OPINIONS/EDITORIALS

Guest Columnist

Charlene Crowell

What Happens If America Can No Longer Pay Its Bills?

For much of Black America, having adequate cash to cover monthly bills or small business overhead has historically been an ongoing challenge. But over the coming days, the nation's coffers could also lack adequate cash and credit to cover its bills.

The debt limit is the total amount of money that the United States government is authorized to borrow to meet its existing legal obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds and other payments, according to the Treasury Department.

On May 1, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned both the House and Senate, "After reviewing recent federal tax receipts, our best estimate is that we will be unable to continue to satisfy all of the government's obligations by early June, and potentially as early as June 1, if Congress does not raise or suspend the debt limit before that time.

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… Given the current projections, it is imperative that Congress act as soon as possible to increase or suspend the debt limit in a way that provides longer-term certainty that the government will continue to make its payments."

Since then, every passing day shortens time for President Biden and congressional leaders to craft a resolution. To avoid rippling global financial chaos, both the administration and Congress must reach agreement.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy advocates tying the debt dilemma to the administration's budget propos- al, including slashing many domestic programs and adding new work requirements to access program benefits. Alternatively, Biden seeks a separation between the debt limit and the budget. While discussions among the White House and lawmakers have begun, a solution had yet to be announced at press time.

In the meantime, an anxious nation — its people and businesses — faces financial uncertainty.

According to Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Missouri), a longtime lawmaker and member of the House Financial

Marian Wright Edelman

A Lesson from Ambassador James Joseph

I recently attended a memorial service for my dear friend and former Children's Defense Fund Board Chair Ambassador James Joseph. Ambassador Joseph was a civil rights, corporate and philanthropic leader, including his transformative service as president and chief executive officer of the Council on Foundations and a co-founder and chair of the Association of Black Foundation

Executives, and a lifelong public servant. He was an adviser to four U.S. presidents beginning with President Carter, and in 1995 was appointed as the U.S. ambassador to South Africa by President Clinton.

It was a crucial moment following Nelson Mandela's 1994 election as South Africa's first Black president, and Ambassador Joseph became the only American ambassador to present his credentials to President Mandela as he worked closely with his new administration. He witnessed firsthand South Africa's early

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What We Shouldn't Permit

Picture a mountain valley somewhere in the Alleghanies, Appalachians or Blue Ridge. It's a safe bet what you just imagined didn't include a metal pipeline more than three feet wide running down a steep ridge or crossing a pristine stream.

People from West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, and several

Indigenous nations have been fighting for years to keep that image from becoming a reality by opposing the incongruously named, 303-milelong Mountain Valley Pipeline across their states and ancestral lands. They've been so successful, in fact, that some in Congress want to take away their power to oppose a project that's recorded hundreds of clean water violations alone.

It's part of a bigger fight that goes by the mundane-sounding name "permitting reform" that's playing out in Washington right now. While post-apartheid struggles as it sought to move away from its legacy of white supremacy, legal segregation and racial violence towards a new future striving for truth and reconciliation, and could see the parallels between South Africa's history and our own. He also held out hope for what both nations could become.

His own early experiences of America's history came from his childhood in Opelousas, Louisiana, a state KKK headquarters where he remembered lynchings and racial violence as common facts of life. Later,

Ben Jealous that description isn't as stirring as "Star Wars" missile defense or "the Great Society," the decision being made will determine how the nation can exert oversight on big projects from pipelines to manufacturing plants to minimize their damage to the planet. Some of them may go on federal lands, many of them will be financed by hundreds of billions that the federal government will invest in infrastructure and clean energy in the next decade.

It's a fight so important that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has after graduating from Southern University and earning a master's degree in divinity from Yale University, he returned South to serve on the faculty of Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, another KKK stronghold, where he became a leading figure in the local civil rights movement. He participated in protests where he was attacked and beaten and received death threats. But these were the years that shaped his hope for the future. As he put it decades later, "I have been able to remain hopeful in the midst of great adversity be-

Services Committee, "This is the first debt-ceiling situation that I felt was not going to be abated in time to protect our country. "I've never seen anything like this."

Federal fiscal agencies like the Congressional Budget Office and Federal Reserve have clearly and repeatedly warned Congress as well of the unprecedented and looming financial chaos that would result from debt default.

Nonpartisan economists have also chimed in. For example, Moody's

CROWELL Page 49 cause I learned early in life to make a distinction between hope and optimism. It is not just hope-theologians but hope-psychologists as well who remind us that optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better. Hope, on the other hand, enacts the stance of the participant who is able to look beyond the evidence and see alternative possibilities. … The truth is that hope is not so much an act of tied defaulting on the country's debt to resolving it.

"This is more than just about the Mountain Valley Pipeline," Maury Johnson, a retired educator and farmer from West Virginia who's a leader in the opposition, told a reporter. "This is about the Gulf Coast, North Alaska and every community that has been sacrificed for decades. We can't continue to sacrifice communities and people."

If we called it "protection reform," it might easier to understand. What's at stake is the process for protecting our air, water, and land from what may be irreparable harm.

Some want to erode environmental safeguards that have been in place for more than 50 years and reduce the time allotted to determine the impact the new projects will have during their decades-long lifespan. Some want to treat dirty fossil fuel industries in the same way we think about new clean energy businesses. The fast lane needs to be reserved for renewable energy and transmission