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The music world stand up against overzealous Feds? This is 2011, when Fascism is cool, not 1968 when rock -n- roll meant freedom — as opposed to Bigger, Fatter, Government.
Gisbon CEO Hanry Juszkiewicz contributes to conservative candidates, so that probably won’t endear him to the music world either, no matter how righteous his cause.
Those contributions, however, might help to explain this absurd raid:
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.
The aptly title ObamaFail blog has more:
It seems this is a case of the Obama DOJ intimidating an American business into complying with what it perceives to be international law.
The core issue is Gibson’s purchase of wood for use in guitar fingerboards. The wood is not raw, nor is it finished. Juszkiewicz explains that the wood is purchased from Madagascar when it is “two-thirds of the way” finished. Once purchased, the wood is brought to America, where it is finished by American workers.
Michelle Malkin summarizes the story as well as anyone and Dana Loesch’s Twitter-taunts of Gibson-wielding artists is about as good as it gets.
On the other hand, does this sudden interest from the Feds have more to do with the fact that Gibson is non-union and relocated to Tennessee, a right to work state?