While 30 men in SWAT attire dispatched from Homeland Security and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cart away about half a million dollars of wood and guitars, seven armed agents interrogate an employee without benefit of a lawyer. The next day Juszkiewicz receives a letter warning that he cannot touch any guitar left in the plant, under threat of being charged with a separate federal offense for each “violation,” punishable by a jail term.
[…]
Gibson’s very success made it a fat target for federal prosecutors, whom Juszkiewicz alleges were operating at the behest of lumber unions and environmental pressure groups seeking to kill the market for lumber imports. “This case was not about conservation,” he says. “It was basically protectionism.”
Two months before the raid, lobbyists slipped some arcane supply-chain reporting provisions into an extension of the Lacey Act of 1900 that changed the technical definition of “fingerboard blanks,” which are legal to import.
With no clear legal standards, a sealed warrant the company has not been allowed to see too this day, no formal charges filed, and the threat of a prison term hanging over any executive who does not take “due care” to abide by this absurdly vague law, Gibson settled. “You’re fighting a very well organized political machine in the unions,” Juszkiewicz concluded. “And the conservation guys have sort of gone along.” Hey, what’s not to like about $50,000?
Forward.
So they basically stole the resources of this business and took into custody a private citizen without due process.
One of these days, one of these days……..
Ah but Gibson got a little back. Go to their website (http://www2.gibson.com/Gibson.aspx) and check under “Products” and look for the Les Paul Government Series. A little poke in the eye at the bureaucratic sh-theads.
What corrupt filth.
And how is this any different than what happened in the Soviet Union? or any other fascist state? “land of the Free…” not so much anymore.
Nice looking guitar although I prefer a maple neck.
Here is a great quote from the comments on the Gibson site.
“i would like one with ivory frets and a seal skin hardcase”.
You’re right, Chris. It isn’t any different. It’s no wonder that economic growth in the US is microscopic. Under such a business climate, who in their right mind is going to invest in anything that isn’t a preferred activity sanctioned by the state, aka crony capitalism?
It is not really a question of reforming the system. It’s now really a question of how much of the apparatus of the state must be dismantled.
Law via regulation is the problem. Ever growing bureaucracies require ever growing regulations. Bureaucratic tyranny. Fahrenheit 451 anyone?
You are right, and cgh had a great followup.
Communism is always bad, even when disguised as “progressive”.
Ken, in the mid-1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev and a handful of other top Politburo leaders all agreed that the Soviet Union was incredibly badly run. They were still diehard Communists but wanted the system to run much more honestly, effectively and fairly than the corrupt collapsing mess it had become under Brezhnev in the 1960s and ’70s. Hence, glasnost and perestroika.
The reform effort failed, massively, and the collapse of Soviet Union into what we now see as Bonapartism. Same thing happened in France. The inital goal of the revolution in 1788-90 was to reform thoroughly the French monarchy. It failed. And the revolutionary government failed as well. The result was Bonapartism.
After a certain point, as the history of the Roman Empire showed and as the Young Turk Revolution demonstrated, a political system cannot be meaningfully reformed. It can only be dynamited to the ground and rebuilt essentially from scratch. It is no longer clear to me that meaningful democracy and the rule of constitutional law can ever be restored to the United States without the dismantling of most or all of its governing and administrative apparatus.
I am becoming increasingly convinced that 1984 and Starship Troopers read back-to-back chart the course of Western civilization.
Wait until you see what the EPA has up its sleeve for next week… puddles, CO2… everything.
Somewhat troubled that I agree with cgh regarding the USA not being able to pull out of its current tailspin.
Rick, quick question…
I’m lusting after a Strat American Deluxe HSS. Rosewood or maple is the issue that has me “fretting” this somewhat.
You like maple, likely you own a Strat or Telly, why your preference?
“Bonapartism”, that is a good word to describe what happened. You describe Russia well. Ukraine on the other hand has been looted by corrupt self-serving oligarch politicians pretending to be democrats.
It may well come to that in the US as the people, the media and the educational institutions have become too corrupted to clean up the corruption in the government. But what will come first, a dictatorship of the Marxist left or directly into Bonapartism.
Many like Trudeau and May seem to want a dictatorship of the left.
Obama’s civilian army at work.
Wait till the 2016 elections they will be out in force.
Ken, all dictatorships are varying degrees of ghastly, regardless of whether they are left or right in origin. Look at Oliver Cromwell; one of the greatest liberators from tyrranical government in the past thousand years in English history. And yet, forced to become ‘Lord Protector’ of England because of the willingness of the ruling class to revert England back to absolute monarchy the moment the Army’s back was turned. There are, in a few ways, odd parallels between Cromwell and Kemal Ataturk.
Bonapartism by the way is a well established term in political science. It describes the outcome of a revolution resulting in a strong-man takeover, either from the left or the right, of the state because of the inability of the revolutionaries to organize a proper government. France (Napoleon), Russia (Lenin), Turkey (Ataturk), Italy (Mussolini), Germany (the baddest of them all) and China (Mao) all ended up with absolute dictators because of the failure of the revolutionaries to organize an effective and efficient democratic government. Only the US escaped that historical trap.
Yes, many of our policians want a more dictatorial government. It’s an old phenomenon of needing to “march the Masses in the direction they need to go, even if they don’t yet see that it’s good for them.”
Gotta love the Obama War on Middle America. Guitars first then Guns???
I have 2 tele’s and 1 strat. Teles have maple necks. Strat has rosewood. Prefer the tele’s.
Both my Gibsons have rosewood necks which I don’t mind on them.
Yeah well, I have always alleged that the yanks are revolting people…..why haven’t they?
Rick, thanks for the feedback. I currently have a Strat American Standard, looking to upgrade.
Now all I have to do is get over being green with envy of your collection!
🙂
Fascism by any other name would smell as foul.
It ain’t necessarily the politicians (sometimes), The paper pushing bureaucrats at all these government agencies are like kids in a candy store when it comes to these asinine regulations.
No CDF (Common Dog F*ck) is ever used. Gibson, and a lot of other businesses jump through all the hoops and yet still get dinged on some technicality or new rule. To tell a business that the rules have changed and from now on you should do xyz would be too easy. Busting some normally law abiding business seems to ensure a promotion in the simple service.
Ever wonder why the Agriculture department recently procured body armour and high power ammunition?
Too hooked on bread and circuses.
So if you happen to cross the U.S. border and in your guitar case is a Gibson guitar, do you get arrested and Homeland Security places you on the “no fly list?
If the Gibson guitar folk and C&W singers take up the cause, there will be more anit-Obama songs on youtube than you can count.
If a few thousand Gibson guitar toting protestors march, while playing their guitars, will the SWAT/RIOT squads attack.
That would make the news all over the world.
Al in Cranbrook, Actually I own Epiphone guitars (a subsidiary of Gibson), a Les Paul, Wildkat and Sheraton II. Love the tones….
Actually there was some concern about that due to the fact that some older guitars had wood that is currently on the banned products list. Not sure if it’s part of the CITES convention or some other, but apparently alot of musicians had to obtain waivers to travel with their instruments, even though they were legally produced and sold at the time.
Rick…
A lot of players think the Epiphone is every bit as good as their parent Gibsons. I have a Parker PM20-Pro, Korean, that plays great, and a vintage Swedish Hagstrom H-ll-N bought new circa 1971 that was my first relatively serious guitar. For some aging Boomers it takes a Harley. I think Strats are a lot safer…and definitely cheaper.
Businesses face numerous and all types of challenges on a daily basis. Some of the comments here seem to be somewhat xenophobic in nature. It’s like America is evolving into a liberal-socialist malaise where special interest lobbyists are causing its rapid descent into sharia law. That may well be the case but the fact remains; Gibson bought some pretty cheap advertising. If it spent $50K of its advertising budget doing conventional promotion the result would likely have been far less effective.
The lobbyists clearly have a skewed agenda but in their zeal to vent their misdirected anger they gave Gibson publicity you can’t buy at any price. Stupid liberal-socialists!
Alberta would love to have Gibson move here, after all the word on the street is we don’t care about the environment, just don’t expect much wood from BC, its all full of pine beetle holes.
The worst part of all of this? The absolute worst part?
That Gibson – having supposedly violated a rule of accountants and administrators – was attacked by fully-armed SWAT-goons, who pointed their loaded weapons at Americans who were simply at work, doing their jobs.
There needs to be a resurgence of fear amongst those goons. Good people really ought to be shooting back.
“Cops” used to be brave and respected members of society who took on risks. Now, they simply kill everyone who might possibly be a risk to them first, and then go in and arrest the witnesses.
Compare the number of cops killed on duty to the number of people that cops blow away. Face it – they’ve simply become one more of the many gangs that honest people must fear.zamp4w