Barack Obama spent eight years telling America he was the champion of working people, small businesses, and the middle class. He was lying then, as his policies proved, and he’s lying now.
Adamson Plumbing Contractors is done. Owner Mike Owen has suspended operations, laid off nearly 30 employees, abandoned half a dozen other construction jobs in progress, and filed a $1.72 million lien against the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago — all because he claims the center stiffed him on nearly $4 million in payments he was owed.
“Laying off close to 30 people is something that no owner in our industry wants to do,” Owen told Fox News Digital. “It was just the final death blow to the company.”
The breaking point came with almost operatic timing. Owen’s crew had hung on through previous payment struggles, but when two plumbers were asked to perform last-minute work before the center’s grand opening, Owen agreed — on the condition that at least $100,000 of the disputed amount arrived first. He says it never did. The company was gone within weeks.
“We negotiated it in good faith,” Owen said. “Against my better judgment, I agreed. Not getting that large sum of money just kind of pulled the brakes on the train.”
This is not an isolated incident. RedState previously reported that multiple contractors and subcontractors are engaged in payment disputes with the Obama Center, with some claiming losses ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. What makes it worse — and what the mainstream media has been conspicuously quiet about — is that a significant number of those stiffed contractors are Black-owned businesses. A community leader put it plainly on social media: “So many of our black contractors are complaining they have not got their money. A lot of the black community and newspapers do not know.”
The man who spent two terms positioning himself as the avatar of equity and justice for black America built a monument to himself — and apparently didn’t pay the black contractors who built it.
There is a certain poetic consistency to all of this. Obama’s economic record in office was a masterclass in delivering less than advertised to the people he claimed to champion. The recovery from the 2008 recession was the slowest in post-war American history. The ACA reduced the equivalent of 2 million full-time jobs from the labor supply, per the Congressional Budget Office’s own estimate. The 2009 stimulus inflated job numbers by funding temporary positions — and when the counting method became embarrassing, his administration stopped counting actual jobs and started counting “lives touched,” which meant anyone who worked a single hour on a stimulus-funded contract.
He’s still touching lives. Just not in the way the press releases promised.
Thirty families in Chicago are now without a paycheck because a plumbing contractor trusted Barack Obama’s presidential monument to pay its bills.
The monument to hope and change apparently couldn’t find the change.
