Slavery still tops the list!
When musing on the biggest crimes in US history everything pales in comparison to slavery, although the crime is a moral one since it was legal at the time.
Many of the assasinations could be nominated but their effects are largely conjecture, would reconstruction have been different under Lincoln? Would the US have escalated in Vietnam to such a large extent under JFK? The McKinley assasination could actually be seen as a benefit to everyone except McKinley himself and Sacco and Vanzetti who suffered under the anti anarchist backlash, but that is still conjecture.
The crime whose results can be seen and which was actually a crime when it occurred that had the most devastating effect was the criminal conspiracy to end mass transit in most of the US and replace it with the automobile. Yes, kids, America's love affair with the car is more like a gang rape but it wasn't just private uindustry that conspired.
https://www.mlui.org/pubs/glb/glb13-01/glb13-14.asp
http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery;jsessionid=c06cltaa6g77g?method=4&dsid=2222&dekey=United
+States+v.+National+City+Lines+Inc.&gwp=8&curtab=2222_1&sbid=lc03b&linktext=United%2
0States%20v.%20National%20City%20Lines%20Inc.
When we were making deals with warlords for oil just prior to and during WWII, it made a modicum of sense but that was the last sensical thing to arrise from our deal with the devil that is cheap oil.
To wit:
In the beginning, the Saudi R(oil) Family made deals with the most radical clerics to help keep the bedouins in line, so while Roosevelt was laying out the Four Pillars of Freedom, he was handing an AMEX card to all that is the opposite of that. There is, of course, no way that anyone could have foreseen that giving biliions and billions of dollars to people whose consciuosness resides somewhere in the 14th century would be a problem.
Around this time the afore mentioned crime of dismantling US Mass Transit was occurring around the country. Eisenhower embarked on the Federal highway system and the suburbs were born.
On August 19th, 1953, the democratically elected government of Iran was overthrown by the CIA and replaced by the 15 year old Shah.
http://www.bowlingforcolumbine.com/library/wonderful/iran.php
Of course, to help keep his people in line after ending their short lived democracy, the US needed to help him train a secret police force, the savak, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAVAK.
The brutality of this regime was one of the reasons that that the nation accepted rule by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
That revolution in Iran made them a Theocratic state oppossed to the US but with all of our military stuff.
So...we decided to help arm Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran to make them both a little less powerful in the region. This helped cement Hussein's power.
Saddam Hussein was a member of the Baathist party in 1963 when they took control of the country from the guys that couped the King.
The Baathists were supported by, wait for it, the CIA.
http://www.freedomfiles.org/war/ciairaqcoup.htm
Now we sit there, in that desert, certainly heating up from the greenhouse gases, trapped in an unwinnable situation with a rediculous puppet of oil in the Oval Office, the world hates and our economy teeters, fed by federal debt.
The ripple effects of our addict like appetite for oil are myriad.
A royally fucked (litereally) foreign policy where countless thousands of people have been eliminated by all kinds of craven miscreants at home and abroad.
Our own oil money being used to finance the most horrific terror attack in the history of the planet.
Texas has dominated our White House (since WWII we have had 3 Texan Presidents and they ALL sucked ass, Texans shot at least one Kennedy and the Dallas Cowboys are the living embodiment of all that is evil. Plus Ross Perot looks like a Ferengi).
Green House gases are causing the earth to heat up and may already be causing Hurricanes to gain in ferocity.
And one of the most insidious. People will now live very far from work. "We have to in order to afford a house". Do you know who pays for that commute? You do. Do you know who pays for your bosses commute? You do. He expenses it, thats why. The ability for employers to pull workers from a 2 hour travel distance allows them to keep wages low. You can afford a house if you are willing to drive far enough. Your boss gets to live in Beverly Hills or Manhattan or the poshest area of San Francisco because you get to sit in your car for four hours a day so that you can afford a house. Thats the new American dream. If companies had to draw form the workers around them then they would either have to pay a living wage or move to where the people are. Why do the poor and middle class commute? Why shouldn't someone like Dick Cheney be the one schlepping to Modesto to visit the plant? Thats where the people are.
Not to mention the insane cost of car maintenence, insurance, registration.
50,000 deaths a year and having to sit next to REALLY LOUD WOOFERS in traffic.
Definitely a mistake.
For foreign policy reasons, for reasons of ethics and morality, for an improved standard of living for all Americans, for the health of the planet, we must go to an oil addiction 12 step program and grow the fuck up as a nation. There is no such thing as a free lunch and now a whole lotta chickens are coming home to roost all at the same time.
We need to not only change our foregin policy, NOW and our energy policy NOW, we need to make sure that we conduct business in a rational way in the future.
Give me a party that runs on that and I will move heaven and earth for them. Give me a party that gives me a vision of the future that is clean and gleaming with less poverty, fewer sick people and a moral, rational foreign policy. Give me the party that the Democrats are afraid to be but want to be, oh so badly.
And also give me spell check...