What induced SWAT Raid On Gibson Guitar Factory?

[francisco]

Lumber Union Protectionists Incited SWAT Raid On My Factory, Says Gibson Guitar CEO

“Henry. A SWAT team from Homeland Security just raided our factory!”

“What? This must be a joke.”

“No this is really serious. We got guys with guns, they put all our people out in the parking lot and won’t let us go into the plant.”

“Whoa.”

“What is happening?” asks Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz when he arrives at his Nashville factory to question the officers. “We can’t tell you.” “What are you talking about, you can’t tell me, you can’t just come in and …” “We have a warrant!” Well, lemme see the warrant.” “We can’t show that to you because it’s sealed.”

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.

Full article at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrezza/2014/05/26/lumber-union-protectionists-incited-swat-raid-on-my-factory-says-gibson-guitar-ceo/

[jkr]

cuz
fuq
you
dat
why

[tod evans]

Is this another raid or the one a few years back?

[Tod]

Is this another raid or the one a few years back?

Sounds like it is a new interview about the raid that happened a few years ago.

[HOLLYWOOD]

Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz is probably one of the most diligent supporters of ecology and green initiatives. A decade ago he banned the use of Brazilian rosewood from Gibson guitars, because of the deforestation happening in Brazil. You can still purchase Brazilian rosewood from other manufacturers and dealers in America. BTW, have you seen or heard about any of the other musical instrument manufacturer raided by the FEDS using the exact same woods and distributed sources from around the world? NOPE, because special groups donate to the Marxist-Socialist dictatorial controlled government called Washington DC, force a fight via proxy.

Look at the hypocrisy as that very same federal government bombs countries around the world, builds massive Military Industrial Complex weaponry, fly dozens of jets and hundreds on staff for a photo propaganda op/junket, halfway around the world or fundraisers for the elitists or how about Barry's latest surprise photo junket at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan a few days ago. When Barry flies, it's dozens of jets, cargo planes, 1000s of people, massive expenditure of fossil fuels, natural resources, and energy, all for a 2 bit "PEP RALLY". The military alone, burns through $13+ Billion in fossil fuels each year... it's endless waste and hypocrisy by the thugs with guns. And that's just one aspect, you can choose from 100s of different situations of ecological waste by even the very entities that are enforcing the horrible Lacy Act.


This was an outright Mafioso Nazi-Stasi raid on a competitor of high finance political puppet system. America is a bribed-financed Fascist-Marxist-Dictatorship on steroids. Lookout... here they come for everything next!


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/db/Fahrenheit_451_1st_ed_cover.jpg

[francisco]

cuz
fuq
you
dat
why

You mean like this?

http://cdn.pjmedia.com/tatler/files/2014/05/because-fytw.jpg

[francisco]

Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewiczis probably one of the most diligent supporters of ecology and green initiatives. A decade ago he banned the use of Brazilian rosewood for Gibson guitars, because of the deforestation happening in Brazil. You can still purchase Brazilian rosewood from other manufacturers and dealers in America. BTW, have you seen or heard about any of the other musical instrument manufacturer raided by the FEDS using the exact same woods and distributed sources from around the world? NOPE, because most donate to the Marxist-Socialist dictatorial government called Washington DC. Look at the hypocrisy as the same federal government bombs countries around the world, builds massive Military Industrial Complex weaponry, fly dozens of jets and hundreds on staff for a photo propaganda op/junket, halfway around the world or fundraisers for the elitists.


This was an outright Mafioso Nazi-Stasi raid on a competitor of high finance political puppet system. America is a bribed-financed Fascist-dictatorship on steroids.


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/db/Fahrenheit_451_1st_ed_cover.jpg

Perfectly Stated.

[Anti Federalist]

“What is happening?” asks Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz when he arrives at his Nashville factory to question the officers. “We can’t tell you.” “What are you talking about, you can’t tell me, you can’t just come in and …” “We have a warrant!” Well, lemme see the warrant.” “We can’t show that to you because it’s sealed.”

Held to account, at rifle point, for non-compliance with that which cannot be complied with, frog marched around, at rifle point, at the whim of writs of law, that cannot be seen.

That is tyranny, by any measure.

And not a fuck is given...

[Brian4Liberty]

Rule of law has become a bad joke...



...
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?

And this isn’t an isolated incident. Just ask Harvey Silverglate, Boston lawyer, activist, civil liberties advocate, and author of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. As he explains, the Feds routinely take advantage of the vagueness of many of our laws by starting from the target and working backwards, selectively prosecuting people they want to go after by charging them with crimes they often don’t even know exist.

“We are in terrible trouble as a nation under law,” he says. “When you have a system predicated on jurisdictional interests rather than on specific, identifiable, understandable, definable violations of law, there is a great opportunity for tyranny.” As a result, just about any businessperson, especially in highly regulated industries, can be construed by a prosecutor to have committed three or four arguable felonies a day. “If for some reason the authorities are eyeing you and they look closely enough at your daily activities, they can find something. That makes us all very vulnerable.”

Worse, 95 percent of federal cases never go to trial, because “Justice Department prosecutors have engineered the system to make it too risky to go to trial,” often railroading people who are innocent. “They have built a conviction machine, not a system of justice.”

Federal criminal law is not bound by the accepted rules of common law. Congress, the courts, and prosecutors can criminalize everyday conduct without having to prove that the accused intended to violate a known legal duty. That intent used to be fundamental to the mens rea required for criminal liability. It no longer is, and this is a direct result of the mushrooming administrative state in which we live. The convoluted content of many laws implemented through regulation aren’t even clear until after there’s a guilty plea or conviction, essentially giving prosecutors a blank check. Throw unchecked prosecutorial discretion into the mix and you have a recipe for legal nightmares straight out of Kafka.
...
More:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrezza/2014/05/26/lumber-union-protectionists-incited-swat-raid-on-my-factory-says-gibson-guitar-ceo/

[tod evans]

Rule of law has become a bad joke...

The "rule of law" has always been he who has the most weapons writes the laws...

[JK/SEA]

Held to account, at rifle point, for non-compliance with that which cannot be complied with, frog marched around, at rifle point, at the whim of writs of law, that cannot be seen.

That is tyranny, by any measure.

And not a fuck is given...

i give out fucks all the time. Mostly in a raised voice though. Doesn't seem to be working.

[tod evans]

i give out fucks all the time. Mostly in a raised voice though. Doesn't seem to be working.

Proper fucks come in .223, .308 and 45/70.......

[thoughtomator]

What could possibly justify the warrant being sealed for almost three years?

[francisco]

What could possibly justify the warrant being sealed for almost three years?

See post #6

[Brian4Liberty]

What could possibly justify the warrant being sealed for almost three years?

Double secret probation. Off to re-education for you comrade.

[tod evans]

Courtesy of Drudge;


Does that Gibson Guitar raid make more sense now?

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/26/does-that-gibson-guitar-raid-make-more-sense-now/

An editorial at Investors Business Daily may wind up being filed under how did I miss this one? Following the recent revelations of cases where the administration appears to have used the muscle of the federal government to go after its political enemies, IBD takes a walk down memory lane to the strange case of Gibson Guitars and the federal raids on their facilities for alleged illegal importing of exotic woods used in their products. They reach one provocative conclusion.

The inexplicable raid nearly two years ago on a guitar maker for using allegedly illegal wood that its competitors also used was another targeting by this administration of its political enemies…

Interestingly, one of Gibson’s leading competitors is C.F. Martin & Co. According to C.F. Martin’s catalog, several of their guitars contain “East Indian Rosewood,” which is the exact same wood in at least 10 of Gibson’s guitars. So why were they not also raided and their inventory of foreign wood seized?
Well, let’s see… maybe C.F. Martin was getting their supplies from a properly regulated source? No. Did they fill out some forms that Gibson forgot to submit? No… so what could it be?

Grossly underreported at the time was the fact that Gibson’s chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz, contributed to Republican politicians. Recent donations have included $2,000 to Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and $1,500 to Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

By contrast, Chris Martin IV, the Martin & Co. CEO, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400 in contributions to Democratic candidates and the Democratic National Committee over the past couple of election cycles.

“We feel that Gibson was inappropriately targeted,” Juszkiewicz said at the time, adding the matter “could have been addressed with a simple contact (from) a caring human being representing the government. Instead, the government used violent and hostile means.”
The end of that story was a travesty, with Gibson being forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in a settlement where there was no finding of criminal action just so they could get back to business. At the time of the judgement, our own Mary Katharine Ham covered the story and found a lot wrong with it, but even she didn’t seem to suspect this situation. And in retrospect, it doesn’t seem all that surprising.

While all this was going on, there was plenty of reason to suspect that there was politics of some sort involved. With Democrats in control of the White House and the Senate, it didn’t seem much of a stretch to think that the eco-warriors were in full throated, chest thumping mode and they would be pushing the limits to show how much they were doing to save the planet. The Gibson story, with its hook of endangered forests and evil manufacturing giants stripping the land, was a perfect fit. But I don’t think many of us imagined that even the Obama administration would be so blatant as to simply launch a police state style attack on a company which supported their enemies while leaving friendly, Democrat donating competitors alone. Or at least I didn’t.

Is this paranoid, tinfoil hat territory? I assure you that Obama supporters reading this will declare it to be exactly that. But given what we’ve been finding in the news recently, is it really that far fetched? Not any more.

[phill4paul]

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to tod evans again.

Thanks for the follow-up. Interesting quote from comments...


Jazz, you just confirmed what everyone who lives in Memphis already knows, especially the Gibson employees.

Next up, how many GM dealers who contributed to Republicans got to keep their dealership when Obama “liberated” GM and turned it over to the unions? Follow the money.

simkeith on May 26, 2013 at 3:39 PM

[Suzanimal]

“We feel that Gibson was inappropriately targeted,” Juszkiewicz said at the time, adding the matter “could have been addressed with a simple contact (from) a caring human being representing the government. Instead, the government used violent and hostile means.”

The government only uses "violent and hostile means". Has this guy been living under a rock or was he being sarcastic?

[Pericles]

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to tod evans again. Thanks for the follow-up. Interesting quote from comments... And there we have it. Life in a banana republic that can't even grow bananas.

[CCTelander]

The government only uses "violent and hostile means". Has this guy been living under a rock or was he being sarcastic?


"You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Suzanimal again."

[Anti Federalist]

And there we have it. Life in a banana republic that can't even grow bananas.

No kidding...no bananas, no cool martial, military parades with phalanxes of soldiers and rockets and tanks under stirring banners and virile national anthems.

Nope, no such luck, we get Sunday School tyranny: nothing but hectoring Grundyism, nagged and harassed and worried and bothered by a bunch grey haired old biddies and slack jawed f-aggots, until we are all driven insane or into compliance.

[Anti Federalist]

Held to account, at rifle point, for non-compliance with that which cannot be complied with, frog marched around, at rifle point, at the whim of writs of law, that cannot be seen.

That is tyranny, by any measure.

And not a fuck is given...

Yup, what I said.

[bunklocoempire]

New when you have to. It's a great economy for buying used guitars.

I say a pox on them both for dicking around with aggression and "playing the game". And a pox on those in government who encouraged it.
Pay to play, with a couple of fear mongers (Blackburn, Alexander)? Pfffft. Gibson can suck it. Martin too.

Former owner of 90's 1960 Les Paul gold top reissue, current owner of early 90's Epiphone Sheraton II.
Rosewood fret board fan. Huge Gibson fan.

Show me a company that complains when their own side wins, playing the game. Not likely to happen. Ditch the tool that makes this crap possible.

Thank you for the update!

[euphemia]

Oddly enough, Juszkiewicz practically wrote the law Gibson was accused of violating. Their headquarters are right here in Nashville. He was interviewed often when the raid happened.

[buck000]

No kidding...no bananas, no cool martial, military parades with phalanxes of soldiers and rockets and tanks under stirring banners and virile national anthems.

Nope, no such luck,...


You sure about that? ;)

http://media.defense.gov/2012/Nov/15/2000096476/670/394/0/121113-F-YJ424-002.JPG

[Anti Federalist]

You sure about that? ;)

http://media.defense.gov/2012/Nov/15/2000096476/670/394/0/121113-F-YJ424-002.JPG

Pansy ass weak sauce, to be expected from the politically correct, emasculated, National Felons League.

This is how you do it:

https://virusx.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/hqdefault.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Nazi_party_rally_grounds_(1934).jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-xMJT73G_h5k/VefKKoKm2WI/AAAAAAAACmY/q9sTG_bwmyM/s1600/militer%2Bchina.jpg

[Brian4Liberty]

Pansy ass weak sauce, to be expected from the politically correct, emasculated, National Felons League.

This is how you do it:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2jgrGtiYHE

[Anti Federalist]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2jgrGtiYHE


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhJQp-q1Y1s

[Pericles]

Pansy ass weak sauce, to be expected from the politically correct, emasculated, National Felons League. This is how you do it: Damn straight. And everybody needs to wear uniforms: Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organisation https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1b/Soviet_Young_Pioneers_in_1983_in_the_Zeravshan_Mou ntains_of_Tajik_SSR.jpg/220px-Soviet_Young_Pioneers_in_1983_in_the_Zeravshan_Mou ntains_of_Tajik_SSR.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/HJ_Uniform.jpg/220px-HJ_Uniform.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-04517A%2C_Potsdam%2C_M%C3%A4dchen_in_der_F%C3%BChr erinnenschule.jpg/220px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-04517A%2C_Potsdam%2C_M%C3%A4dchen_in_der_F%C3%BChr erinnenschule.jpg http://www.histclo.com/imagef/youth/bri/nz/bbnz06s.jpg http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/05/09/12/287DA46B00000578-3074519-image-a-100_1431171151643.jpg http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/05/09/09/287C571200000578-0-image-a-18_1431159361004.jpg

[satchelmcqueen]

Proper $#@!s come in .223, .308 and 45/70.......
hey!!! hows about us .270 guys???

come on now :)

[Danke]

Legendary U.S. guitar-maker Gibson files for bankruptcyhttps://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/legendary-u-guitar-maker-gibson-files-bankruptcy-151014923--sector.html

[Anti Federalist]

Won't quote myself twice...

[Anti Federalist]

No kidding...no bananas, no cool martial, military parades with phalanxes of soldiers and rockets and tanks under stirring banners and virile national anthems.

Nope, no such luck, we get Sunday School tyranny: nothing but hectoring Grundyism, nagged and harassed and worried and bothered by a bunch of grey haired old biddies and slack jawed f-aggots, until we are all driven insane or into compliance.

Yeah, what I said, again.

[shakey1]

Legendary U.S. guitar-maker Gibson files for bankruptcy

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/legendary-u-guitar-maker-gibson-files-bankruptcy-151014923--sector.html

:(
They were like works of art.
https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3408/3480635993_be3e3d06eb.jpg

http://imperialvintageguitars.com/wp-content/uploads/imported/2/2017-Gibson-Custom-Shop-J-180-Everly-Brothers-Acoustic-Guitar-Made-In-USA-wOHSC-253061915112.jpg

http://www.worldsguitar.com/firemist.jpg

[Sonny Tufts]

Gibson's acoustic guitars were never as good as Martin's, and their current woes can be blamed on management. See:

https://www.musicradar.com/news/gibson-how-did-we-get-here
https://www.musicradar.com/news/gibson-files-for-bankruptcy

In terms of beauty, it's hard to beat an original Martin OM-45 Deluxe:

http://www.vintagemartin.com/Martin30_045DLX_258.jpg

[shakey1]

Gibson's acoustic guitars were never as good as Martin's, and their current woes can be blamed on management. See:

https://www.musicradar.com/news/gibson-how-did-we-get-here
https://www.musicradar.com/news/gibson-files-for-bankruptcy

In terms of beauty, it's hard to beat an original Martin OM-45 Deluxe:

http://www.vintagemartin.com/Martin30_045DLX_258.jpg

Agreed... I do like 'em both, but Martins are king of the acoustics.

http://guitardesignreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/martin1m.jpg

http://guitarinternational.com/files/2010/11/back.gif

[Brian4Liberty]

Over-priced and under performing. Paul Reed Smith Guitars have taken over as the most popular guitar. Poor management at Gibson didn't help, both in product lines and some typical Wall St. meddling in the business (Debt! Mergers! Acquisitions! Growth at any cost!). Political persecution certainly hurt while the company is financially struggling, but that is not the whole story.