That’s the lesson to be learned from the experience of Gibson Guitars, whose Tennessee-based operations were overrun by armed agents from the Fish and Wildlife Service this week. The agents were looking for wood used in the manufacturing of the company’s legendary six strings. They believe some of it comes from sources not considered environmentally correct.

Gibson’s CEO protested the raid loudly this week, and who can blame him? For years Gibson has worked hand in glove with far left environmental organizations in an effort to make sure their wood comes from “approved” sources. Gibson is a partner in Greenpeace’s “Music Wood” campaign. It was one of the first instrument makers to procure wood that has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), another green group. Gibson’s president sat on the board of Rainforest Alliance.

What has all the consorting with environmentalists gotten Gibson? Government jackboots kicking down doors and bad-mouthing from environmentalists.

And is anyone surprised to find George Soros involved in this saga?

The Environmental Investigation Agency is a radical propaganda and agitation organization. It has pushed aggressively for the government to punish Gibson for not being green enough (despite Gibson’s long-standing history of yielding to green demands). EIA is supported by the anti-American billionaire Soros.

There is another wrinkle to the story here that’s worth highlighting. It has to do with a growing problem that my organization has been highlighting for months. An unsavory alliance of government policymakers, ideological activists, and corporate interests is colluding to block trade in goods from developing countries, in this case wood from Asia, India, and Africa.

Why would they do this, and why would they target a popular and innovative American company? Blocking trade benefits timber interests in Europe and the United States. It also helps domestic unions who don’t like competition. And it satisfies the demands of hard greens who want to control the market for forest products. The Obama administration goes along with all this to support its union and green political base.

The loser here is not just Gibson but consumers who must pay higher prices for finished goods like guitars and other products requiring wood.

The vehicle for the assault on Gibson is the Lacey Act. This is an example of the law of unintended consequences and of government run amok. The original intention of the Lacey Act was really quite admirable – to prevent the poaching of wildlife on American land. But thanks to hard green radicals and agitators such as Soros, it has been expanded in recent years as a way to police global trade in forest goods. The hallmark of overcriminalization, folks who have (unwittingly) run afoul of the Lacey Act have, quite literally, found themselves in jail, with their property taken away.

One hopes that one day soon Gibson gets its lawful day in court, as it says it wants. Until that time, there are some hard lessons to learn here for companies pursuing so-called “corporate social responsibility” measures.

Simply put, their partners in the environmental movement operate in bad faith. At the end of the day, greens are hostile to free enterprise and private property deep down in their bones. No amount of caving to their demands will placate them.

While Tea Partiers are portrayed by the mainstream media as radicals and potentially dangerous, no Tea Partier has ever advocated barging in to someone’s business and confiscating his property. It’s the far left environmental movement that is the real danger here, backed by the deep pockets of George Soros and others, and empowered by an Obama administration that will never solve the country’s jobs crisis if it continues harassing American companies this way. At the very least, it is time to examine this nation’s problem with overcriminalization–starting with the Lacey Act itself.

If you read between the lines, it also seems to mean Citigroup agrees the panel is a sham.

Eve, senior vice president of Global Consumer Group, Community Relations, at Citigroup, quit after the National Legal and Policy Center pressed Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit to cut ties with ACORN.

In a letter to NLPC president Peter Flaherty, Citigroup announced Eve’s resignation from the panel.

“We too are deeply concerned about the recent media reports regarding ACORN and, because of those reports, have suspended our charitable financial support and program relationships with ACORN, and we are awaiting the results of the independent audit of ACORN activities now underway,” wrote Natalie Abatemarco, Citigroup’s vice president, Global Community Relations.

“On a related topic, please be advised that Eric Eve has resigned his position on the ACORN Advisory Council,” she added.

Citigroup is a Big Government lovers’ bank that funds just about every trendy left-wing cause in America.

Long before it started drowning in red ink, the poster child for so-called corporate social responsibility was a longtime donor to left-wing pressure groups such as Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s Nature Conservancy. In tax year 2003, Citigroup’s foundation gave 20 times more money to groups on the left than to groups on the right, according to Capital Research Center’s 2006 study of Fortune 100 foundation giving. (Foundation Watch, August 2006.)

Citigroup’s foundation has given a staggering $1.4 million to the alarmist World Resources Institute, as well as $509,000 to ACORN in recent years. The ACORN funding included a $500,000 grant to ACORN’s American Institute for Social Justice, which offers Saul Alinsky-style training in community organizing. Other donations to liberal groups include the Aspen Institute ($762,500), Rainbow/PUSH ($750,000), Nature Conservancy ($380,000), Rainforest Alliance ($200,000), and the Council on Foreign Relations ($50,000).

For her part, former ACORN national board member Marcel Reid never believed the council would accomplish anything. Reid and board member Karen Inman were expelled from ACORN by chief organizer Bertha Lewis for asking too many questions about the $1 million embezzlement perpetrated by ACORN founder Wade Rathke’s brother and then covered up for eight years.

When Reid, who is now a member of a reform group called ACORN 8, first heard of the panel, she told me this:

As former members of the Interim Management Committee elected by the national board of ACORN, we say that all of the things that this so-called independent panel is going to examine are things that we tried to accomplish. We called for all of these things –an audit, examination of the books, restructuring of the organization— all of this was already demanded by us.

And because we were trying to exercise due diligence as duly constituted directors of ACORN, we were relieved from our positions, forced out by the board under Bertha Lewis’s direction.

We have no idea how an independent, thorough audit of ACORN can be conducted by these people who were not selected by ACORN’s national board but were put in place by the same senior staff who conspired with Wade Rathke to cover up his brother’s embezzlement for eight years and who subsequently silenced any voice that called for truth, transparency and accountability.

Meanwhile, the remaining members of the council are ACORN allies and funders.

Former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger is leading the investigation. He’s a former president of the left-leaning group Common Cause.

The other members are

* John Podesta, President and CEO, Center for American Progress

* Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Board Member, RFK Foundation, former MD Lt. Governor

* Andrew Stern, International President, Service Employees International Union

* Henry Cisneros, Executive Chairman, Cityview (and a former HUD secretary)

* John Banks, Vice President of Government Relations, Con Ed

* Harvey Hirschfeld, President, Lawcash

*Dave Beckwith, Executive Director, Needmor Fund

Podesta helped manage Obama’s presidential transition team and heads the aggressively left-wing Center for American Progress. The center is heavily funded by George Soros and the subprime mortgage hucksters Herb and Marion Sandler.

Podesta has always been there for ACORN in its time of need. When ACORN got hit with a new wave of election fraud-related charges in May, the Center’s “Progress Action Fund” invited liberal and radical groups – including Harshbarger’s Common Cause – to a meeting in Washington, D.C., to plan how to use rhetorical misdirection to take the focus off ACORN’s increasingly well publicized corruption.

Andy Stern of SEIU is a longtime crusader for something called “social justice.” Social justice is when you have more toys than your friends, so your friends hit you over the head and take some of your toys away. That way everyone is equal. That’s social justice.

SEIU is intimately connected to ACORN but since the undercover sting videos surfaced showing ACORN employees giving advice on how to break the law, it’s trying to distance itself from the group.

Good luck with that, SEIU.