September 18, 2020
Puerto Rico serves as a strategic economic region to recapture the Pharmaceutical industry. Historically Puerto Rico was a hub for pharmaceutical manufacturing; however, due to poor and undependable infrastructure, an outcome of terrible management in government, combined with competitive incentives provided by alternative nations, most PR pharma operations moved to India and China.
With the Trump administration confronting Big Pharma on multiple fronts, including the need for a secure supply chain, a cost-effective approach is massive investment to repair and replace the island infrastructure. Today the White House announces the largest FEMA grant in history as an underpinning to this strategic objective.
WHITE HOUSE – Statement from the Press Secretary on the Largest FEMA Infrastructure Grants Being Awarded to Puerto Rico.
The Trump Administration announced that the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) plans to award two of its largest grants ever for infrastructure projects in Puerto Rico.
Under the leadership of President Trump, FEMA will award almost $13 billion to help rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical grid system and spur recovery of the territory’s education system—the largest obligations of funding ever awarded. This funding amount includes a Federal share of $11.6 billion for the projects.
Together, these grants exceed the total Public Assistance funding in any single federally-declared disaster other than Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Federal funding of $9.6 billion will allow the Puerto Rico Electrical Power Authority to repair and replace thousands of miles of transmission and distribution lines, electrical substations, power generation systems, office buildings, and make other grid improvements. The $2 billion grant for the Puerto Rico Department of Education will focus on restoring school buildings and educational facilities across the island.
The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 included funding for FEMA to support Hurricane Maria response and recovery, as well as language helping FEMA to ensure that Puerto Rico rebuilds its critical lifelines, services, and facilities in accordance with current industry standards.
All critical infrastructure projects are funded under FEMA’s Public Assistance Alternative Procedures, pursuant to Section 428 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act. This innovative funding method allows Puerto Rican officials to work with FEMA to determine how to best meet their unique recovery needs. As part of the 428 procedures, the funding being announced today was reviewed and validated by an independent expert review panel and agreed to by both FEMA and Puerto Rico.
With the grant awards announced today, the Federal Government will have obligated approximately $26 billion for Puerto Rico’s recovery from Hurricane Maria. Today’s grant announcements represent some of the largest awards in FEMA’s history for any single disaster recovery event and demonstrate the Federal Government’s continuing commitment to help rebuild the territory and support the citizens of Puerto Rico and their recovery goals. (link)
Centinel2012 
I would like to send you some studies that appear to provide evidence that appears to substantiate significant disparities in the use of force against African Americans. If you would kindly provide me an email I can use I would happy to send these to you for your comment. I would send you the actual studies, not the citations or mere references (with 1 exception.).
1. A Multi-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias
in Police Shootings at the County-Level in
the United States, 2011–2014
2. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,
Roland G. Fryer, Jr.†
July 2017
3. Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of
Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016
Joseph Cesario, David J. Johnson, William Terrill (abstract only)
4. Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal
officer-involved shootings
David J. Johnsona,b,1, Trevor Tressb, Nicole Burkelb, Carley Taylorb, and Joseph Cesariob (Heather MacDonald used this study as (among others?) for her editorial in the WSJ.
5. Correction for “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in
fatal officer-involved shootings,” by David J. Johnson, Trevor
Tress, Nicole Burkel, Carley Taylor, and Joseph Cesario, which
was first published July 22, 2019; 10.1073/pnas.1903856116 (Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116, 15877–15882).
6. Police, Race, and the Production of Capital Homicides
Jeffrey Fagan†
Amanda Geller*
Thank you for your considerations. I am very appreciative of the very fine work JustFacts does to bring a balanced and factual presentation of the evidences and arguments to the issues of our day.
Thank you for your kind words. Below are the key facts on these six studies. As you’ll see, they are either fatally flawed, inconclusive, or actually find that police are not more likely to use lethal force against minorities:
1) A Multi-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011–2014
This study uses an incomplete, crowd-sourced dataset that records 16 cases of civilians being shot by police in Houston, TX and surrounding areas from 2011 to 2014. During this period, at least 177 such shootings occurred in Houston alone. In other words, the study’s data is so fragmentary that it is useless.
2) An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force
This study found that “on the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we are unable to detect any racial differences in either the raw data or when accounting for controls.” The author, Harvard professor Roland G. Fryer Jr., called this “the most surprising result of my career.”
On the other hand, the study did find that “blacks and Hispanics are more than 50 percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police,” but this drops to 21.3% when controlling for factors like resisting arrest. Fryer theorizes there is a racial reason for this, but the remaining difference could be due to factors that the study did not control for, or it may be because police are more likely to forcibly restrain people in high-crime neighborhoods to prevent situations that require lethal force, regardless of race.
The paper is also marred and its credibility is undermined by this misleading claim: “The raw memories of these [racial] injustices have been resurrected by several high-profile incidents of questionable uses of force. Michael Brown, unarmed, was shot 12 times by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, after Brown fit the description of a robbery suspect of a nearby store.” Before the working draft of this paper was published in 2016, the Obama Justice Department proved in 2015 that the officer shot Brown in self-defense. On 9/12/16, I personally wrote to Fryer with documentation of that fact, and yet, he still submitted this paper for final publication with this falsehood in it.
3) Is There Evidence of Racial Disparity in Police Use of Deadly Force? Analyses of Officer-Involved Fatal Shootings in 2015–2016
This is the exact same study that I quote in the article above. Again, it found that “in nearly every case, whites were either more likely to be fatally shot by police or police showed no significant disparity in either direction.”
4) Officer Characteristics and Racial Disparities in Fatal Officer-Involved Shootings
In the words of the study’s authors, this study found that “once crime rates were taken into account, civilians fatally shot by the police were not more likely to be black or Hispanic than white.” Furthermore, it showed that “white officers are not more likely to fatally shoot minority civilians compared to black or Hispanic officers.”
5) Correction for “Officer Characteristics and Racial Disparities in Fatal Officer-Involved Shootings”
This is merely a technical clarification of the study just above that changes none of its results.
6) Police, Race, and the Production of Capital Homicides
This study mentions earlier research about racial disparities in the death penalty, but the facts are that relative to the rates at which people of different races commit murder in the U.S., black people are less likely to be sentenced to death and executed than white people.
The study correctly points out that murders are less likely to be solved in minority neighborhoods and posits racial causes for this, but it also recognizes that this may be due to factors such as these:
• Minorities are more likely to be involved in murdering strangers than whites, and such murders are more difficult to solve.
• Police resources are stretched in minority neighborhoods due to high crime rates.
• Minorities are less likely to cooperate with murder investigations due to fear of reprisal and hostility towards police.