America, White House, New Orleans discussed on Cape Up with Jonathan Capehart
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
What we just said. In the rebuilding of roads and bridges and airports and ports, we've been doing that for a long time. And we understand how to train folks to do that. But if you're building a clean energy economy and you're building hydrogen hubs, or you're doing carbon capture, or you're laying high speed Internet, or you're doing things like your electrifying the economy by now battery manufacturing. Sometimes those skills that we have right now are not transferable. And so we are really, we're going to talk to the governors tomorrow and the mayors about making sure that even though this is a national problem, it's not necessarily just a federal response. In other words, it has to be a localized response because the focus has to be different from town to town depending on what's being done. And so there's a substantial amount of money in this bill for workforce training, but it's not enough. But we're working with the governors and the mayors and the community and technical schools. And of course, labor unions that the president has talked about quite a lot through their apprenticeships programs to actually find individuals train them really, really well. Train them specifically for what's coming our way and make sure that, as we said, with a diverse workforce, women in the workforce, people of color in the workforce, then we need the tools to get them in the workforce like child care and transportation, putting all of those things together will help us build the kind of workforce that's necessary to help America win the future. And so I'm listening to you as a White House official. And part of me is thinking, well, he's supposed to say these things because this is your job. It is my job. Now, put your hat on as a former mayor. And a former mayor of a major city. Former mayor of New Orleans. Is the infrastructure funding really being directed to the right needs. Well, listen, when if you're a mayor of a city and you have a federal government that doesn't believe in investing in the people of America, much less the communities of America, you have nowhere to go and nothing to do. If you're the mayor of a city and you have a governor that doesn't believe in that at all, then you have nothing to do. But when you have when you're the mayor of a city, little town, a little community, whatever it might be. And you have a president and you have a Congress and you have governors and then everybody's on the same page, you got a chance to rip and run. And that's pretty much the response that we've gotten from everybody in the country. Now, I'm not trying to be overtly political here. It does not matter to the president whether congressmen and women are senators voted for the bill. It does not. He is instructed me and everybody else, make sure this money gets down to the ground and nobody gets left behind. But having said that, it is clearly true that even the people that voted no want the dough, all of them. And he said this the other night, he said this during the State of the Union speech, he said, look, I know many of you didn't vote for this bill. I'm very thankful the 14 of you that did and it was a bipartisan in that regard. But we're not worrying about that.