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Wednesday, September 7, 2011

The Gibson Follies

As hard as it is to believe, the federal government has raided Gibson Guitar in Tennessee and taken the company's inventory of imported rosewood from India. Supposedly, the wood is here illegally. In truth, this seems like total garbage. Here are the facts:

1)The Department of Justice concedes that the wood would be in the country legally if it had been built into guitars in India.
2)Essentially every other manufacturer of guitars in the USA imports the same wood from the same source, but none of them got raided.
3)The Justice Department has not said why there was a problem with the wood, although they cite to a law that forbids importation of agricultural products harvested illegally in their country of origin. Of course, since the other manufaturers buy the same wood from the same source, there can be no rational or honest explanation why the law only applies to Gibson.
4)The Justice Department raid has made it likely that Gibson will have to shut down and its 500 workers laid off.
5)The Chairman of Gibson is a Republican who has contributed to GOP campaigns, while the chairmen of the competitor companies are mostly Democrats.
6)Gibson is a non-union shop, while the competitors are all union firms.
7)That paragon of honesty, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that there were no political motives in the raid whatsoever.

In other words, it seems that this is yet another move by the Obama administration to reward its friends and penalize its detractors. Apparently, the loss of 500 jobs in Tennessee is of no concern in Obamaland.

It is time to have a president who cares about ALL the people and not just his friends.

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