U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Plans to Start Blasting Rock Pinnacles at Thebes; Coast Guard is Preparing Navigation Plan

CHICAGO - December 16, 2012 - Governor Pat Quinn today hailed the quick action by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin the removal of rock pinnacles near Thebes, south of Cape Girardeau, that pose a threat to barge traffic on the Mississippi River. The move comes following Governor Quinn's request last month as concerns mounted about the low levels of water on the Mississippi due to the 2012 drought. The governor also praised the leadership of Senator Dick Durbin who helped marshal federal resources to keep the waterway open.

"Keeping the Mississippi River open to commercial traffic is critically important for the economy of the state of Illinois and the entire upper Midwest," Governor Quinn said. "On behalf of the many Illinois businesses and residents who rely on the Mississippi, I want to thank the Army Corps of Engineers and Senator Durbin for their strong partnership throughout this process. We will continue taking every step necessary to help people and businesses across the state through this unprecedented drought."

The Corps has indicated that two contractors are scheduled to begin removal of the rock pinnacles at Thebes as soon as this week. The contractors started moving equipment to the area last week. On Friday, the Corps held a pre-construction meeting with the contractors to finalize plans for rock blasting and removal, as well as development of a navigation impact schedule.

In response to a November 14 letter from Governor Quinn that raised related concerns about river navigation, the U.S. Coast Guard is developing plans to manage the flow of barge traffic during the rock removal period. The Coast Guard is establishing a mobile command post to provide on-site monitoring and assistance of barge traffic control issues.

The Corps and the Coast Guard estimated that the lowest river levels should occur near December 26th, when the river is expected to hit a record low level in the mid-Mississippi River region. After the Corps removes the rock pinnacles at Thebes and the Grand Tower area, they will continue with dredging activities intended to support safe and navigable channels as much as possible.

As the Mississippi River levels have been dropping, Governor Quinn has taken quick action to bring together stakeholders and ensure that necessary steps are taken to preserve its economic vitality. The Quinn administration has been meeting regularly with representatives from the agricultural, transportation and energy industries, as well as working with the federal government to take every step necessary to maintain navigation on the Mississippi River. Governor Quinn has also ordered a number of Illinois state agencies - including the departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Economic Opportunity, Natural Resources and Transportation - to stand ready to assist the effort in any way possible.

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by Jerome R. Corsi, a Harvard Ph.D., is a WND senior staff reporter. He has authored many books, including No. 1 N.Y. Times best-sellers "The Obama Nation" and "Unfit for Command." Corsi's latest book is "Where's the REAL Birth Certificate?"

NEW YORK - In the wake of the $1.92 billion settlement HSBC reached with the Justice Department, banking experts and customers in India and London have joined U.S. whistleblower John Cruz in demanding criminal prosecution of top HSBC officers and directors globally.

Evidence suggests HSBC has pursued a policy of exploiting and defrauding customers in the developing world to supplement illegal profits obtained in the developed world by working money launderers, terrorists, organized criminals, corrupt public officials and others, as charged by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in a staff report issued at a public hearing July 17.

As WND reported Tuesday, Cruz, who exposed HSBC's money laundering in February in a series of WND stories, called the $1.92 billion fine the U.S. government imposed on HSBC "a joke" and filed a $10 million lawsuit for "retaliation and wrongful termination."

Significantly, the HSBC settlement with the Justice Department announced Tuesday allows all bank officers and directors who may have been aware of or participated in the alleged criminal banking activities to be free of criminal investigation and prosecution in exchange for HSBC agreeing to pay the $1.92 billion fine.

Whistleblowers in India and London are joining Cruz in charging the HSBC settlement amounts to a massive "cover up." Avoiding criminal investigation and prosecution, they say, allows not only HSBC bank officers and directors to avoid further public scrutiny but also any government officials who may have turned a blind eye to HSBC improprieties.

Cruz has insisted to WND that it is impossible to believe HSBC laundered billions of dollars in Mexican drug cartel money, worked with terrorists through affiliate banking operations in Saudi Arabia and circumvented Obama administration banking sanctions against Iran - all activities specifically charged by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations - without the knowledge and perhaps complicity of U.S. government officials in the U.S. Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the CIA and the NSA in an era in which government officials are capable of reading the emails of ordinary citizens.

With the HSBC settlement announced this week, any criminal investigations under way are officially brought to a halt.

In response to WND's reporting earlier this year of Cruz's evidence, HSBC lodged a complaint that blocked Internet access to one of the WND stories, and senior reporter Jerome Corsi was fired by the New York City investment firm he had worked with for two years as a senior managing director, Gilford Securities.

In June, WND reported evidence Eric Holder's Justice Department has not investigated money-laundering charges in deference to bank clients of his Washington-based law firm, where Holder was a partner prior to joining the Obama administration.

WND reported in October HSBC was engaged in a systematic scheme to defraud citizens of India who live abroad out of billion of dollars in investment accounts, according to an Indian source who provided evidence.

'Demon bank'

In emails to WND, Indian journalist Ajit Ujjainkar has charged HSBC with operating as "an illegal and corrupt" bank that he characterizes as "a demon bank."

Writing in the December 2012 issue of gfiles Magazine, published in India, Ujjainkar charged "the reported money-laundering and terror financing operations run by HSBC bank pose a threat to the safety and integrity of not only the banking industry (in India) but to the security of the country itself."

Ujjainkar further alleges that operating in developing countries like India, HSBC has found profits from laundering money can further be supplemented through various banking schemes aimed at defrauding bank retail customers.

Ujjainkar gave as an example the case of a customer named Ravi Shankhar (not the legendary sitar player who died Tuesday).

"HSBC issued Ravi Shankhar a credit card he neither applied for nor received," he explained to WND. "This did not stop HSBC from asking Shankhar to pay fees for the card and, when Shankhar refused to pay, from selling his name to debt collectors who destroyed Shankhar's credit and blocked him from getting a home loan, even though Shankhar objected he knew nothing about the HSBC credit card."

Shankhar, along with hundreds of other HSBC customers, posted on a website in India set up for complaints against HSBC. The customers found that HSBC banking policies in India are made by management in London. But when Indian customers present formal complaints to London, the London management refuses to solve the problem, choosing instead to respond with form letters.

"Someone has applied (for a) credit card in 2007 on behalf of my pan card copy," Shankhar wrote in a May 16 posting on the site. "And HSBC has issued that card. All mandatory personal detail/information (mother's name, address, etc.) are not matched, except my date of birth. This is a really big blunder fault of HSBC Bank LTD. I have never applied this credit card as well as never seen this card and used this card."

Shankhar continued to explain he applied for a home loan and got a call from his banker, who said that a huge sum had been charged against the credit card and a default statement had been published regarding his account on CIBIL, the Credit Information Bureau Limited, based in India.

Shankhar threatened to sue the bank and make his case public with the media if HSBC did not remove the adverse information from the CIBIL website within two days.

Ujjainkar told WND this particular form of credit card fraud is particularly detrimental to customers in India, a country where a blemish on a person's credit history might block him from ever obtaining credit in the future.

"There is a deep malice in the way the bank operates in India," Ujjainkar claimed.

Ujjainkar said the Department of Justice decision not to prosecute HSBC officers and directors sends an unfortunate message to international bankers around the world.

"Shareholders and customers around the world should demand justice instead of being blinded by the dollar sign," he insisted. "All the U.S. settlement with HSBC accomplished is to send a signal to bankers around the world that crime does pay."

WND previously reported on a scheme in which HSBC allegedly defrauded non-resident Indian customers who were asked to sign open-ended powers of attorney giving HSBC officers in India complete discretionary authority to invest the customers' funds in the Indian stock market.

'Where is the justice?'

London-based HSBC shareholder activist Michael Mason-Mahon shares Ujjainkar's frustration after being stymied by HSBC bank officers in London in hundreds of cases, including that of Ravi Shankar. Since early 2010 he has tried to address grievances and banking irregularities claimed by HSBC customers in India.

"I have found that The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited in London has been abusing customers by the illegal use of CIBIL, refusing to register complaints, threatening customers and demanding money illegally," Mason-Mahon wrote WND in an email.

He said HSBC "has breached all the rules and regulations of the Reserve Bank of India, the Standard Board of India, as well as the Code of Commitment to Customers."

Mason-Mahon, who has charged that Chairman Douglas Flint and the board of directors of HSBC Holdings PLC in London are "fully aware of the criminal behavior of HSBC in India," is also extremely upset that no criminal prosecutions were pursued by the U.S. Justice Department.

The settlement came after an extensive investigation of HSBC by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

"Where is the justice in the $1.92 billion fine the U.S. government charged HSBC?" he asked WND. "This is just shareholders' money to a man like Douglas Flint, the chairman of HSBC Holdings in London. Why not suspend the bank's license to operate in the United States for a year or two?"

Mason-Mahon told WND he had supplied attorneys with Democratic Sen. Carl Levin's committee with information about alleged criminal behavior by HSBC in India, although no reference to his allegations can be found in the 334-page staff report issued by the committee at its public hearing July 17.

"Sen. Levin's subcommittee seems completely unaware that HSBC merely factored in to its international business plan the $2 billion fine the U.S. government imposed on the bank," he said. "To HSBC internationally, even a fine of this magnitude was simply considered the cost of doing business when the bank had no intention of complying with rules and regulations."

Negligible fine

Cruz and WND handed over to Department of Homeland Security bank-fraud experts 1,000 pages of customer accounts documenting alleged money laundering activity. Along with the records copied from HSBC computers before he was fired, Cruz made audio recordings of more than a dozen HSBC bank officers admitting their knowledge and participation in the money laundering scheme.

In emails and interviews with WND, Cruz disputes the statement Tuesday made by Sen. Levin that the HSBC settlement "sends a powerful wake-up call to multinational banks about the consequences of disregarding their anti-money laundering obligations."

Cruz told WND that HSBC "reserved $2 billion to pay these fines years ago."

He argued that a fine even of that magnitude was negligible, compared to the profits HSBC made laundering money for drug cartels and terrorist groups and violating U.S. sanctions against doing business with Iran.

Levin's subcommittee has evidence supporting Cruz's claim.

On page 2 of the July 17 report, the Senate Permanent Investigating Subcommittee's staff noted HSBC is "one of the largest financial institutions in the world, with over $2.5 trillion in assets, 89 million customers, 300,000 employees, and 2011 profits of nearly $22 billion."

"Kids Don't Have Lobbyists: Part I" is Latest Installment of Thanks in Advance Campaign

 

CHICAGO - December 11, 2012. The impact of the pension squeeze on future generations of Illinois children is the focus of a new video posted today as part of Governor Quinn's "Thanks in Advance" Internet campaign to educate Illinoisans about the urgent need for pension reform. A two-part video - "Kids Don't Have Lobbyists: Part I" - goes behind-the-scenes at a children's focus group about breakfast cereal which turns into a serious discussion of pension reform. As the gravity of the pension problem becomes clear and the kids realize their voices are not always heard, they decide to hire a lobbyist.

View the first part of the "Kids Don't Have Lobbyists" video at ThisIsMyIllinois.com or the "Thanks in Advance" Facebook page.

"Nobody has more at stake in fixing the pension problem than the children of Illinois," Governor Quinn said. "In the past decade, the pension squeeze has forced lawmakers to make deep cuts in early childhood education, after-school programs and grants for college-bound students. Tomorrow's children face a difficult future unless we act responsibly to ease the pension squeeze."

According to the Governor's Office of Management and Budget, state spending on public pensions is projected to exceed education spending by 2016. The state's pension payments - which made up just 6 percent of the state's budget in 2008 - have soared to 16 percent of the budget in 2013. That increase has "squeezed" the education portion of the budget from 30 percent down to 26 percent. The "squeeze" by pension payments on essential state services is the focus of "Thanks in Advance," which has attracted more than 30,000 unique visitors since its launch to the website.

The "Kids Don't Have Lobbyists: Part I" video joins three videos on the "Thanks in Advance" website, including one launch video and two videos by legendary "explainer" and founder of the Khan Academy, Salman Khan. Khan was named by Time Magazine as one of the World's 100 Most Influential People for his commitment to offering a "world class education for everyone everywhere". Part II will be launched in the coming days.

In April, Governor Quinn proposed a plan that would rescue the pension systems, ensure employees have access to benefits and prevent skyrocketing pension costs from eating up core services like education and healthcare. The governor's plan would fully fund the pension system by 2042. "Thanks in Advance" aims to build public awareness about the need for legislative action on pension reform in Springfield and empower citizens to make their voices heard. The legislature is scheduled to work January 3 - 8.

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