP has applied to be a columnist for UC Berkeley’s student-run newspaper, the Daily Cal!

While decisions are not expected for two weeks, we have a good feeling that after reading our cover letter (pasted below), the Daily Cal will feel compelled to select UCMeP as a columnist.

In the meantime, please feel free to bombard the Daily Cal’s Opinion Editor (opinion@dailycal.org) and Development Editor (development@dailycal.org) with emails explaining why you feel UCMeP should have a column in the Daily Cal.

Dear Daily Cal,

We here at the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP) are pleased to offer you the enviable opportunity to make UCMeP a columnist for your venerable publication. In case you have been living under a rock for the past year and a half (as regular readers of Daily Cal columns, we fear this might be the case) and do not know what UCMeP is, allow us to catch you up.

Like the Daily Cal, UCMeP is an independent organization of students and alumni who are dedicated to serving the interests of the UC administration and police department. And like so many other faculty, staff, and students of the University of California, UCMeP is extremely concerned by the pending privatization of the world’s premiere public university. Yet unlike those whining over the direction in which certain elites are steering the UC, UCMeP is deeply troubled by the snail’s pace at which this inevitable transformation is proceeding. Since 2009, UCMeP has spearheaded a number of innovative projects aimed at ensuring the  swift and efficient privatization of the University of California.

Now you might be asking yourself, what can UCMeP provide the Daily Cal that it hasn’t already had in the past? To be completely honest, the content UCMeP has to offer is hardly any different from what Daily Cal columnists are known for regularly spewing out, ie. sensationalist and moralizing defamations of student activists, blind affirmations of the right of UC police to draw firearms on students, and fairly offensive defenses of structural racism. So content-wise, all UCMeP can offer the Daily Cal is more of the same.

But we promise you, it will be more of the same with style. Think Roman Zhuk (your former wonderfully reactionary Opinion Editor) but with a better haircut and a wardrobe that wasn’t picked out by our mom.

That’s what UCMeP will give the Daily Cal.

Possible future columns could include: “UC Cyber-Campus: Giving New Meaning to Separate but Equal,” “Why UC Custodians Should Pay to Pick Up My Trash,” and, “No Humanities? No Problem.”

Regarding multi-media stuff, UCMeP has proven itself more than adept at utilizing media of all sorts. Check out UCMeP’s website at www.ucmep.wordpress.com for examples. And if the Daily Cal lets us, we would be happy to make UCMeP podcasts and even a feature length biopic about the life of UC Regent Richard Blum entitled, “How to Make Millions off the Poverty of Others.”

And one final note, people often think that UCMeP’s rhetoric regarding the urgent need to swiftly privatize the world’s leading public university is a joke. Let us be clear, we are entirely serious about becoming a Daily Cal columnist. And if you choose us, UCMeP might actually consider selling you your website domain back.