Montana Hall Overthrown in ‘January Revolution’

By Brent Zundel
For the MSU Exponent
February 2, 2012

Note: This column originally appeared as part of the Exponent’s Sugarbeet page, a satirical biweekly feature that attempts to stimulate discussion of critical community issues.

After completing ECNS 101: The Economic Way of Thinking, a group of young, impressionable — and rabidly free-market — students from MSU have taken over Montana Hall, where the university is run by a panel of buttons and levers.

In response to the recent protracted recession, they are demanding that the university implement an austerity plan. Their proposal includes firing public sector employees—including all professors who don’t directly create jobs for their students—deregulating tuition and just generally getting the state and the university “out of the average student’s life.”

These laissez faire capitalists have held the university hostage since last Tuesday.

In response, the College Democrats, backed by members of the Montana ACLU, local members of the Communist Party USA and a few dazed-looking hipsters have laid siege to Montana Hall.

The group’s leader, Subcomandante Kim, an MSU senior in Latin American studies, told the Exponent that her band of leftist guerrillas intend to “occupy” the building within a week. Using basic trebuchets and catapults, built with the help of the only three leftist members of the College of Engineering, they have begun launching copies of various peer-reviewed economic journals, as well as pamphlets of “The Communist Manifesto” and Amnesty International human rights documents through the building’s windows.

In response, many of the neocons have called on their NRA contacts for help. Using an illegally maintained cache of weapons, they have employed bazookas to launch rolled-up copies of Adam Smith’s and Milton Friedman’s seminal capitalist works into the middle of the liberals’ “Kum Ba Yah” drum circle.

The Exponent asked former International Monetary Fund Managing Director Johan Witteveen to comment on the economists’ demands. “While I don’t condone their methods, the results of the austerity package are sure to be transformative for MSU and potentially for the Montana region as a whole.”

When pressed for further details about the effect of neoconservative policies on a global scale, Witteveen declined to comment. According to him, the infamous meetings between roving economist-for-hire Milton Friedman and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, where Friedman doled out economic advice, had nothing to do with the egregious human rights violations that resulted. “I have no idea where those 3,000 desaparecidos are,” he said, referring to the thousands of people who went missing while Pinochet busied himself with increasing both the country’s Gross Domestic Product and its staggering inequality index.

Recent reports indicate that the fighting has spread to the Student Union Building, where the guerrillas ambushed the Scotch-swilling neocons during a Yacht Club meeting, as they were discussing how to best make use of their inheritances.