Obama Steals Away $244 Million in Tax Dollars from Bankrupt Illinois for His ‘Private’ Museum, aka MONUMENT TO HIMSELF!
"So, once again we see how Obama lies and that Illinois is thoroughly corrupt."
Barack Obama sold his fake presidential library as a “private” project that would not require any state tax money. But now it appears that his facility has gotten $244 million in tax dollars already. And who knows how much more will be thrown at his fake library in the near future?
First of all, Obama’s presidential library is not a “library.” Unlike other presidential libraries where the president’s papers, books, and records are stored in the facility bearing his name, the “Obama Center” will not have any of Obama’s papers. None.
So, Obama’s “center” was a bait and switch on that level from the beginning. Instead of housing his papers and serving as a place for scholars to study his presidency, the “Obama Center” will be an overgrown “community center” and gift shop.
But from the beginning he said it would never require a cent in federal or state tax dollars.
He lied.
As Thomas Lifson reports:
Unfortunately, the notion that taxpayers would be unmolested is fake news.
Start with the acres of city-owned park land on the shore of Lake Michigan that Chicago handed over as a gift, in apparent violation of law.
The group Protect Our Parks has sued to prevent the giveaway, and cites this Illinois State Law.
But the taxpayer-owned parkland is but one aspect of the rape of the taxpayers.
The new Illinois state budget artfully obscures the estimated $244 million dollars that Land of Lincoln taxpayers will be giving to make the project happen.
Lifson points to a report by the Illinois Policy Institute which reported:
Projects relevant to the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center in Chicago’s Jackson Park will cost taxpayers $224 million, according to the Washington Examiner.
This includes $174 million for roadwork in and around Jackson Park and $50 million for renovations to the Garfield Green Line station, two miles from the presidential center.
Illinois taxpayers will be on the hook for $199 million of the total cost, with $25 million of the Garfield station renovations funded through a federal grant, according to the Washington Examiner.
Unfortunately, Illinois taxpayers would have no way of knowing this money was flowing to the presidential project from looking at the state’s 1,245-page budget, which makes no mention of the Obama Presidential Center.
That spending is hidden, but has been confirmed by political figures such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Naturally, the budgeting and negotiations took place behind closed doors and was not open for the people of Illinois to see or approve.
So, once again we see how Obama lies and that Illinois is thoroughly corrupt.
Obama’s Presidential Library Is Change Chicagoans Can’t Believe In
In fact, it’s not even really a ‘library’ at all.
Something fascinating is happening in Chicago. When Barack Obama became president, the city was ebullient; he was, after all, a favorite son, and he’d promised to deliver the liberal policies beloved by Chicagoans.
But now, nearly nine years later, city residents find themselves at odds with Obama over the plans for his presidential library.
In its initial bid for the right to host the library, put forth on behalf of the city, the University of Chicago offered large tracts of idyllic land in Washington Park and Jackson Park as two potential sites. Almost immediately, the people of those parks’ districts began scratching their heads. “Why not build it in one of the many blighted areas?” they asked. “Why are you taking a huge chunk of our parks?” Obama’s response was essentially an ultimatum: If the library couldn’t be built in a Chicago park, he’d take it to Honolulu or New York City.
After Obama selected Chicago and the Jackson Park site, protests began to grow.
Residents of the park’s district, Woodlawn, took to local government and the op-ed pages of the city’s papers to express their fear that the project would rapidly gentrify the minority-majority area, force out longtime residents, and ruin the park’s role as a community gathering place.
In May of this year, protesters began a campaign to implore the Obama Foundation, the group overseeing the library’s construction, to sign a community benefit agreement (CBA), which would commit the Foundation to setting aside jobs for residents around the library, protecting low-income housing, supporting black-owned businesses, and strengthening neighborhood schools. The Foundation refused, and when a resident asked Obama himself to sign the agreement at a September public meeting about the library, Obama refused as well.
The issue many Chicagoans take with the library isn’t simply the absent CBA or the use of park land, but the way the Foundation has steamrolled them at every stage of the process. And it’s hard for them to ignore the irony underpinning the whole ordeal: Obama’s stated purpose for his library is to inspire visitors and locals “to make a positive change in their communities,” yet the project has already begun to alienate the very community it’s meant to change.
It seems Obama is once again taking executive power for granted:
His library will neither contain his presidential documents, which have all been digitized, nor be administered by the National Archives and Records Administration — the two elements required of a presidential library.
In fact, the Obama Foundation has named it the Obama Presidential “Center,” and the only books it might contain would come from the Chicago Public Library.
In other words, it’s not really a presidential library at all.
It is, in Obama’s words, a “gift to the community” that will spread his message. The Foundation explains this on its website by pointing out that the center itself will be a living testament to the values of Obama’s presidency. It boasts that the center’s design takes into account the expressed views of “Chicagoans like you,” and that the Foundation will “continue to ask for and incorporate your feedback every step of the way.”
When it’s finished, the center will include a community garden, a “test kitchen,” and a recording studio where visitors will be able to “create their own songs, speeches, short films, and interviews,” according to the Foundation’s website. But neighborhood residents have said countless times that they don’t want any of that. They want their public park, their low-cost housing, and their culture. They want their elected officials to listen when they bang their fists on the table.
Instead, they’re getting change they can’t believe in.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/12/barack...residents/
Obama's presidential library ripped as 'ugly waste of taxpayer resources' by Chicagoans
January 29, 2018
Chicagoans in droves are venting their displeasure with former President Barack Obama’s planned library, calling it an “ugly waste of taxpayer resources” and a “dangerous precedent” for the preservation of historic public parklands.
Recent letters to the editor published in the Chicago Tribune overwhelmingly have panned the Obama Presidential Center, which will consume nearly 20 acres from historic Jackson Park and cost taxpayers $100 million in renovations to the surrounding area.
In a letter published Jan. 26, John Deal of Dolton, Illinois, called the egg-shaped main tower and surrounding buildings “garish monstrosities that ruin the esthetics of the surrounding parkland stolen from the taxpaying public.”
“Does anyone else think the artist’s rendering of the proposed Obama Presidential Center campus is ugly?” Mr. Deal asked.
Jerry Bruti of Chicago expressed outrage that the library is “taking valuable and irreplaceable park land that belongs to all the people of Chicago” in order to erect an “empty monumental edifice.”
“My suggestion: Build the Obama Presidential Center on vacant land that is not already dedicated as parkland, perhaps in an area that needs rejuvenation; and while at it, maybe spend those millions of dollars to build and endow a state-of-the-art school, library, affordable housing or other facility that the people of Chicago really need and can use to improve their quality of life,” Mr. Bruti wrote in the letter published Jan. 28.
Plans for the library elicited controversy on the South Side even before the University of Chicago won the bid to host the facility in 2015.
Preservationists point out that Jackson Park, part of Chicago’s public park system, was originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the landscape architects behind New York’s famed Central Park.
Then came news that the center will not be Mr. Obama’s official presidential library and will not house documents from the Obama White House .
Two-hundred professors at the University of Chicago, where Mr. Obama lectured on constitutional law for more than a decade, signed a public letter this month denouncing the plans for the library as “socially regressive.” Tb]
They argued the library’s lush Jackson Park location, right on the lakefront, does little to rejuvenate Chicago’s economically underserved neighborhoods.
“We are concerned that these are not the best ways to use public funds to invest in the future of Chicago,” the professors wrote.
Blair Kamin, the Tribune’s architecture critic, wrote a Jan. 22 column defending the library on both historic and economic grounds. He said rhetoric about the destruction of Jackson Park is “ludicrous” and approvingly cited Obama Foundation estimates that the center will have a $2.1 billion economic impact over 10 years.
He was less enthusiastic about the center’s main tower, which he called “bulky” and “severe,” but argued that “parks need to evolve” and implored opponents of the center to expand their “narrow esthetic perspective.”
“Improve the Obama center plans,” Mr. Kamin concluded. “Don’t reject them.”
In response to Mr. Kamin’s review, W.J.T. Mitchell, a professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago, penned a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune on Jan. 25. He said the university’s public letter, which he signed, represents a “broad consensus” of scholars who represent “all the disciplines of the arts and sciences.”
“Conservative estimates of the costs of what Kamin calls an improvement to Jackson Park run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, to be paid by the taxpayers of Chicago,”
Mr. Mitchell wrote. “The only accomplishment of this ‘improvement’ will be to make commuter traffic just a little bit worse than it is now, while defacing a magnificent historical landmark.”In a Jan. 25 letter to the editor, Charles A. Birnbaum, president of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that opposes the center’s construction, argued the plans for the library “suffer from a lack of transparency,” pointing out that the University of Chicago has not made the winning bid for the Obama Presidential Center public.
“What has gotten lost in the discussion is why the University of Chicago, which won the contest to host the center, is not using any of its own land for the project,” Mr. Birnbaum wrote.
The university’s winning bid to host the center — which has never been made public — is remarkable because the university has no ‘skin in the game,’ i.e., none of the property it owns would be used for the center. Instead, the university demanded that Chicagoans give away public parkland listed in the National Register of Historic Places.”
“Chicago should relocate or scrap the Obama Center,” Mr. Falk wrote in the Jan. 23 letter. “If scrapped, the tens of millions of tax dollars not spent on infrastructure for the center would pay for a simple Obama monument and a plaque harmlessly placed on an acre in Jackson Park.”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan...waste-taxp
$1 billion for Obama's library? Stop this presidential trend [/b
Recently it was revealed that President Barack Obama intends to raise $1 billion to build his library and fund the associated endowment. Let me say this again: The president intends to raise one billion dollars for his library.
The collective public response to this news was a big ho-hum. Everyone simply assumes former presidents will build monuments to themselves. But despite being a student of presidential history and a supporter of Obama, I think it's time to put an end to this modern-day version of the Egyptian pyramids.
George W. Bush raised $500 million to build and endow his shrine. And now Obama is set to double that mark. So, in a span of about 60 years, the price of a presidential library has gone from less than $2 million to $1 billion and counting.
Where does this end? Would a President Hillary Clinton seek to top both her predecessor and her husband with a $2 billion extravaganza in New York? Or would a President Donald Trump ... OK, we know the kind of facility he would build.
The only answer is to put an end to this nonsense. The thoughtful, scholarly study of the presidency is important. So, too, is the celebration of a president by the community or state that launched his or her career. But $1 billion edifices are not just too expensive, they also stand in conflict with the very idea of citizen leaders.
The next president should pledge that he or she will not build a bricks-and-mortar library. Instead, he or she should create the first totally virtual library. The critical objectives of scholarship and transparency, as promoted by Roosevelt and Truman, would still be honored. But the unseemly and irresponsible shilling by former presidents would come to an end.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/co...story.html [/b
Madigan wants taxpayers to fund Obama library
House Speaker Michael Madigan confirmed Wednesday he would support a measure to use taxpayer funds to help construct former president Barack Obama's presidential library in Chicago.
"I would be supportive of state support in help for the Obama library," Madigan said outside of a private political fundraiser in Decatur. Drawing comparisons to Springfield's Abraham Lincoln Museum and Library, Madigan said, "I think the Obama library is going to be a very significant asset for the state of Illinois."
Some Republicans disapprove of the idea, especially when the state continues to hold the nation's worst credit rating.
"President Clinton, President Bush, they used private funds," Rep. Bill Mitchell said.
The Decatur Republican plans to retire after twenty years in the legislature, during which time he spent several years in the same statehouse as former state senator Obama. Mitchell claims his objections are neither personal nor partisan, but rather that "President Obama is a good fundraiser. He can raise $100 million I'm sure within 12 months."
https://www.wcia.com/news/local-news/madigan-.../826345030
"So, once again we see how Obama lies and that Illinois is thoroughly corrupt."
Barack Obama sold his fake presidential library as a “private” project that would not require any state tax money. But now it appears that his facility has gotten $244 million in tax dollars already. And who knows how much more will be thrown at his fake library in the near future?
First of all, Obama’s presidential library is not a “library.” Unlike other presidential libraries where the president’s papers, books, and records are stored in the facility bearing his name, the “Obama Center” will not have any of Obama’s papers. None.
So, Obama’s “center” was a bait and switch on that level from the beginning. Instead of housing his papers and serving as a place for scholars to study his presidency, the “Obama Center” will be an overgrown “community center” and gift shop.
But from the beginning he said it would never require a cent in federal or state tax dollars.
He lied.
As Thomas Lifson reports:
Unfortunately, the notion that taxpayers would be unmolested is fake news.
Start with the acres of city-owned park land on the shore of Lake Michigan that Chicago handed over as a gift, in apparent violation of law.
The group Protect Our Parks has sued to prevent the giveaway, and cites this Illinois State Law.
But the taxpayer-owned parkland is but one aspect of the rape of the taxpayers.
The new Illinois state budget artfully obscures the estimated $244 million dollars that Land of Lincoln taxpayers will be giving to make the project happen.
Lifson points to a report by the Illinois Policy Institute which reported:
Projects relevant to the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center in Chicago’s Jackson Park will cost taxpayers $224 million, according to the Washington Examiner.
This includes $174 million for roadwork in and around Jackson Park and $50 million for renovations to the Garfield Green Line station, two miles from the presidential center.
Illinois taxpayers will be on the hook for $199 million of the total cost, with $25 million of the Garfield station renovations funded through a federal grant, according to the Washington Examiner.
Unfortunately, Illinois taxpayers would have no way of knowing this money was flowing to the presidential project from looking at the state’s 1,245-page budget, which makes no mention of the Obama Presidential Center.
That spending is hidden, but has been confirmed by political figures such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Naturally, the budgeting and negotiations took place behind closed doors and was not open for the people of Illinois to see or approve.
So, once again we see how Obama lies and that Illinois is thoroughly corrupt.
Obama’s Presidential Library Is Change Chicagoans Can’t Believe In
In fact, it’s not even really a ‘library’ at all.
Something fascinating is happening in Chicago. When Barack Obama became president, the city was ebullient; he was, after all, a favorite son, and he’d promised to deliver the liberal policies beloved by Chicagoans.
But now, nearly nine years later, city residents find themselves at odds with Obama over the plans for his presidential library.
In its initial bid for the right to host the library, put forth on behalf of the city, the University of Chicago offered large tracts of idyllic land in Washington Park and Jackson Park as two potential sites. Almost immediately, the people of those parks’ districts began scratching their heads. “Why not build it in one of the many blighted areas?” they asked. “Why are you taking a huge chunk of our parks?” Obama’s response was essentially an ultimatum: If the library couldn’t be built in a Chicago park, he’d take it to Honolulu or New York City.
After Obama selected Chicago and the Jackson Park site, protests began to grow.
Residents of the park’s district, Woodlawn, took to local government and the op-ed pages of the city’s papers to express their fear that the project would rapidly gentrify the minority-majority area, force out longtime residents, and ruin the park’s role as a community gathering place.
In May of this year, protesters began a campaign to implore the Obama Foundation, the group overseeing the library’s construction, to sign a community benefit agreement (CBA), which would commit the Foundation to setting aside jobs for residents around the library, protecting low-income housing, supporting black-owned businesses, and strengthening neighborhood schools. The Foundation refused, and when a resident asked Obama himself to sign the agreement at a September public meeting about the library, Obama refused as well.
The issue many Chicagoans take with the library isn’t simply the absent CBA or the use of park land, but the way the Foundation has steamrolled them at every stage of the process. And it’s hard for them to ignore the irony underpinning the whole ordeal: Obama’s stated purpose for his library is to inspire visitors and locals “to make a positive change in their communities,” yet the project has already begun to alienate the very community it’s meant to change.
It seems Obama is once again taking executive power for granted:
His library will neither contain his presidential documents, which have all been digitized, nor be administered by the National Archives and Records Administration — the two elements required of a presidential library.
In fact, the Obama Foundation has named it the Obama Presidential “Center,” and the only books it might contain would come from the Chicago Public Library.
In other words, it’s not really a presidential library at all.
It is, in Obama’s words, a “gift to the community” that will spread his message. The Foundation explains this on its website by pointing out that the center itself will be a living testament to the values of Obama’s presidency. It boasts that the center’s design takes into account the expressed views of “Chicagoans like you,” and that the Foundation will “continue to ask for and incorporate your feedback every step of the way.”
When it’s finished, the center will include a community garden, a “test kitchen,” and a recording studio where visitors will be able to “create their own songs, speeches, short films, and interviews,” according to the Foundation’s website. But neighborhood residents have said countless times that they don’t want any of that. They want their public park, their low-cost housing, and their culture. They want their elected officials to listen when they bang their fists on the table.
Instead, they’re getting change they can’t believe in.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/12/barack...residents/
Obama's presidential library ripped as 'ugly waste of taxpayer resources' by Chicagoans
January 29, 2018
Chicagoans in droves are venting their displeasure with former President Barack Obama’s planned library, calling it an “ugly waste of taxpayer resources” and a “dangerous precedent” for the preservation of historic public parklands.
Recent letters to the editor published in the Chicago Tribune overwhelmingly have panned the Obama Presidential Center, which will consume nearly 20 acres from historic Jackson Park and cost taxpayers $100 million in renovations to the surrounding area.
In a letter published Jan. 26, John Deal of Dolton, Illinois, called the egg-shaped main tower and surrounding buildings “garish monstrosities that ruin the esthetics of the surrounding parkland stolen from the taxpaying public.”
“Does anyone else think the artist’s rendering of the proposed Obama Presidential Center campus is ugly?” Mr. Deal asked.
Jerry Bruti of Chicago expressed outrage that the library is “taking valuable and irreplaceable park land that belongs to all the people of Chicago” in order to erect an “empty monumental edifice.”
“My suggestion: Build the Obama Presidential Center on vacant land that is not already dedicated as parkland, perhaps in an area that needs rejuvenation; and while at it, maybe spend those millions of dollars to build and endow a state-of-the-art school, library, affordable housing or other facility that the people of Chicago really need and can use to improve their quality of life,” Mr. Bruti wrote in the letter published Jan. 28.
Plans for the library elicited controversy on the South Side even before the University of Chicago won the bid to host the facility in 2015.
Preservationists point out that Jackson Park, part of Chicago’s public park system, was originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the landscape architects behind New York’s famed Central Park.
Then came news that the center will not be Mr. Obama’s official presidential library and will not house documents from the Obama White House .
Two-hundred professors at the University of Chicago, where Mr. Obama lectured on constitutional law for more than a decade, signed a public letter this month denouncing the plans for the library as “socially regressive.” Tb]
They argued the library’s lush Jackson Park location, right on the lakefront, does little to rejuvenate Chicago’s economically underserved neighborhoods.
“We are concerned that these are not the best ways to use public funds to invest in the future of Chicago,” the professors wrote.
Blair Kamin, the Tribune’s architecture critic, wrote a Jan. 22 column defending the library on both historic and economic grounds. He said rhetoric about the destruction of Jackson Park is “ludicrous” and approvingly cited Obama Foundation estimates that the center will have a $2.1 billion economic impact over 10 years.
He was less enthusiastic about the center’s main tower, which he called “bulky” and “severe,” but argued that “parks need to evolve” and implored opponents of the center to expand their “narrow esthetic perspective.”
“Improve the Obama center plans,” Mr. Kamin concluded. “Don’t reject them.”
In response to Mr. Kamin’s review, W.J.T. Mitchell, a professor of English and art history at the University of Chicago, penned a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune on Jan. 25. He said the university’s public letter, which he signed, represents a “broad consensus” of scholars who represent “all the disciplines of the arts and sciences.”
“Conservative estimates of the costs of what Kamin calls an improvement to Jackson Park run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, to be paid by the taxpayers of Chicago,”
Mr. Mitchell wrote. “The only accomplishment of this ‘improvement’ will be to make commuter traffic just a little bit worse than it is now, while defacing a magnificent historical landmark.”In a Jan. 25 letter to the editor, Charles A. Birnbaum, president of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that opposes the center’s construction, argued the plans for the library “suffer from a lack of transparency,” pointing out that the University of Chicago has not made the winning bid for the Obama Presidential Center public.
“What has gotten lost in the discussion is why the University of Chicago, which won the contest to host the center, is not using any of its own land for the project,” Mr. Birnbaum wrote.
The university’s winning bid to host the center — which has never been made public — is remarkable because the university has no ‘skin in the game,’ i.e., none of the property it owns would be used for the center. Instead, the university demanded that Chicagoans give away public parkland listed in the National Register of Historic Places.”
“Chicago should relocate or scrap the Obama Center,” Mr. Falk wrote in the Jan. 23 letter. “If scrapped, the tens of millions of tax dollars not spent on infrastructure for the center would pay for a simple Obama monument and a plaque harmlessly placed on an acre in Jackson Park.”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan...waste-taxp
$1 billion for Obama's library? Stop this presidential trend [/b
Recently it was revealed that President Barack Obama intends to raise $1 billion to build his library and fund the associated endowment. Let me say this again: The president intends to raise one billion dollars for his library.
The collective public response to this news was a big ho-hum. Everyone simply assumes former presidents will build monuments to themselves. But despite being a student of presidential history and a supporter of Obama, I think it's time to put an end to this modern-day version of the Egyptian pyramids.
George W. Bush raised $500 million to build and endow his shrine. And now Obama is set to double that mark. So, in a span of about 60 years, the price of a presidential library has gone from less than $2 million to $1 billion and counting.
Where does this end? Would a President Hillary Clinton seek to top both her predecessor and her husband with a $2 billion extravaganza in New York? Or would a President Donald Trump ... OK, we know the kind of facility he would build.
The only answer is to put an end to this nonsense. The thoughtful, scholarly study of the presidency is important. So, too, is the celebration of a president by the community or state that launched his or her career. But $1 billion edifices are not just too expensive, they also stand in conflict with the very idea of citizen leaders.
The next president should pledge that he or she will not build a bricks-and-mortar library. Instead, he or she should create the first totally virtual library. The critical objectives of scholarship and transparency, as promoted by Roosevelt and Truman, would still be honored. But the unseemly and irresponsible shilling by former presidents would come to an end.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/co...story.html [/b
Madigan wants taxpayers to fund Obama library
House Speaker Michael Madigan confirmed Wednesday he would support a measure to use taxpayer funds to help construct former president Barack Obama's presidential library in Chicago.
"I would be supportive of state support in help for the Obama library," Madigan said outside of a private political fundraiser in Decatur. Drawing comparisons to Springfield's Abraham Lincoln Museum and Library, Madigan said, "I think the Obama library is going to be a very significant asset for the state of Illinois."
Some Republicans disapprove of the idea, especially when the state continues to hold the nation's worst credit rating.
"President Clinton, President Bush, they used private funds," Rep. Bill Mitchell said.
The Decatur Republican plans to retire after twenty years in the legislature, during which time he spent several years in the same statehouse as former state senator Obama. Mitchell claims his objections are neither personal nor partisan, but rather that "President Obama is a good fundraiser. He can raise $100 million I'm sure within 12 months."
https://www.wcia.com/news/local-news/madigan-.../826345030
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