Did you know that during the Greater Depression, communists and socialists organized people all over the country to stop foreclosures and evictions? Why aren't more of us doing it now?

After the Battle of the Bronx, as it was later called, the landlords at Bronx Park East asked a blue ribbon committee of Bronx Jewish leaders to arbitrate the dispute. But the strike leaders rejected arbitration. "When times were good," strike leader Max Kaimowitz declared "the landlords didn't offer to share their profits with us. The landlords made enough money off us when we had it. Now that we haven't got it, the landlords must be satisfied with less."

The landlords retaliated by forming rent strike committees. They used their resources to push through quick evictions. Many of the renter strikes were broken. Mass evictions took place at 665 Allerton Avenue and 1890 Unionport Road.

The landlords continued their offensive and the judges rarely considered the neediness of the families. By December 1932 is appeared that the Bronx rent strikes had largely been crushed.

But then something happened.

in December of 1932 and January of 1933, the Unemployed Councils began a new wave of strikes that rapidly assumed far greater proportions than the last one. Beginning in Crotona Park East, the strikes spread into Brownsville, Williamsburg, Boro Park, the Lower East Side, and much of the East Bronx. In February of 1933, a panicked Real Estate News writer warned that "there are more than 200 buildings in the Borough of the Bronx in which rent strikes are in progress, and a considerably greater number in which such disturbances are brewing or in contemplation."

Yes, when you push people to the edge, sooner or later, they're going to fight back:

In these excerpts from a recorded interview, Anna Taffler, a Communist activist and a Russian Jewish immigrant, described how her own experience of facing eviction pushed her into organizing the unemployed.

Mary Gale helped organize the poorest people in Long Island City.

Meanwhile, a rival Seattle group, Unemployed Citizens’ League, formed by socialists Hulet Wells and Carl Branin, provided practical aid like food and wood for heating to the unemployed.

In Pittsburgh:

The unemployed organizations shared common demands: They called for sufficient government relief to provide an unemployed family with a survival budget and for the creation of public employment on a large scale. They also organized to combat the evictions and foreclosures of thousands of unemployed renters and homeowners.

On March 6, 1930. International Unemployment Day, 5,000 unemployed gathered at the Pennsylvania Railroad Station. Their march toward downtown was broken up after half a block by dozens of club-wielding police.

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Glenn Beck has presented Fox News with an interesting dilemma:

Does the cable network hang onto its star tea-partying pundit with the once-stellar (but now rapidly declining) ratings, or does it now give its official imprimatur to a talk-show host who openly promotes the work of a Nazi sympathizer -- and then refuses to apologize for it or even acknowedge that his endorsement was misbegotten?

Because yesterday, faced with the insurmountable fact that he had avidly promoted the work of Hitler apologist/American fascist Elizabeth Dilling, Beck refused to back down, and in fact tried to pretend that it was somehow that fault of liberals that he had done so.

Simon Maloy at Media Matters has the whole sordid story. Here's Beck's response:

BECK: But I'm also getting some amazing mail from the left that now says I'm a Nazi anti-Semite because I quoted a book on Friday -- it was the Red Book, or something like that. It was a who's who, who's in the communist party in 1935. Apparently, I don't know, apparently written by a Nazi sympathizer here in America. Part of the, I'm sure -- I don't know because I didn't look it up -- but I'm sure part of the Father Coughlin, social justice crowd, because this is the choice that progressives give you -- you're either a Nazi or a communist. No, I'm neither. But now -- so now I'm kind of stuck between the place where the left says that I'm a Nazi sympathizer and a Jew lover. So I guess the left can have it all, that I'm a Jew-loving Nazi sympathizer. It's a really interesting place that I don't know if anybody's ever been.

Sorry, but WTF? Beck's understanding of fascism has been so completely polluted by Jonah Goldberg's Newspeak that he is incapable of any kind of coherent understanding of what Americans fascists were all about in the 1930s and afterward.

As Maloy puts it:

First of all, you don't get to play like you don't even really remember what book you were talking about. You told everyone that you spent all of Thursday night reading it, and you were praising it to the skies on Friday as an early example of the sort of communist documentation you yourself claim to be currently undertaking: "This is a book -- and I'm a getting a ton of these -- from people who were doing what we're doing now. We now are documenting who all of these people are. Well, there were Americans in the first 50 years of this nation that took this seriously, and they documented it." I mean, really, Glenn -- you held the book in your hand as you feted it...

MM's Eric Hananoki notes that Dilling actually attended Nazi meetings in Germany.

And if you want to sample Dilling's work for yourself, the text of The Red Network can be found online.

It's really very simple: If Fox News continues to employ Glenn Beck after this, it will forever after be known as a TV network that employs an apologist and advocate for Nazism.

If so, it will have irrevocably proven itself to be not a news organization, but a propaganda organ for the worst kind of racial and ethnic hatred known to man. It's pretty close to that judgment now.

Via Kos, it appears the Kansas Republican Party, deeply divided between moderates and far-right activists, is pushing party loyalty to the extreme.

The state Republican Party is forming a loyalty committee so that it can punish officers who endorse or contribute to Democrats. [...]

Bob Beatty, a Washburn University political scientist, suggested the loyalty committee could prove a "public relations disaster."

"Ironically, it smacks most of the Communist Party," Beatty said Monday. "That's the kind of public irony that most parties try to avoid -- the party of freedom telling people they have no freedom."

As TBogg said many years ago, “Nothing quite says ‘freedom’ like being compelled to recite a loyalty oath.”