Reality checks:

Corporate Watch once noted "The Five 'D's" of corporations:

Deny [harm],      Delay [solutions],      Divide [opposition],  Dupe [the public] and then  Dump [the product]

Risk Assessment:

The definition of risk assessment is how many people you can kill before profits must end. - Paul Goettlich

7.   RUMOR CONTROL  --   It is NOT true that risk managers in the Agency have been upset with dermatology risk assessors for making rash decisions!     -HAPPENINGS AT THE SAB  Vol. E1, No. 2

A risk assessment is like a captured spy.  Torture it enough and it will tell you anything.   -William Ruckleshaus

The difference between a prostitute and a risk assessor?  A prostitute only sells *their* body ...

A typical risk assessment consists of about 50 separate assumptions and extrapolations, each of which may skew the analysis by a factor of 10 or more. These assumptions and extrapolations can alter the final numeric estimate of risk by a multiple of billions, and this result is, again, unverifiable.     -Mark Shere (conservative corporate environmental lawyer) in _The Columbus Dispatch_: David Lore 'Determining Toxic Risks is Costly Voodoo, Lawyer says',  24 Nov. '95

Calculating a "central estimate" of risk is like averaging the winning percentage of all Los Angeles sports teams--basketball, football, hockey and baseball--to derive a central estimate of likely success for an athlete playing in that city.   -Ellen Silbergeld (toxicologist; testimony to U.S. Congress committee in '95

The idea that a harm prevented in the future is worth LESS than a harm prevented today turns the ethical and practical rationale for protective health and environmental regulation on its head. [re: discounting the value of a life or other good that occurs in future]. -Ellen Silbergeld, 'The Risks of Comparing Risks' _N.Y.U. Env. Law J._  3 (1994)

If you pollute when you DO NOT KNOW if there is any safe dose, you are performing improper experimentation on people without their informed consent. If you pollute when you know there is NO safe dose, with respect to causing extra cases of deadly cancers, then you are committing premeditated random murder. -John Gofman

[Chemical] Risk assessors are now in the position of the conductors and engineers who kept the trains running on time to the death camps in Nazi Germany to minimize the discomfort of their passengers--they are just doing a job, honorably and to the best of their ability, but the final result of every professional risk assessor’s work is the destruction of the natural environment, one decision at a time, and the relentless spread of sickness...     -Dr. Peter Montague in _REHW_ # 519, 7 Nov. '96

Risk assessment that concludes that someone has to die in order for a technology to come on-line is a human rights abuse.  If someone said that in order to build an incinerator here we have to select 10 people from the 10 million who live here and shoot them and pile their bodies up on the street--that's the price for this incinerator--people would be up in arms.. But if you kill people by cancer over a long period you get away with it.  The deaths are anonymous.  One of the struggles we have as activists is the invisibility of this.  The chemicals are invisible and the deaths are invisible.  -Dr. Sandra Steingraber, 1995

Dr. Paul Connett:
What is '2 + 2' to a:
Mathematician: "Four."
Philosopher: "That depends on what you mean by 'two', and by 'plus'."
Risk Assessor*: "Shut the door, and tell me what you want it to mean."
(* = P.R. man, lawyer, consultant, ...)