not only is she a best selling author but she s releasing her new book today called move, putting america s infrastructure back in the lead. thank you so much for joining us. the book really explains with compelling details many of the health costs and even social justice impacts of our outdated infrastructure system, and i want to get to some of those today. first of all, can you please give us a brief synopsis of where we are today and how we re fairing versus other countries? so there s only one indicator in the transportation and infrastructure area in which the u.s. is number one and that is number of available airline seats. that s because we ve made it cheap and we like to fly. impact, americans like to fly. europeans will take the train. that s one reason we don t have a good enough rail system in america, passenger rail system. otherwise, we are way down on the international indicators. my friend rodney slater who s here today former secretary of transportation
discussion and help move transportation and infrastructure policy forward. thank you very much, and i look forward to our discussion. thank you. [ applause ] go ahead and sit in the middle. and rich, if you join us on the end there. we ll have some q&a here. we ll chat a little bit and then time to open it up to some questions from you all in the audience. thank you both for being here. as i said at the top, a host of issues where the chamber and the afl-cio, organized labor do not see eye to eye. i saw mr. trumka and on this issue there is so much overlap and the question is raised immediately, if organized labor and the largest business group in washington are on the same page, why can t this get done. maybe i ll go to you, rich, first. what s standing in the way? you ve looked at this issue and battled over this for years. what s in the way? it s pure politics right now. in the past this was always a bipartisan issue. there was never bickering. everybody knew that you