Economy

March 16, 2018 - Gunmakers are leaving their historic roots in the North's "Gun Valley" to set up shop in low-cost Southern states — with tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives sweetening the deal.

March 9, 2018 - Conceived by a group of high-tech moguls and investors and championed by Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, a new program that offers capital gains tax breaks for investing in poor neighborhoods could end up displacing long-term residents.

February 16, 2018 - People who have not been convicted of any crime languish in jails simply because they can't afford to post bail. To address the injustice, several Southern cities have reformed their bail policies — and organizers in one North Carolina community are trying to make their city next.

February 6, 2018 - In the harshest of environments for union organizers, United Campus Workers achieved a historic win in the fight against Gov. Bill Haslam's privatization scheme.

February 2, 2018 - Despite losing two high-profile organizing campaigns in Mississippi and South Carolina last year, labor unions gained 130,000 members in the South in 2017.

January 11, 2018 - In Florida state prisons, where a $4 can of soup costs $17 in the canteen, inmates risked their lives performing cleanup duties after Hurricane Irma but were paid nothing in return. This MLK Day, they plan to carry on the tradition of nonviolent resistance by withholding their labor.

January 5, 2018 - The Trump administration announced an aggressive proposal to bring offshore drilling to Southern states where governors oppose it, despite a federal law that says their wishes should be considered. Governors, both Democrat and Republican, say they plan to fight it.

December 15, 2017 - The project's developers are airing TV commercials claiming that the fracked-gas pipeline would be an economic boon for North Carolina. But a new economic analysis adds to a growing body of evidence that calls those claims into question.

December 14, 2017 - Attorney and civil rights movement veteran Al McSurely serves on the steering committee of the newly-launched Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival. He shares the lessons he learned organizing in Appalachia during the original Poor People's Campaign launched by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years ago.

December 14, 2017 - Daniel Boyd's graphic novel "Carbon" features a villain modeled on former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who just completed a prison stint for his role in the deadly 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia. We talked with Boyd about Blankenship's political aspirations and his state's troubled relationship with coal.