While John Edwards and Hillary and Barack Obama are running around the nation deploring the greed of corporate CEOs, North Carolina State Senate kingpin Tony ‘The Fixer’ Rand is helping the CEOs.

At the end of the legislative session Senator Rand slipped through a bill to give Goodyear Tire and Rubber $40 million in “incentives” from the state (The News and Observer, 8-4-07).

Now, the state has given hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives to Google and Dell and others to bring jobs to North Carolina. (Or, at least, that’s the theory.)

So how many jobs will Goodyear create for $40 million? None. All it has to do is keep its factory in Senator Rand’s district (after a bit of retooling subsidized by taxpayers courtesy of the Senator).

How did this strike Bridgestone/Firestone, Goodyear’s competitor which employs 2200 people in Wilson?

“We’re disappointed,” their spokesman, Dan McDonald, said.

I guess so. Firestone probably never counted on competing with a $40 million subsidy from North Carolina taxpayers.