10 American Scandals That You Probably Don’t Know About, But Should

America is a country that is no stranger to scandals, from political controversies to celebrity scandals. However, there are some that seem to have slipped under the radar. Here are ten massive American scandals that you may not have heard of.

1. The Church of Scientology's Tax-Exempt Status

“The church of Scientology blackmailed and threatened IRS people to get their tax exempt status,” one person claimed. Someone else jumped in, adding, “I've posted this a few times before but they weren't any better in the UK. They used to have their base at East Grinstead over here in the 80s and were trying to get a religion status to avoid tax.

My dad was investigating them for the UK tax office and there were suddenly several attempted break-ins at his office in Crawley. Assuming it was the ‘Church' my dad brought the files home with him each day but unfortunately ‘someone' broke into our home and stole them and nothing else, which if it was the church almost certainly meant that they must've been following him from work to know which house to burgle. Absolutely mental.

When it came to the result of the investigation, they still got told to buzz off though and didn't get the tax status they wanted, in fact this probably helped.”

2. 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 substantial sums (including John Glenn and 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,” one person recalled.

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3. 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,” someone shared.

4. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

“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,” one person said.

“This Tuskegee Study is exactly why I don't trust medical science or even doctors today. I am 100% positive they use us as test subjects even today. Humans don't suddenly “become wholly ethical” after doing something like that for 40 YEARS. They are STILL very much into getting away with as many unethical things as they can,” someone else cautioned.

5. For-Profit Juvenile Detention Systems

“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),” one person shared.

“When I used to be a debt collector one of our clients was a government run juvenile jail system in Florida that charged parents room and board for their kids entire stay at juvie. It was messed up and I never expected to get any sort of payment on these accounts because who would pay that? I only got 1 payment in the 3 years we had that client and it was from a kid who was in juvie who eventually grew up started doing better and wanted to clear the 3k balance from his moms name,” someone else added.

6. 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 messed up.

Human experimentations included vivisections without anesthesia. 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 killed 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,” informed one commenter.

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7. The DuPont Scandal

“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,” said one commenter.

Someone else added, “They did the same thing in Wilmington, NC. Dumped their poison into the Cape Fear River, drinking water source for hundreds of thousands of people.”

8. CIA Cocaine Scandal

“The CIA trafficking cocaine to the US to sell to drug dealers to fund death squads in Central America. Also, the general incompetence of the CIA,” one commenter shared.

Someone else added more context to the story. “The ideology is pretty much this: Cocaine will come in anyway, so the CIA can gather intel as to who it goes to in the US. The major suppliers. The CIA use the profit to increase their anti-drug budget. The CIA now understands the major players in South America. The CIA then used the profit to overthrow Communist regimes and take out the primary cartel members.

The CIA then install a friendly anti-drug regime that destroys the cocaine plantations. Except in the real world these regimes are massively unreliable.”

9. The Tulsa Race Massacre

“The immediate aftermath was also crazy. The city tried to land-grab the burned out district on behalf of a local real estate developer run by a klansman. They changed local zoning laws to make it industrial to try to make it illegal for the black population to rebuild. Lots of them did so anyway defiantly and were repeatedly arrested for it until a heroic local black lawyer, running his office out of a tent, successfully argued to get the laws struck down in court.” shared one commenter.

10. The Business Plot

“The Business Plot. 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…” shared one person.

Others weren't so convinced this was the real story. “Yeah, there's no way they had 500,000 people armed and ready to overthrow the government but all were disciplined enough to keep it a secret and wait for orders. It also seems backwards to amass and train an army before you find a general to lead them.”

Read the original thread here.

This article was produced and syndicated by Max My Money.