DOJ Raids Guitar Company for "Illegal" WoodNo image available
DOJ Raids Guitar Company for "Illegal" Wood
Made popular 635 days ago in Politics
townhall.com — What are the "top priorities" of the Obama Justice Department these days?
1) Giving Mexican Drug Cartels thousands of illegal guns,
2) Raiding private businesses for perfectly legal and federally compliant wood
3) Killing the few manufacturing jobs left in America,

Despite President Obama constantly preaching about how we need to manufacture goods in the United States while he supports policies that make it impossible to do so. The Gibson raid is just one example.

Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson's chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company's manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. "The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier," he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle.

It isn't the first time that agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service have come knocking at the storied maker of such iconic instruments as the Les Paul electric guitar, the J-160E acoustic-electric John Lennon played, and essential jazz-boxes such as Charlie Christian's ES-150. In 2009 the Feds seized several guitars and pallets of wood from a Gibson factory, and both sides have been wrangling over the goods in a case with the delightful name "United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms."

The question in the first raid seemed to be whether Gibson had been buying illegally harvested hardwoods from protected forests, such as the Madagascar ebony that makes for such lovely fretboards. And if Gibson did knowingly import illegally harvested ebony from Madagascar, that wouldn't be a negligible offense. Peter Lowry, ebony and rosewood expert at the Missouri Botanical Garden, calls the Madagascar wood trade the "equivalent of Africa's blood diamonds." But with the new raid, the government seems to be questioning whether some wood sourced from India met every regulatory jot and tittle.

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Posted by james2044
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Is this something that needs to be done?
Yes, tihs is needed
43%
Lean to yes
1.9%
Not sure
0%
Lean to no
43%
No, this is playing politics and killing jobs
13%
This is not a scientific survey, click here to learn more. Results may not total 100% due to rounding and voting descrepencies.
User Comments
lastbaldeagle
Posted 634 days ago
0 up votes, 0 down votes
You would think that Holder would be concerned with ILLEGAL ALIENS, voter fraud, union intimidations, flash mobs, true hate crimes and the like, but I guess someone at Gibson has angered the Obama administration by witholding a campaign donation or something subversive along those lines.
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