(This is the directive of Brown’s campaign – to help those in need, to work in their own community, and to lead before ever getting to Washington. – promoted by David Dayen)

As many are aware, the fires ravaging Northern California have affected the lives of thousands. Yesterday, Charlie Brown headed north to Oroville to help with relief efforts for fire victims and evacuees.

scorched earth outside Oroville city limits

Our first stop was to the Oroville Rescue Mission on Lincoln Blvd. They have been collecting goods for the fire victims since the blazes began over 3 weeks ago. They, like other collection agencies in the area, are asking for the following items:

-summer clothing

-bottled water

-paper plates

-paper cups

-bath towels

-adult diapers

-canned & dry food

Oroville Rescue Mission van outside their HQ

Goods donated by the campaign team in Roseville

Charlie Brown sorting through the goods at the ORM

From the Oroville Rescue Mission, we moved on to the shelter set up at Las Plumas High School on Las Plumas Ave. The families there were eager to talk and help one another through this shared difficult time.

Outside Las Plumas High School, some families have set up tents rather than sleep in the gymnasium

As of right now, this is the closest some have to homes

Charlie loading water onto a cart

A message board inside the gym letting families and friends have a chance to communicate with each other

The Red Cross has done a fantastic job, but they still need help

With all the trouble afflicting our neighbors in Butte County, the amount of friendliness and generosity we’ve seen is inspiring. Helping hands unloading the Jeep, volunteers serving those in need, and complete strangers helping their brothers & sisters who have lost everything but the clothes on their backs.

One cannot say enough about the incredible work of the national guardsmen and firefighters–from across California and across the country–who are working around the clock to battle the California wildfires.

This has been a tough week for many of our neighbors, and our fellow Californians, but we can all take action to help those afflicted.

If you have the weekend off, take a load of bath towels up to Oroville. The Las Plumas Shelter hotline is 1-925-788-9821. They can tell you what the greatest need is. The Red Cross is coordinating all efforts to take care of our friends in Butte County, but they need all our help on this one.

Thank you all for reading.

Dissent magazine has a fascinating article by Marie Gottschalk on current efforts to achieve healthcare reform in the United States http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1166. SEIU President Andy Stern and the business-friendly approach that failed here in California gets some well-deserved criticism:

“So far, Stern has garnered a disproportionate amount of media and popular attention. His business-friendly stance on health care reform, which stresses how the U.S. health care system is fundamentally hurting the country’s economic competitiveness, helps explain why. But his economic competitiveness argument is not convincing and could undermine efforts to forge a successful coalition or movement on behalf of affordable, high-quality care for all.”

The author argues that wooing business leaders in order to build momentum for healthcare reform is a backwards-thinking approach, and one that has failed before. For example, the labor movement tried to bring business leaders to the table in the early 1990s. The Clinton healthcare plan fell apart not only due to a lack of grassroots support, but also after multimillion-dollar attacks came from those same business leaders. The author also shows that healthcare costs are not hurting the U.S. business community’s ability to compete with overseas companies.

One example: European and Japanese firms bear higher indirect costs, because of higher corporate taxes. Those extra costs generally exceed what even the most generous American businesses spend on coverage for their employees. Another example: corporate spending on healthcare, as a percentage of after-tax corporate profits, declined steadily in the U.S. between 1986 and 2004 (except for the three years from 1998 to 2001).

Gottschalk’s bottom line: “The economic competitiveness framework obscures the fact that employers and insurers have been remarkably successful at shifting health care costs onto employees, their families, and other individuals through higher co-pays, higher deductibles, restrictions on coverage, and other measures,” and the focus needs to be placed squarely on the damaging economic consequences for individuals and households who are bearing the greatest burden of rising healthcare costs, not on employers.

The reality is that only by building a bottom-up movement will we win healthcare reform—and only after we make it clear that change is important because it’s the right thing to do for everyone. Arguing that we need reform in order to protect corporate profits is the wrong way to go. It is the right of every person in this country to have access to quality, affordable healthcare. This moral rationale for reform must maintain center stage, linked to an economic rationale focused on reducing costs for working families, and delivering higher-quality healthcare more efficiently—by providing better integrated, more appropriate services, and reducing insurance company administrative overhead, marketing costs, and profit.

My union, United Healthcare Workers-West, fights for real healthcare reform based on these principles and our personal experiences with this perverted system. We oppose phony reform, like what Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed for California last year. Badly misreading the situation here in the state, Andy Stern supported a reform package that yielded far too much ground to Schwarzenegger’s proposals. That plan proved unacceptable to the rest of the labor movement and the State Senate, and would have been rejected by voters had it gone to the ballot.

The reply brief in Bennet v Bowen has been filed by Equality California and allies. You can grab the PDF here.

There’s not a whole lot new here, so I’d recommend that you take a look at my previous diary. This reply brief focuses on the issue of pre-election versus post-election review and then restates the previous two issues: that Prop 8 is a revision rather than an amendment of the constitution and that the signature forms carried an improper statement of the law.

There is one interesting passage that I thought might carry some weight and might incline the justices to consider pulling Prop 8 off the ballot:

No other group in this state has ever had to face an initiative that would deprive them of their basic status as equal families under California law. If Proposition 8 is a revision, as Petitioners assert, gay and lesbian Californians should not be required to endure the indignity and pain caused by the uncertainty that Proposition 8 now poses for their families. That many gay and lesbian couples have had to wait decades or even most of their lives, to exercise the fundamental freedom to marry does not diminish, but rather exacerbates, the grave harm caused by that uncertainty.

I’m still counting this one as a longshot for anything to happen before the November election. It is still a case of first impression and would be creating new law, but it’s not an altogether unreasonable argument. Either way, let’s plan to shut the door on discrimination right here in California.