The Economist has a brief mention of the Gibson raid:
Agents barged in and shut down production. They were hunting for ebony and rosewood which the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) alleges was imported from India in violation of the Lacey Act, a 1900 law originally designed to protect fauna from poachers. This law has metastasised: it now requires Americans, in essence, to abide by every plant and wildlife regulation set by any country on Earth. Not having heard of an obscure foreign rule is no defence. Violators face fines or even jail. FWS claims the ebony sent from India was mislabelled, and that Indian law forbids the export of unfinished ebony and rosewood.
[. . .]
Guitarists now worry that every time they cross a state border with their instrument, they will have to carry sheaves of documents proving that every part of it was legally sourced. Edward Grace, the deputy chief of the FWS’s office of law enforcement, says this fear is misplaced: “As a matter of longstanding practice,” he says, “investigators focus not on unknowing end consumers but on knowing actors transacting in larger volumes of product.” But Americans have been jailed for such things as importing lobsters in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, in violation of a Honduran rule that Honduras no longer enforces. Small wonder pluckers are nervous.
Original report on the Gibson guitar raid here. Rules like the Lacey Act are tailor-made for petty bureaucrats to exercise immense amounts of judicially unsupervised power. It’s hard to believe that this kind of rule is being enforced evenhandedly, and rather easier to believe that it is being used selectively as a way of paying off scores, providing a “service” to certain firms at the expense of others, and creating lots of opportunities for bribes, “protection money”, and the like.
Uh oh: http://www.leevalley.com/en/wood/page.aspx?p=48302&cat=1,41182
Any guess on how long it takes for the US government to seize shipments of Veritas tools at the border?
Lie Nielsen should be OK — their totes and knobs are made of cherry, a domestic species.
Comment by Lickmuffin — September 7, 2011 @ 09:03
Unless Robin Lee has been making disparaging comments about the President, or is a known contributor to extreme right-wing fringe groups like the Republican Party, he’s probably safe enough for the time being. In spite of the Gibson Guitar raids, this isn’t really about wood: it’s about US regulators cherry-picking particular foreign regulations to enforce against select targets in the United States. Equal protection under the law this very much isn’t.
Comment by Nicholas — September 7, 2011 @ 09:12
I was wondering if you were ever going to come out and discuss the real reason for the Gibson raids. You seemed to be skirting this point in your earlier posts.
Comment by Lickmuffin — September 7, 2011 @ 09:38
I held off in the initial report just in case there actually was a valid reason for the government to have moved against Gibson. To no great surprise, it appears that this is indeed a specific, targeted reprisal.
Comment by Nicholas — September 7, 2011 @ 10:05
Another example of “Chicagoland” down in he US of A. Once a thug, always a thug I guess.
Comment by Dwayne — September 8, 2011 @ 01:26