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Even with high gas prices, the Great Recession claims another rural business, a convenience store at a high-traffic intersection in a small Western town in [...]

Neutered cats, criminals, liberals, pet chickens, politicians. Despite the chaos, we get the Tea Party message. Americans need help, but it's not the help that [...]

Texas secessionists at the San Antonio Tea Bagger rally, a major part of the group at Glenn Beck's Tax Day protest (thanks to Republican Governor [...]

Tea Baggers protest taxes at the Alamo on Tax Day. The Alamo is a publicly maintained state historic site, the rally was held in a [...]

In theory, budget earmarks can serve a good purpose. But not in this case. I had not seen a Border Patrolman (95% are men and [...]

What's wrong with this photograph? Nothing, and I hope it stays that way. This is the Rio Grande River near Big Bend National Park. There [...]

Near here, there was a not-too-well camouflaged Border Patrol camera. I stopped to photograph it, but instantly two patrolmen appeared. "Hey, it's a free country, [...]

I heard a story on Montana Public Radio one morning about the scattering of Joe Hill's last ashes to take place in Butte later that [...]

The image is too ambiguous to have credible meaning. Except that most really rich people were born into great wealth. Exhibit A: Donald J. Trump. [...]

I'm not sure this is a good enough image to make public. The point is that we're loving the place to death, but there are [...]

This text/image pairing is not good, and the image is not good enough to fix it.

Everywhere you look in the Southwest during the Great Recession, boondockers are camped on the side of the road with everything they own. There are [...]

Parker is a resort community on the Colorado River, popular with snowbirds who flock to the desert in their recreational vehicles. But some residents, local [...]

At the entrance of a mobile home community, members and guests are recruited to join the Colorado River Residents for Justice. It's not clear what [...]

Right across the street from <a href="https://take-note.com/note-takers/marshall--mayer/notes/houseless-occupy-retail-space-because-demand-collapses/view" rel="nofollow">https://take-note.com/[…]/view</a> is a shopping center that is all but closed. In fact, the only storefront that is still [...]

As the Great Recession rips through the country, the disruption affects everyone. Demand for low-end retail outlets collapses. Unhoused people take advantage of the shade [...]

The Southern California desert is a national sacrifice area. For most of the year, families from the coastal counties drive their RVs on Interstate 8, [...]

The American Southwest has a lot of public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Regulations vary by district, but camping is generally free, [...]

It doesn't matter what you call them—c-stores, dollar stores, gas stations—it's incredible how little fresh food you can buy in the areas that grow most [...]

This is the only UPOM sign that I could find in the town of Roy. It is hung directly across the street from the post [...]

This scene is at the major highway intersection near Roy, MT, population 108. Signs with this message have heavily peppered central Montana in the last [...]

As Americans celebrate Independence Day, few reflect on the true cost of their freedom. In this western Colorado restaurant, Breakfast in America, the clientele is [...]

Apparently, there were two sets of rules in the original game: one for the capitalists and the other for everyone else. See https://fb.watch/6gLvirlCro/.

A worker is tethered to a safety harness as he loads bentonite into train cars at this plant owned by Black Hills Bentonite LLC. Of [...]

The Windbag Saloon on Last Chance Gulch in Helena is a Montana institution. It used to be called Big Dorothy's Saloon, named after the woman—Dorothy [...]

Colstrip, Montana—a town dominated by coal mining and several forty-year-old and obsolete coal-fired power plants (note that only one stack is emitting)—is a classic neoliberal [...]

The original Monopoly game was invented in the early 1900s as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. [...]

"I am always looking outside, trying to look inside, trying to say something that is true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what's out [...]

We're at the lowest point in the United States, literally. And the parking lot is full of recreational vehicles, many of which were probably bought [...]

With the economy in free fall, we had hoped that President Obama would change American's expectations for what their government could do for them. Instead, [...]