Posted on 08/29/2011 7:17:46 PM PDT by Kaslin
Overcriminalization: Guitar. n. a stringed musical instrument with a long, fretted neck, a flat, somewhat violinlike body, and typically six strings plucked with the fingers. Also a target of the federal government.
It's true that, since those long-ago, legendary days of Jimi Hendrix and his mates, the ancient instrument — kitarah in Arabic, kithara in Greek — has been distorted beyond recognition. But are some zonked backwoodsmen now hooking them and poking them into trout streams? Are they amping them up so the sound waves knock endangered eagles out of the sky?
Neither, it turns out. Now the Internet is reverberating with a mean blues riff about how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the last two years has twice raided Gibson factories in Tennessee.
The federal blue meanies have decided that the iconic guitar maker may be violating the century-old Lacey Act, which outlaws trafficking in flora and fauna whose harvesting has broken foreign laws.
Actually, the plant and timber provisions of the law were toughened in 2008. So the federal agency felt unbounded in its search for the contraband even if it hindered not only livelihoods in the music industry, but also the future success of wannabe Claptons and Segovias.
In the first raid, G-men hauled away ebony fingerboards, alleging they violated Madagascar law. Gibson responded by obtaining the sworn word of the African island's government that no law had been broken.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
This is what Gibson gets for not making a large donation to the Democrats.
This is BS.
Sounds like the boys and girls down at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife fiasco don’t have anything to do. Did someone say, “What would YOU cut?”
Revolt. This government has become despotic and totalitarian, (literally, they want “total control”)
It is time to clean that whole d@mned place out.
The “sanest” explanation I’ve seen is that GIbson allegedly skirted Indian regulations requiring rosewood imported from India to be first finished in India. Gibson did not like the quality of the Indian woodworkers’ work, so it refinished the rosewood after it arrived in the USA. Now the Obama administration is all agog that some Indian woodworker might have been cheated out of some work even though Gibson met the letter of Indian law.
Messing with our guns is one thing. Messing with our axes is a whole different matter. Pissing off the metal heads is going to be an interesting endeavor.
Just another Obama —American job breaking incident.
Obama helping the Indians at the expense of an American company.
All of the things that need doing in the Justice Department and they are farting around with a few guitar necks.
Everyone who has a pre 1960? guitar is potentially a criminal? Welcome, welcome to the machine.
I doubt that Indians are in any way helped. India has the wood and it needs to sell it to anyone who wants to buy. Wood does grow on trees, after all. Rare wood is not going to be bought just by anyone. There are only a handful of companies who need this wood. If they can't buy it anymore ... what options do they have? The option #1 would be to relocate manufacturing of the product to India. Not only "the law" would be happy, the costs would also go down. Perhaps the quality will suffer a bit, but if everyone is in the same boat then I guess artists just need to get used to the brave new world of ecoterrorism ... done by their own governments.
Have you noticed? It is only OUR government.
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