I’m gonna go with stooge. Certainly in Bev’s hip pocket as Siemens continues to try to carve out a business model in the Carolinas which is largely dependent on public sector support. You know, sell light rail infrastructure and cars to dopey public transit systems; repair, build, and maintain physical plant for quasi-governmental publicly regulated utilities; get taxpayers to pick the costs of job training, that sorta thing. Anyway to the propganda:

Gov. Bev Perdue issued a call for help Monday. Flanked by some of the biggest employers in the Charlotte region, she warned current budget proposals could be detrimental to education.

“The budget that’s being suggested and proposed right now in Raleigh is doing some generational damage,” said Perdue. … “That is the result is a lack of about a billion dollars in revenue, which is equates to the firing or laying off of 25,000 educational personnel,” said Perdue. … “Education in the workforce is the number one issue for us in Siemens and probably for every company looking to hire people,” said Mark Pringle, the Charlotte manager of Siemens. “We need more support and we’d like to see more funding.”

Three hundred people have been hired at Siemens Energy since January as a part of its expansion, with 300 more jobs expected to be filled by the end of the year. Pringle says while there’s a demand for the jobs, the high school level test given to applicants shows fewer people are qualified.

“Of maybe those 2,000 applicants we might get 200 that pass the test,” he said. “So it’s a challenge and maybe a wake up call that we need to do a better job of educating our folks for a secondary education.”

No, Mark, maybe it is a wake up call that your Siemens op is too cheap to pay enough to get smarter applicants and want taxpayers to make up the difference.

Meanwhile, Branch Manager Hood pink-slipped the absurd jobs talk that surrounds the state budget:

In the real world, there is no conceivable way that the Republicans’ $19.1 billion General Fund budget would result in 30,000 state and local employees losing their jobs. None. Nor would Perdue’s $19.9 billion budget save 30,000 government jobs. Not even close.

How did the governor concoct such a ludicrous claim? As far as I can tell, she and her staff began with some questionable assumptions, then mixed up the terms “positions lost” and “layoffs,” then forgot to subtract the positions eliminated in her own budget plan, and then forgot to subtract an estimate of private jobs created by the Republican plan, which includes lower income and sales tax rates.

That’s how Perdue turned what is likely a modest positive number -– the net short-term effect of the GOP budget on North Carolina employment –- into a massive negative number. It was a prodigious feat of political calculation, though a colossal failure of economic miscalculation.

In the end the Perdue-Pringle formula is nothing more than enshiring public sector spending as the well-spring and yardstick for economic health. If you believe that, I’ve got a gas turbine I’d like to sell you.