Hey, when you’re the most powerful country in the world, there are bound to be a lot of scandals.

And there’s no doubt that America has more than its fair share…and that includes a lot that the general public doesn’t really know about.

Let’s hear from folks on AskReddit about American scandals that most people don’t know about.

Start now!

1. Hmmm…

“The Church of Scientology blackmailed and threatened IRS people to get their tax exempt status.”

2. Scandalous.

“DES given to pregnant women from 1940 until 1971.

It gave girls who were born after prenatal exposure a much higher risk of several cancers, including one cancer that no one else gets. It also causes an inability to carry pregnancies in some women who were exposed to it before birth. Boys born after exposure were cryptorchid and had a high rate of micro penis.

There was a registry for these children so they could be tracked for medical needs and if other effects cropped up, but Congress did away with the registry. The changes that DES caused to gene expression are heritable, and it is now affecting DES granddaughters and great-granddaughters.

While Congress has funded continuing research on effects, there is no registry anymore so no possibility that DES daughters will ever see any compensation. The FDA approved the drug for use in pregnant women based on a single non-blind study.”

3. Crazy story.

“The media destroyed Gary Webb’s career because he exposed the C.I.A’s connection to c**aine.

Newspapers like The New York Times later apologized.”

4. In the dark.

“Watchtower.org Watchtower, Bible, and Tract Society Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses or whatever you want to call them.

Most know of their refusal to take blood transfusions and to celebrate birthdays. Most do not know that they also refuse to report the s** crimes of their church elders and will provide safe escape to another part of the country and probably the world to a guilty elder.

They will not report the crime in jurisdictions the do not require it. They choose to punish members guilty of far less offensive violations with shunning and totally cutting them off.”

5. BS.

“How many kickbacks large corporations got from CARE back in 2020 while the rest of us got $1,200 and a six-month wait for unemployment.”

6. Awful.

“Enron was so awful and deserves to be remembered.

The financial elite lost billions and billions in normal Americans savings because of their greed and recklessness.

It left many broken families in its wake to no fault of their own.”

7. Historical shame.

“The Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

It was a 40-year long study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the US Public Health Service that involved 400 African American men with syphilis who were not informed of their condition or given proper treatment in order to study the progression of the disease.”

8. Whoa.

“The Business Plot in 1933.

Smedley Butler alleged that a cadre of Wall Street bigwigs approached him (through a bonds salesman) to lead an army of 500 000 men on Washington, overthrow FDR, and install Butler as a dictator.

It was laughed off as a “could never happen”, but the committee assigned to investigate it discovered that basically the plan was already finished, and the conspirators were just waiting to pull the trigger…”

9. Higher education.

“College.

Not the CONCEPT of higher education but how its actually executed. You pay an exorbitant amount of money for just knowledge you could get in a number of other places and there are tons of classes padded on that you would never choose of your own volition or use in your career path in the day to day.

Also its not work experience it doesn’t LAND you a job it just makes you “eligible” for jobs that honestly don’t need a degree. Some for sure but the majority of jobs I see that say bachelor degree minimum etc do not need them. A few years of work experience in that field would be a million times more valuable or just some basic on the job training to actually get the position filled.

College: An excuse to extend adolescence while saddling you with crippling debt… welcome to being a indentured servant to the govt.”

10. Shady.

“The Keating Five.

In 1989, in the midst of the savings and loan crisis, banker Charles Keating was charged with fraud and racketeering.

During the investigation, five Senators to whom he’d donated large sums (including John Glenn and John McCain)  were accused of having pressured federal regulators to drop previous cases against Keating.

The Senate Ethics Committee found that none of them had formally broken any laws, but found three of them were implicated enough to be formally censured.”

11. That’s depressing.

“The General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy.

Between 1936 and 1951, several car and oil companies conspired to control the streetcar system in cities all over the USA. They replaced electric streetcars with gas-powered buses.

Antitrust practices continued into the 1970s to k**l expansion of the electric transportation systems. That’s why the USA doesn’t have mass transit.”

12. Shocking.

“I read Empire of Pain recently and the opioid crisis and the behaviour of basically everyone involved with the Sackler family and its companies was absolutely shocking.”

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