The unions propaganda machine is alive and well, due to the mandates from politicians, threats from union bosses and the overall sock-puppets called the UC Board of Regents.

Today’s report from State Senator Darrell Steinberg, that the three furlough days being implemented by the Governor’s Office is an actual burden upon the state’s budget; nothing more than bogus economics and propaganda paid for by your tax dollars, and an increase to 6,000 undergraduates’ fees.

The report comes from the UC Labor Institute, a tax dollar supported recruiting and training program established by Governor Gray Davis in 2000.

The students that journey through these programs at Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses volunteer their time to benefit the liberal politicians, partisan political agendas, initiative campaigning and efforts of the public employee unions of California.

I remember running across many of these students in 2003, organizing anti-recall protests at signature gathering sites all across California. It’s a nice credit hour if you can get; after you save the governor he may give you an internship in Sacramento.

The “research” that the UC Labor Institute produces is nothing more than slanted, poor research based on a biased hypothesis that is then manufactured to prop-up the arguments, campaigns and raw propaganda of the unions of this state, and their workers interests.

And all of this is supported by your tax dollar.

Since Governor Davis added this institute to the UC Budget in 2000, it has been a general budget item for the UC System.

But since the decline in state revenues, things had to change. This is the forgotten story the media refuses to report today. Numerous politicians faced off with the UC Board of Regents and strong-armed them into funding the UC Labor Institute, while cutting a mere $150 million worth elsewhere in the UC System.

I spoke to Kevin Dayton today, Senior Fellow with the Pacific Justice Instutute. Dayton referenced that when the state’s budget crisis became acute in 2008, the Legislature gave the labor institute another $5.4 million. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger then vetoed the funding.

This prompted Attorney General Jerry Brown, Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and then Senate President Pro Tem-elect Darrell Steinberg to pressure the UC Office of the President to find an alternative funding source. The demand challenged the UC leadership financially and ethically.

Dayton told me in our discussion that numerous emails were found, exposing the manipulation of the UC System budget process and ethics.

“I think if we give them more than $1 million or so in cash, we’d be doing a disservice to the rest of the University,” said an e-mail from Debora Obley, associate vice president in the UC Budget Office.

In a later e-mail, she remained dismayed about diverting limited funds from other programs to the labor institute.

“We have $150 million worth of cuts to deal with. That is huge and we don’t have money just lying around. Can you imagine the firestorm inside the University if we cut everyone more in order to fund this one?”

Pressure from top legislative Democrats remained fierce. Greg Campbell, a top labor consultant for the Assembly speaker, declared in an e-mail that “any solution that includes ‘well, the unions should just pay for some portion of the overall mission’ is a tired old argument we have heard before and will not go over well.”

Finally, UC President Mark Yudof caved to the extortion and included $4 million for the labor institute in his proposed budget approved by the UC Board of Regents. This amount could have protected more than 6,000 resident undergraduate students from the fall 2009 semester fee increase of $662.

While the private sector wrestles with loss of jobs, corporate cut-backs, consolidation, removal of holidays and 401K matching benefits, raw bankruptcies and historic foreclosure rates, the unions apply the muscle to undergraduate students and taxpayers.

The real world is worried about keeping their families, jobs and homes together; the public employee unions – through the muscle of Brown, Bass and Steinberg – are making sure their “Pravda-propaganda machine” is well oiled.

So on a day when a CalPERS “middleman” was getting paid from both sides to funnel billions of CalPERS investment dollars into failing adventures – to a loss of over $80 billion, we have a State Senator making sure the union UC Labor Institute gets its false research in the headlines.

On a week that featured 560 DMV workers walking away from their responsibilities on a former Columbus Day Holiday, protesting that they have lost two paid holidays and are forced into three monthly furlough days, their argument is funded by taxes gathered from the citizens of the state, and their children’s student fees.

In a year that has displayed a historic recession and unheard of state unemployment, the UC Labor Institute is still fully funded, fully operative and fully able to spin the web of contempt that the elitist state worker unions have for the private sector of this state.

Instead of making government more efficient, the unions (and the politicos they feed) continue to give outrageous pensions to legislative employees, hire more and more bureaucrats and use taxpayer dollars to produce studies in an effort to protect their own status quo.

And here, with dozens of union officials on its advisory committee, the labor institute churned out biased studies and released them to the public shortly before votes on union issues at the state Legislature and at local governments. It also trained union leaders on how to be more effective in union organizing and political activism.

If you want to have your very own Pravda Post, pay for it yourself. Stop calling this reseach non-partisan. It is what it is, your manipulated, isolated unethical delivery of campaign material at the expense of California taxpayers, parents and students.

Just another example of unions killing the private sector to satisfy their greed.