A dozen years in the making, the $1 billion Obama Presidential Center had its public unveiling in Chicago today. It became the sought-after ticket for liberal politicians and celebrities who want to ignore the presence of Orange Man Bad in the White House. Indeed, Donald Trump wasn’t even invited, no doubt much to the relief of former presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden who all showed up. The performers included Bruce Springsteen, Bono and Jennifer Hudson.
They were celebrating a most unusual building, and one the mainstream media has shown remarkably little interest in looking into.
Its brutalist near-windowless features have been compared to a 225 foot World War Two flak tower. Britain’s Guardian even noted it was “like a Klingon prison.” In part because federal law limits taxpayer-funded presidential archives to 70,000 square feet, Obama instead chose to build a sprawling campus on 19 acres. It features a museum covering four floors complete with a replica of the Oval Office, a branch of the Chicago Public Library, an auditorium, an NBA-regulation-size basketball court, a two-level playground, a vegetable garden, a recording studio, classrooms and more than two dozen pieces of public art. It could almost be its own city.
Such a complex could probably only come about in a city like Chicago, which has been run by a political machine for over 100 years. The city machine’s spared no effort in paving the way for the Obama Dream Palace.
The center sits in historic Jackson Park, an iconic Chicago institution designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (Central Park). Chicago officials secured $174 million in the Illinois state budget to cover the cost of closing the roads through Jackson Park needed to make way for the center and then handed over the 19.3 acre site to the Obama Foundation through a 99-year lease with the city for a one-time fee of merely $10.
This sweetheart “privatization” deal enraged some local residents and preservationists. They formed a group called Protect Our Parks, which filed a lawsuit claiming that the city had essentially engineered a disguised sale or gift to a private entity without clear legislative authorization or an equivalent public benefit. The suit argued the city then ran roughshod over due process by improperly delegating site-selection and decision-making authority to the Obama Foundation. Lastly, Protect Our Parks noted the project would result in the removal of 300 mature trees with hundreds more cut down for road and infrastructure work. The end result would represent an illegal net loss of public parkland.
But the park protectors ran into a judicial brick wall. US District Judge Robert Blakey rejected their arguments and extolled the proposed center as creating a “public benefit.” The US 7th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reverse Blakey’s ruling, and the Supreme Court chose not to hear the case. In February 2021, the federal government’s National Park Service conveniently weighed in with a finding that the project would not have a significant environmental impact.
The Obama Foundation also set highly ambitious goals to have half of the overall project done by firms owned by female, black and Latino Chicagoans.
But the New York Post reported last week that “some of the very subcontractors who helped build the 19.3-acre campus on Chicago’s South Side say they are facing financial ruin as they race to recover millions of dollars they claim remain unpaid ahead of the center’s grand opening.”
And a Fox News Digital investigation “identified multiple construction firms claiming losses ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of millions.”
They include Adamson Plumbing, whose owner Mike Owen claims he is some $4 million in the red after experiencing constant delays and more than 100 change-order requests. “As for me and my company, I’m at the end of my rope and I see no other choice than to have to tell my story,” Owen said.
Omar Shareef, the president of Chicago’s African American Contractors Association, says many firms are constrained from complaining by non-disclosure agreements as well as concerns that speaking out could jeopardize payments. “They are scared to death about talking about it,” he told Fox Digital.
The Obama Foundation scoffs at such talk. It says it hired a group called Lakeside Alliance as the project’s construction manager and it was responsible for paying any subcontractors. The Foundation insists it has no contractural relationship with any subcontractors.
Several subcontractors say there is another more likely explanation. The Obama Foundation’s reserve fund – touted as a $470 million financial safeguard to protect taxpayers in case the project got into financial difficulty – has only some $1 million in its bank account. Richard Epstein, a former law professor at the University of Chicago who advised Protect Our Parks on its lawsuit, says the Obama Foundation represents “the very opposite of transparency and disclosure. We were never able to get them to open their books.”
What we have learned from IRS filings is that former Obama Administration cronies are doing quite well for a decade of work in making the Center a reality. Valerie Jarrett, a top Obama aide, has made $740,000 a year as the Foundation’s CEO since 2021. There are 337 other employees, including several other former Obama officials making very comfortable salaries as executives.
The story of the House That Obama Built does not augur well for the next presidential library that is likely to open. Presidential son Eric Trump has released AI-generated renderings of what the proposed Trump Center in Miami will look like. They feature a towering glass skyscraper about 50 stories (450 feet) tall, topped with a spire bathed in red, white and blue color and emblazoned with a huge “TRUMP” sign.
It won’t duplicate the brutalist building at the heart of the Obama Center, but the proposed Colossus of Trump will no doubt write its own story of wretched excess.
It’s hard to.believe that before Franklin Roosevelt began the tradition of presidential libraries partly funded by the taxpayers, departing occupants of the Oval Office used to simply deposit their papers with the Library of Congress.
That building, with its massive 160-foot dome, painted murals and Tiffany-style glass accompaniments, was completed in 1897. It strikes me as the only essential building a democratic republic should need to honor its chief executives.
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