Business Industry

By now, businesspeople have become all too familiar with Georgia’s most distressing employment statistics: A half-million people out of work. Statewide unemployment at 10.2 percent. In the state’s most adversely affected area, the metro Dalton area, where carpet and textile…

Hospitals are scary and necessary motherships of healing where medical miracles happen daily, and where tens of thousands of people die unnecessarily every year. Patients, who don’t want to be there to begin with, have to confront their illnesses and…

You hear it every time another corporate scandal makes headlines, whenever an Enron, an Arthur Andersen or Bernie Madoff rears its misguided, greedy head: “Whatever happened to business ethics?” And on the heels of that, the jokes, beginning with the…

Georgia is experiencing its highest jobless rate in decades and the line for unemployment benefits is only expected to get longer. Ask one of the 500,000 or so people who are out of work in Georgia about the best place…

Northwest Georgia, hit especially hard by the recession, has a strong manufacturing tradition, thanks largely to the carpet industry. It has felt the pain of a diminished housing market as well as the effects of an economy that lacks diversification.…

Two years ago, Georgia was burning up the roll books, chartering 20-something de novo (new) banks thanks, in large part, to the unparalleled real estate boom the economy – particularly in the Atlanta metro area – was enjoying. Established banks…

After several years of on and off drought conditions, Georgia farm-ers saw 2009 unfold with seemingly unending rains that kept them out of the fields during the critical spring planting season. The warm, wet weather that followed created ideal conditions…

It took Fuller Cochran 10 years to buy his farm in the Appalachian foothills of Whitfield County, beginning in 1932, at a cost of one bale of cotton per year. It was an investment in a future he could not…