The Poorhouse: Aunt Winnie, Glenn Beck, And The Politics Of The New Deal

Image by jgarber via FlickrAunt Winnie, whose story is preserved in the archives of the Historical Society of Washington, had been sent to an American institution that was by then some 300 years old and went by a variety of names: the county farm, the poor farm, the almshouse or, most often, simply the poorhouse. She would probably have been surprised to learn that more than a hundred years later, after the virtual eradication of elderly poverty, a powerful political movement would materialize with the mission of returning to the hands-off social policies that made the poorhouse the nation's only refuge for the jobless, the aged, the infirm and the disabled.

That movement's most outspoken proponent is Fox News host Glenn Beck, who doesn't merely pine for the pre-New Deal era in general, but regularly prevails upon his audience to recognize the particular genius of some of the period's presidents, whose ideologies of inaction he holds up as the American ideal.

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Pharma Payments to Mental Health Group: More to Come? - Health Blog - WSJ

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Jacob Goldstein

Over the past few years, the drug industry contributed more than $20 million to the nonprofit advocacy group National Alliance on Mental Illness. That figure was unearthed by Chuck Grassley, the Senator behind the never-ending inquiry into the drug industry’s financial ties, and reported this week in the New York Times.

Now Grassley wants to know how much drug makers contributed to state chapters of NAMI, Dow Jones Newswires reports.
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