It’s funny which scandals seem to grab the public’s attention and which ones fly under the radar.
But I guess the media can only cover so many stories, right?
Let’s hear from AskReddit users about American scandals that most people don’t know about.
1. Shady.
“How about that time the major telecoms took over 400 BILLION dollars to install fiber optics in homes, schools and libraries across the entire country and just….didn’t?
The money was just reinvested in the companies to expand overseas and pay legal fees fighting against competitors with fiber plans and blocking future expansion.
“Here is 400 billion dollars, please use it to give us all good internet”
“Ok”
“Hey, where’s that high speed internet you were gonna put in?”
“Oh we decided that was way too expensive, it would cost like 400 billion and we just don’t have the money. Have this DSL instead over the existing network.”
2. Wow.
“Operation Snow White, absolutely gonzo stuff.
The Church of Scientology successfully infiltrated the government at high levels and purged records which were unfavorable to L. Ron Hubbard.”
3. Convicted.
“The ABSCAM operation.
The FBI set up a fake Arab investment company and offered various state and federal officials bribes to pass bills that would better enable their investment process.
It led to the convictions of half a dozen Representatives and a Senator for bribery.”
4. Shocker.
“The House banking scandal.
It was revealed that numerous Congressmen had been overdrawing their office accounts with zero financial accountability.
It resulted in the convictions of three former Representatives and the House Sergeant-At-Arms for bribery and corruption.”
5. Remember him?
“The Abramoff scandals.
Jack Abramoff was a federal lobbyist, primarily involved in gambling and Indian tribal law, who was convicted of defrauding and overbilling Indian tribal councils he was representing to the tunes of tens of millions of dollars.
Investigations also revealed that he was giving unlicensed gifts to Congressmen, leading to a Representative being convicted of accepting bribes and the Deputy Secretary of the Interior being convicted of obstruction of justice.”
6. Chemical waste.
“The Dupont scandal.
DuPont chemical dumped thousands of tons of chemical waste containing a long chained fluorocarbon also known as PFOA into waterways in Parkersburg, West Virginia. These chemicals were found to directly cause cancer and birth defects.
Unfortunately the irresponsible disposal and manufacturing of this chemical didn’t just effect America; trace amounts of PFOAs can be found in virtually every single living creature on earth.”
7. Scary.
“The for-profit juvenile detention system.
Basically, judges in Pennsylvania were intentionally handing out harsher sentences because these for-profit juvenile prisons contributed to the judge’s campaign (in PA they elect their judges which blows my mind for this very reason but that’s another story).”
8. The foster care system.
“Those Turpin siblings that escaped being chained to their beds by their sh**ty parents?
Happy ending, right? Yeah, no.
Turns out their foster parents ended up a**sing them even worse and now a bunch of them are suing.”
9. Scandalous.
“The business plot against FDR.
Wall Street tried to lead a coup against sitting president FDR.”
10. Unit 731.
“That Americans granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing America with all the research they had conducted on biological warfare as well as the data from all of their human experimentation. Pretty f**ked up.
Human experimentations included vivisections without anaesthesia. They had also been infected with things like cholera and the plague. The subjects used to study gangrene had limbs amputated and reattached to other parts of their body.
Others had limbs crushed, frozen or circulation cut off. When they were near death and considered useless they would then be k**led finally. They had male prisoners infected with syphilis rape women (from ages 12-80) and men to see how the disease progressed.
They were especially interested on how that would affect fetuses. They would also dissect both the woman and baby (sometimes just the fetus) upon birth.”
11. Trouble in the water.
“The current and previous pollution of PFAS chemical compounds across our water systems.
There has been reporting on it, but everyone I bring it up to hasn’t heard of it.”
12. Check this out.
“The Church Committee (formally the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) was a US Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church (D-ID), the committee was part of a series of investigations into intelligence abuses in 1975, dubbed the “Year of Intelligence”, including its House counterpart, the Pike Committee, and the presidential Rockefeller Commission. The committee’s efforts led to the establishment of the permanent US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
The most shocking revelations of the committee include Operation MKULTRA involving the drugging and torture of unwitting US citizens as part of human experimentation on mind control;[1][2] COINTELPRO involving the surveillance and infiltration of American political and civil-rights organizations;[3] Family Jewels, a CIA program to covertly assassinate foreign leaders;[4][5][6][7] Operation Mockingbird as a systematic propaganda campaign with domestic and foreign journalists operating as CIA assets and dozens of US news organizations providing cover for CIA activity.[8]
It also unearthed Project SHAMROCK in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA (while officially confirming the existence of this signals intelligence agency to the public for the first time).”
What can you add to the list?
Let us know in the comments!
Thanks, friends!
