Illinois Business Journal Illinois Business Journal
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Costello, Shimkus, Durbin convince FEMA to slow down re-mapping process
By ALAN J. ORTBALS

   Many people were shocked when Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator R. David Paulison signed an agreement at the end of September that would delay the new flood hazard maps for the American Bottom region.
   Those maps, which would designate

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the entire American Bottom as a high-risk flood zone, were scheduled to become official in August 2009. Under the agreement, that date will be pushed back two to three years.
   The re-mapping project is going on throughout FEMA’s 10 districts across the nation as a result of the Hurricane Katrina disaster along the Gulf Coast in August 2006. The Mississippi River divides two FEMA districts so that the Illinois side of the St. Louis metro area was being re-mapped by District 5 and the Missouri side by District 7. The two district offices have been working on separate timetables, and the Missouri-side re-mapping was running two to three years behind the Illinois side.
   The agreement delays the effective date of the Illinois maps until the re-mapping process is complete across the entire St. Louis metro watershed.
   Prior to the FEMA agreement in late September, American Bottom residents and business owners were threatened with mandatory, expensive flood insurance beginning in August 2009. Anyone who held a federally-backed mortgage on property in the American Bottom would be subject [continue]

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Congressmen vote no on bailout bill that pushes national debt to an all-time high

. The United States’ national debt now stands at $10.5 trillion, twice what it was in 2001 and 11 times more than it was in 1980. . By ALAN J. ORTBALS

   When Congress approved the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act last month - legislation commonly referred to as the Wall Street bailout package - Democratic U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello and Republican U.S. Rep. John Shimkus voted against the plan. The nay votes were cast, both say, in part because there was no revenue to pay for the expenditure and all of the money would need to be borrowed - pushing the national debt over $10 trillion, an all-time high.
   “The national debt has doubled in the past eight years,” Costello said. “It’s gone from $5 trillion to over $10 trillion

dollars. We just added potentially $700 billion to the national debt. It will be borrowed money, and we will be borrowing that money from China and from Japan and from other foreign countries. We should have paid for it,” he added.
   According to the Office of Management and Budget, interest on the national debt already consumes about 9 percent of the entire federal [continue]

Media coverage can impact financial markets, journalists say
By KERRY L. SMITH

Journalists agree that TV appearances like those of Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” on the Today Show, can indeed affect the financial markets.

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   Does the media impact the markets?
   Media professionals and academics say it certainly can. Journalists themselves say it’s the responsibility of those professionals who purvey breaking news to do it without bias so that audiences can draw their own conclusions based on the facts.    Arguably one of the clearest examples of this cause and effect recently was CNBC “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer’s animated appearance on the Today Show on Oct. 6. During his morning interview, Cramer said “Now is the time to panic,” advising viewers to take out of the stock market whatever investments they may need for the next five years. That day, the Dow lost nearly 370 points,

followed by a 500-point lost the next day. [continue]