Keep checking our home page for more and more U.S. PIRG videos. Right now, Gary Kalman is also up there at uspirg.org -- talking health care reform.

SFCA Inc., the Reading, Pa.-based company that purchased the assets of juvenile product manufacturer Simplicity Inc. after foreclosure, appears to no longer be conducting day to day operations. SFCA Inc. is no longer answering phone calls, responding to e-mails from consumers, or providing repair kits to fix hundreds of thousands of defective cribs. At least 13 children have tragically died in recalled Simplicity cribs and bassinets. CPSC is urging all parents, caregivers, online sellers and purchasers, daycare providers, and thrift store owners to immediately check if they have one of the following Simplicity-made or Simplicity-branded products and dispose of those units where there is no longer a remedy.

If a car was “basically dirt free” or had the occasional ground-in spots but was relatively clean, it was rated clean. Cars were rated unclean if they had a “dingy floor” and “one or two sticky dry spots.” And those that received dunce caps were caught having “heavy dirt, opened or spilled food, hazardous conditions, sticky wet spots and seats unusable due to unclean conditions.” The survey did not rate litter.

Laws that help citizens or workers build countervailing power are an underused mechanism for building better, more efficient government that intrudes less into markets and achieves better outcomes. [...] All of these citizenship strategies address the same broad problem: the imbalance between the concentrated power of affected industries and the diffuse power of ordinary people. By designing regulation so that it engages and informs citizens, facilitates organizing, and puts citizens into direct encounters with the industry as well as with regulators, these policies energize citizenship, and they begin to redress the structural power imbalance.

"If you argue against the agency, then you could be incorrectly painted as arguing against consumer protection," said Scott Talbot, senior vice president of government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable.

Financial industry and other business groups are considering running "Harry and Louise"-style ads to sway public opinion against the Obama administration's proposed Consumer Financial Products Agency. The original Harry and Louise television spot, financed by the insurance industry, helped defeat the Clinton health plan in the early 1990s. In the commercial, a middle-class married couple laments they are worse off under the new health-care regime, describing it as a bureaucratic nightmare.

We're reading it now. Here is the 152 page CFPA draft and here is an amendment to the FTC Act. More at financialstability.gov

"a repayment plan that lets graduates reduce their loan payments, based on their income,"

"It enables all borrowers to be able to face their life circumstances and know there is some flexibility and responsiveness based on what life throws their way.”

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:

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:

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.

Consumers could file the claims even if their vehicles were made by the "old" GM. However, those with past claims would have to pursue the GM left behind in bankruptcy with nothing but unwanted assets, debts and other liabilities.

ORIGINAL: The New York Times is reporting today that G.M. to Maintain Legal Liability for Claims. Recently, U.S. PIRG had joined other leading advocacy groups in a letter to the President urging this condition to the government-negotiated bankruptcy plan. Otherwise, victims who are maimed or killed by product defects would have little or no recourse. From the Times:

G.M. and the administration’s auto task force have been negotiating with more than a dozen state attorneys general who have objected to the company’s plan to sell its desirable assets to a new, government-financed entity. A hearing to approve the plan is scheduled for Tuesday in federal bankruptcy court in Manhattan.

Our web site is still being rebuilt after a server crash, so the full report may not be available today, but you can read more about it over at Arthur Delaney's Huffington Post interview with Nicole:

"We're coming from an abysmal state: There was no information available about the participants, no information about why they were receiving the money," said U.S. PIRG's Nicole Tichon, author of the report card, in an interview with the Huffington Post. "The fact that there's lip service being paid to taxpayer protection is a great step." The report card praises the administration for making "important progress around transparency in terms of developing online resources, fact sheets, guidelines, interactive programs and tools to help taxpayers navigate the myriad programs and hundreds of participants" in the TARP.

"Inspection reports from a Nestlé USA cookie dough factory released yesterday show the company declined several times in the past five years to provide Food and Drug Administration inspectors with complaint logs, pest-control records and other information."

[Unlike CPSC and DOT] Currently, food recalls are largely voluntary—federal agencies responsible for food safety, including FDA, have no authority to compel companies to recall contaminated foods, with the exception of FDA’s authority to require a recall for infant formula.

Although the legislation (HB 1171) was called the "consumer choice" bill, it actually would have allowed about 40 of the largest property insurers to start charging virtually any price they want for policies with hurricane coverage, and to bypass regulations the state imposes on other companies.