UPDATE: Reuters on the launch.

As reported by the Associated Press and the LA Times, we will be participating in a campaign that SEIU is launching today to help whistle-blower workers protest their incentive-based participation in programs designed to put consumers into the worst accounts, extra accounts and over-priced loans and mortgages. From Daniel Wagner's AP story:

UPDATE: LA Times story. New York Times story. USA Today story. Finally, here is the Forbes story. The bank kids do a good job in all these stories of sticking to their tired, false "patchwork" messaging. They seem to like that better than "balkanization" these days even if neither is accurate. What happened is this: The court simply put real corporate crime cops back on the beat enforcing their narrow set of non-preempted laws. The next step, reinstating all the other state laws OCC wrongly preempted, is up to Congress.

Original post: The Supreme Court has issued its decision in Cuomo vs. Clearinghouse and OCC, holding that when a state attorney general seeks to enforce state laws over national banks in his or her role as the state's chief law enforcer, he or she is not preempted by the overly-broad OCC preemption rules. However, the decision is not 100% on our side, as it is unclear how investigations could be conducted under the lines drawn by the court. In any case, we knew that win this case or not, we'd still need Congress and the President to go further to reinstate state rights, as the President has proposed. We'll have more after our legal eagles analyze the scope of the decision.

We were amicus in the case on the side of the states. Dow Jones via CNN Money. Lauren Saunders of the National Consumer Law Center has issued a statement: Excerpt:

We expect to see legislative language from the Treasury Department implementing President Obama's proposal for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) sent to the hill, probably Monday. Following Wednesday's House Financial Services hearing on the proposed CFPA (watch video, download testimony), the fight is just getting started. Industry groups have staked out their position: they strongly oppose an agency to protect consumers. They like the current system. But that system failed, the last I checked. But the bankers like it because they dominate its captured regulators. As the American Bankers Association's Ed Yingling testified as he sat right next to me: "We believe that a separate consumer regulator should not be enacted…." Further, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will oppose a standalone agency "that cannibalizes regulatory expertise, adding yet another regulatory layer." (AP) The Chamber has also launched a $100 million campaign against “mounting government regulations:” (National Journal). Even the Wall Street lobby group (Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association-SIFMA) whose members’ excesses and greed exacerbated the collapse has a new campaign on ‘Populist Overreaction’ (Bloomberg).

The New York Times, in its editorial today On the Road to Regulation, points out that a key test of the new CFPA legislation will be whether it gives consumers the right to enforce the banking laws, too.

"Lawmakers will also have to ensure that the administration’s very good idea (link to previous editorial) for a consumer financial-products safety commission translates into a truly robust agency. One sign that is happening would be for the law to include a right for consumers to sue firms that violate certain doctrines established by the new agency."

After the jump, I have a lot more commentary plus links to news stories on what will be a critical reform battle between the banking lobby that failed our economy and the people and groups trying to ensure that it won't happen again.