The feds are going to seize guitars from musicians: AT GUN POINT!

[Radical Bucks]

Just when you think you have seen it all.

The feds are going to seize guitars from musicians:

http://www.ijreview.com/2012/05/5881...s-at-concerts/

[JFK]

WTF , what an abuse of power

[L-Pink]

Heh heh, he said illegal wood ...

.

[BIGTYMER]

Expect more stuff like this in the future.

NOAA raiding seafood distributors
FDA raiding Amish food stalls

And USF&W raiding a guitar manufacturer

[DWB]

LOL

Can you imagine what the next 20 years will look like?

[u-Bob]

[bronco67]

I have no idea what that article was about....

[MrCain]

Your tax dollars hard at work.

[ninavain]

can that video be even more boring

[u-Bob]

Originally Posted by bronco67

I have no idea what that article was about....

This thing has been going on for a while now.

There's Lacey Act which was originally intended to prevent the poaching of wildlife on American land (in the early 1900s). Thanks to radical environmentalists and agitators like Soros, it has been expanded as a way to police global trade in forest goods. The Lacey Act requires a documented chain of possession for anything sold in the US. It also requires US companies to obey local laws (or a US interpretation of those laws, even one that that country might not use).

In 2009 Gibson's offices were raided over wood from Madagascar. Gibson filed a lawsuit in protest and as a result was raided again. this time over wood from India. No charges have ever been filed in either of those cases. Each time the government said they were "simply investigating".

copy/paste from science20:

Juszkiewicz (the Gibson CEO) issued a statement saying the government contends "the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Department's interpretation of a law in India."

See what I mean about US courts interpreting foreign law under the Lacey Act?

The dispute is over Indian Ebony, all completely documented and legal except for this interpretation business. The Indian government "prohibits the export of sawn wood" but does not prohibit the export of veneers, sheets of woods that have already been worked on. The Feds say the wood was falsely declared as veneers because some assembly is still done in the U.S rather than India.

Worse, says Juszkiewicz, the government told him if he would just have all of the work outsourced to India, the problem would go away. Yes, we've had the worst employment month since World War II and someone in the government that created this mess is telling an American company to outsource more jobs.

[sperbonzo]

All these problems would all just go away if we would simply increase government regulation and give more power to internal agencies to write "regulations" that are enforced as laws without anyone ever voting on them.....


There is no problem that the government can't fix.





.

[Tom_PM]

Seems we need someone to get India to edit some law, or our guys should just chill out a bit.

I would never support seizing end-products from customers who bought them in good faith that they were made and sold in compliance with all applicable laws. That's just BS.

I didn't care for how some of the quotes in the article make it seem like it's all motivated by politics either. A second load of BS I'd have to say.

[Emil]

Originally Posted by DWB

LOL

Can you imagine what the next 20 years will look like?

I watched the movie 1984 yesterday so yeah, I can.

[EonBlue]

Toward the end of the article, the point is finally made:

First, the Obama Administration has a history of harassing non-union companies and even unionized companies that move their operations to right-to-work states. Second, Gibson?s closest competitor, Martin Guitars, is operated by a major Democrat-supporter and uses wood from the same sources as Gibson. But Martin has never been harassed.

[Robbie]

Originally Posted by eonblue

toward the end of the article, the point is finally made:

bingo!!!

[Tom_PM]

First, the Obama Administration has a history of harassing non-union companies and even unionized companies that move their operations to right-to-work states. Second, Gibson?s closest competitor, Martin Guitars, is operated by a major Democrat-supporter and uses wood from the same sources as Gibson. But Martin has never been harassed.

Ok. "harassing non-union companies, and even unionized companies that move.." Simple lesson here, when you're going to say both, you don't have to say either. You can simply say "harassing companies that move..". Unions are thrown into the comment on purpose as a polarizing element. It's bait. Also, there is nothing substantiating the claim itself, that there is a "history of harassing" such companies. Article should have cited 1 example, and/or listed "right-to-work" states.

Next point is really simple. Gibson is the most well known guitar maker in the US and perhaps the world. THAT is the reason why they get targetted. Attempting to link targetting with not donating to democrats is more bait.

It's trolling for predisposed people.

[Robbie]

PR-Tom...when this first happened a year ago there was a story on it on the news here. And the President of Gibson in Nashville, TN flat out said that the union had been threatening them and harassing them and used their influence from campaign contributions in Washington DC to make this happen.

This is a law that was NEVER intended to be used that way. But it's written in such a way that IF you wanted to put the squeeze on someone you could interpret it to do so.

And yes, union bosses are pissed at Gibson and want to make an example of them.

[Tom_PM]

Well, that's why I say they should have cited something. I wouldnt have known any of this precedent stuff.

I wonder if any union or anyone else had comments on what he refers to as threats and harassement? What could that even mean I wonder. Threat and harass are certainly fighting words. I'm sure the president of Gibson is not pleased to be saying them.

I think relative to other lobby groups and corporations, Gibson is not very large. It's hard to imagine a gov. risking it's reputation because some union leader gave the signal.

Congress could get some people in there to testify if there's corruption of that scale you would think.

[RebelR]

Originally Posted by Robbie

PR-Tom...when this first happened a year ago there was a story on it on the news here. And the President of Gibson in Nashville, TN flat out said that the union had been threatening them and harassing them and used their influence from campaign contributions in Washington DC to make this happen.

This is a law that was NEVER intended to be used that way. But it's written in such a way that IF you wanted to put the squeeze on someone you could interpret it to do so.

And yes, union bosses are pissed at Gibson and want to make an example of them.

That was the first thing that came to mind. This doesn't appear to be some arbitrary incident. They pissed in someone's conflakes and are being made an example of.

[u-Bob]

[Tom_PM]

Originally Posted by RebelR

That was the first thing that came to mind. This doesn't appear to be some arbitrary incident. They pissed in someone's conflakes and are being made an example of.

I'll be the first to say that if thats the case, they should totally subpeona each person in a position to have such influence immediately. And not later.. right now before the elections. Someone is on that as we speak because they would be some serious corrupt shit.

[blackmonsters]

Good move by the government on this one here!

Everybody knows that guitar playing leads to harder drugs.

Disclaimer : Air guitar is only played by those already on harder drugs.

[Sunny Day]

This happened in 2009 based on a law over 100 years ago

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...027859286.html

[Robbie]

Originally Posted by Sunny Day

This happened in 2009 based on a law over 100 years ago

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...027859286.html

No, that's the ORIGINAL story when the govt. FIRST went after Gibson Guitars right in the middle of the worst economy in our lifetimes. It was unreal.

[Rochard]

Yeah, clearly it's Obama's fault because he must have directly ordered the US Fish and Wildlife Service to raid them. Clearly Obama has a beef with them because they are union, not union, or Republican, or maybe Obama just likes Fender guitars.

People are fucking idiots, as if the President of the United States is directly ordering a government agency to raid and anjoy a company.

BTW, the Lacey Act of 1900 was last updated in May of 2008 - While Bush was in office.

[baddog]

AT GUN POINT!! - yeah, right.

[Sunny Day]

The sky is blue

IT'S OBAMA'S FAULT.

[AsianDivaGirlsWebDude]

Good read on the Gibson guitar imported wood controversy...

Do you have a sweet six-string? Should you be worried that it might include pieces that were illegally logged in a Malagasy rainforest, or snuck into the United States under false pretenses? Some recent federal enforcement efforts against the guitar maker Gibson suggest that contraband wood might still be finding its way into instruments, despite a prohibition.

In late August, the US Fish and Wildlife Service raided two of the company's Tennessee locations, in search of illegally imported wood. It was the second time in as many years that the company had been targeted for violations of the Lacey Act, a law that bans the import and sale of illegal wood products.

The first time the feds raided the company was in November 2009, when they seized a shipment of ebony from Madagascar used to make fingerboards. The August 24 seizure focused on ebony and rosewood from India. According to an affidavit from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the wood was mislabeled to hide the fact that it it was a type of wood that, under Indian law, is not supposed to be exported from the country.

Now here's where it gets weird: Over the past few weeks, Republicans in Congress have sought to make the CEO of Gibson Guitar the poster boy for government overreach. House Speaker John Boehner invited Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz as his guest for the president's jobs speech earlier this month. Tea partiers are holding a "We Stand With Gibson" rally next month. Another House Republican has accused the Obama administration of acting "like a bunch of cowboys" in the raid.

Conservative politicians have also been ginning up fears that the feds would come confiscate the guitars of unwitting rock stars and arrest them (they won't, as the Department of Justice and the Department of Interior emphasized in a letter last week).

All of it seems to miss the fact that the company was apparently violating a law against illegal logging that Congress passed on a bipartisan vote just three years go.

The Lacey Act was first passed in 1900 to prevent the illegal trade of wildlife, fish, and plants. In 2008, Congress updated the law to included wood and wood products (and other plants) that were obtained or sold illegally.

The law requires companies that import or export wood to follow the laws of the United States and the country where the logging took place. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) was the sponsor of the bill, but he had 10 Republican cosponsors on it, the support of the Bush administration, and widespread business backing. It was popular precisely because it was billed as a way to protect American logging companies and manufacturers from unfair competition from illegally logged timber.

"We had the whole hardwoods industry, we had labor support, environmental support, NGOs," Blumenauer told Mother Jones. "We heard from small manufacturers, talking about how business in the US could not compete with bandits in China using illegally harvested timber."

Last week, the World Future Council recognized the 2008 Lacey Act amendment with an award for being an exemplary policy solution. Other countries have modeled their laws on the US version. And it has helped contribute to a 22 percent decline in illegal logging around the world in the past decade.

But Juszkiewicz has gone on the offensive against efforts to enforce the law, accusing the government of "bullying Gibson without filing charges." He claims that the crackdown is jeopardizing jobs and costing money, and he has started an online petition to President Obama to defend the company.

While guitar makers are certainly not the biggest buyers of wood in the US, they do import some of the rarest and highest-quality woods. And quality guitars are both an expensive purchase and an emotional one, and the subject gets people a lot more riled up than, say, an illegally sourced wooden toilet seat. Which is why what Gibson has to say about the Lacey Act gets a lot of attention.

But this isn't the first time that Gibson has been targeted for Lacey Act violations. On both of the occasions in question, Gibson was dealing with the same German wood supplier. Perhaps the first raid should have been a warning? What's more, the Lacey Act makes it clear that buyers are expected to take "due care" to ensure that they are not receiving illegally sourced products. Information released so far suggests that the federal government believes that Gibson either did not undertake adequate measures to ensure that, or if it did, then it ignored problems.

And Gibson appears to be an outlier in the industry.

Last week, other guitar makers and groups like the Hardwood Federation (the country's largest forest product association) and the National Hardwood Lumber Association (the industry trade group) pushed back on Gibson's claims in a conference call with reporters. They argued that the Lacey Act has actually been beneficial for American companies, while putting in place standards to prevent illegal logging.

"We can be musicians, and we can be businessmen and users of wood, but we all have to work together," said Charlie Redden, the supply chain manager at Taylor Guitars. "We believe this is a way to control the demand side of illegal logging."

It's not just an environmental concern, either, said Scott Paul, director of the forest campaign at Greenpeace US. When it comes to illegal logging, he said, "we're [often] dealing with a part of the trade that is well documented as some of the worst of the worst organized crime, money laundering, arms trade, drugs trade, slavery." The act is designed to support the rule of law, particularly in countries that are unstable or that have a strong criminal element.

All this makes Gibson's complaints about the law seem more than a little out of tune.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I mostly play Fender guitars.



ADG

[Radical Bucks]

Originally Posted by blackmonsters

Good move by the government on this one here!

Everybody knows that guitar playing leads to harder drugs.

Disclaimer : Air guitar is only played by those already on harder drugs.

Maybe true LOL

We also need to ban all "Beats" in laptops and HP products cause we all know that RAP leads to murders and hardcore crack use.

DISCLAIMER: ALL THOSE WHO LISTEN TO RAP HAVE ALREADY COMMITTED MURDERS AND SMOKED A 100LBS OF CRACK

[Major (Tom)]

Originally Posted by PR_Tom

Ok. "harassing non-union companies, and even unionized companies that move.." Simple lesson here, when you're going to say both, you don't have to say either. You can simply say "harassing companies that move..". Unions are thrown into the comment on purpose as a polarizing element. It's bait. Also, there is nothing substantiating the claim itself, that there is a "history of harassing" such companies. Article should have cited 1 example, and/or listed "right-to-work" states.

Next point is really simple. Gibson is the most well known guitar maker in the US and perhaps the world. THAT is the reason why they get targetted. Attempting to link targetting with not donating to democrats is more bait.

It's trolling for predisposed people.

Someone has their logic detector set to fine tune.
I read shit the same way.
ds