Federal authorities entered the warehouse brandishing automatic weapons. Employees were separated and interrogated. The Fed seized over half a million dollars of product.
What was the Obama Administration after? Weapons grade plutonium? Heroin? No…something much more sinister.
Guitar fingerboards.
In apparent effort to lose the musician vote, the Obama Administration has launched not one but TWO Kafkaesque raids on one of America’s iconic brands – Gibson guitars, makers of such classis instruments as the Les Paul, SG, ES-335 and the brand new Firebird X.
Read the rest here. It is well worth the read.
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My oldest son has a les Paul… 4 listens on youtube and he can play it. God but he will have fun with that in college…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVnm3jiF5Hw
Me playing my Les Paul.
This is the second raid at Gibson. No wrongdoing found first time, now a second raid.
IF, big if, Gibson was shipping woods via a third party to India, repackaging them, and “certifying” them via India law… well Jake and I may get to do an LBO after all!
next,they gonna bang on my door because i own parade sticks from hondouras,of rose wood,way before there was a stewardship of forestry on the international scale. so go to the ludwig factory and shut them down because throughout the last century they have been building marimba’s from rose wood as well. wtf is putting it mildly……obama didnt have my vote the first time,and he sure the fuck isnt going to have it this time.
drummer:
Reagan signed (1981) the law making importation and trade of the wood illegal if it was not legally harvested in the country of origin.
Bush signed (2008) the law that let US companies use the “gee, I had no idea” free pass to import illegal wood.
Companies which did not knowingly import or trade in illegal wood, and which exercised “due care” to make sure their wood was legal face a whopping maximum fine of $250, plus potential forfeiture of the illegal material.
Correction:
Bush signed the law that eliminated the “gee I had no idea the wood was illegal” excuse for importing illegal wood and made companies responsible for exercising due care.
What made the raids Kafkaesque?
The search warrants? The “no comment” about an ongoing investigation?
Did the agents dress up as large beetles?
@ ottnott.having run a world renown drum shop in 1978 i was able to get outlawed trinkits that werent allowed out of their respective countries due to not having trade relations with the u.s. in the first place.i have one of the first “china type” wuhan cymbals that were snuck into the us back in “79”.just owning that could have put me in jail.nothing came out of china culture wise to any part of the globe,especially if they were not a trading partner with them.and at the time we didnt trade with china.
The law being enforced in the article above applies only to animal and plant products.
Don’t relax, though. I’m sure the Feds are working late to think of an excuse to bust your door down.
This Reagan-era advice for surviving nuclear warfare might come in handy. If it is good enough to protect you from a nuclear blast, it will probably protect you from Federal agents:
“Everybody’s going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around…Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It’s the dirt that does it.”
T.K. Jones, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, Research and Engineering, LA Times 16 January 1982
only cockroaches survive that one my friend