Did Biogenesis ruin your Summer?

A-Rod, showing his typical intensity.

On Monday, August 5th of this year, Major League Baseball hammered several All-Star caliber players (along with some relative unknowns) including Texas Rangers outfielder Nelson Cruz, San Diego Padres shortstop Everth Cabrera, and the man pictured above with suspensions of 50 games or more due to their involvement with a Miami-based clinic called Biogenesis. For the full list, check out this link: http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/08/05/three-three-unknown-biogenesis-players-named-gio-gonzalez-cleared-12-total-accepting-discpline/
Since this is just one of many performance enhancing drug scandals baseball has had to deal with over the past decade or so, most fans already knew what sort of reaction to expect from the sports media. Reporters lamenting the "state of the game", blowing the players transgressions out of proportion, and letting us all know how deeply and personally they're affected by the whole mess. I'm not trying to say I think every one of these players should be free from scorn, however I found the reaction from high-profile sports media morons like Mike Lupica and Rick Reilly predictably inane, or maybe insane would be a more accurate descriptor. 

We aren't dealing with a situation like the circus that occurred during the now infamous 2003 congressional hearing when Commissioner Bud Selig and several high-profile players spent time testifying about steroids on Capitol Hill. None of these guys has denied they were using, or pulled a Sammy Sosa and pretended like they barely understood English when questioned about the issue. In fact, the most hateable player among the lot, Ryan Braun, was outed around a month before everyone else so you'd think sports columnists and the like would have had ample time to vent. For those unfamiliar with Braun's history regarding doping, he was caught red-handed in October of 2011, shortly after being named the NL MVP, when a sample he admitted for testing was found to have the textbook elevated testosterone levels that come with steroid use. His testosterone results were higher even than those detected in previous steroid cases according to this quote from an MLB source in this New York Daily News article, http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/ryan-braun-initial-ped-test-results-insanely-high-nl-mvp-lawyer-insists-client-peds-article-1.990020,
 Milwaukee Brewers star Ryan Braun’s original test for performance-enhancing drugs as the playoffs were winding down in October was “insanely high, the highest ever for anyone who has ever taken a test, twice the level of the highest test ever taken.” So, why wasn't he hammered two years ago? Well, as anyone familiar with the relationship between the MLB's union and ownership can tell you, one positive test can hardly bury a guy if a loophole is found, and there are numerous loopholes in the process for savvy players, or more likely their lawyers, to take advantage of.The loophole exploited by Braun sounds just as absurd now as it did nearly two years ago. Basically, Braun argued before an MLB arbitrator that since his urine sample was transferred from one location to another in the trunk of a car, it "could have been tampered with", and the arbitrator bought it. Obviously, the guy who's made over 50 mil playing baseball, and whose continued standing as one of the brightest young stars in the baseball sky could be derailed by this positive test, would never lie to protect his career and earning power and the guy who hauled around piss jars for a living was just out to get him. Obviously.

Ryan Braun, proudly displaying his 2011 National League MVP plaque

 The sports media skewered Braun back then, and even when he came back in 2012 and had another stellar, supposedly clean, season, (nearly resulting in a second straight MVP, he finished second in the voting that year only because Buster Posey was responsible for about half the total offense of a World Series champion Giants team) baseball fans and reporters were skeptical of his success. The general opinion did seem to be that even with the probable steroid use, Braun, like Andy Pettitte, David Ortiz and others before him, was still a pretty damn good player in his own right. If there's one thing the sports media machine won't tolerate though, it's fucking up a second time when you know all eyes are on you. Here's a great summary of writers reactions to Braun being caught doping again and suspended a couple months back:
http://deadspin.com/nation-demands-hot-ryan-braun-takes-sports-pundits-pro-881090106
My personal favorite overreaction, from Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports: Of the many things Ryan Braun is – a liar nonpareil, a serial doper, a raging narcissist... sordid, tortuous path... He is a cockroach... "asshole tax"... the walking, talking epitome of hubris... He is a cockroach. And on Monday, he went splat.
Wow. It's like Ryan Braun walked into his house and took a crap in his Cheerios, right in front of him. That's the type of animosity I reserve for people who abuse the elderly, or use the term "Islamofascist". Like Braun, Alex Rodriguez had run afoul of the MLB's testing regime before this current incident. He also has had one of the worst relationships with the media of any professional athlete out there today. Not since Barry Bonds can I think of an elite player sportswriters delighted this much in verbally assaulting. Unlike Braun, however, A-Rod has appealed his suspension and is still in the Yankees lineup today. As you can imagine, this has steamed all sorts of clams, and even led one writer to compare him to recently convicted mobster Whitey Bulger. On the other hand, people who admittedly never even liked A-Rod have come to his defense. The general opinion being that even though he's a "liar and serial doper" just like Braun, the length of his suspension, 211 games, is ridiculous, and smacks of Commissioner Selig's typical policy of trying to establish a legacy as being the guy who "cleaned up the game", hoping we all conveniently forget that he turned a blind eye to doping in the late '90s and early part of this century when guys like Sosa and Bonds were making the league millions.

The illustrious MLB Commissioner

 As many more familiar with the game than myself have already said, the true purpose of levying this massive suspension against A-Rod seems to be to permanently ban him from baseball before he can do as Bonds and McGwire did before him, and stamp his name permanently in the record books after being exposed as an "unclean" player. Even if A-Rod were to be relegated to a designated hitter til the end of his career, it's still likely that he'd play at least one or two more years and end up with over 700 career home runs, something only Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and the aforementioned Bonds have done previously. My personal opinion is that even in an era of skewed home run numbers and guys who were more muscular in their late 30's than when they broke into the league, Bonds and A-Rod were exceptional talents both offensively and defensively, even though Bonds pulled off fewer defensive highlight plays as he got older and larger in San Francisco than his days as a young buck in Pittsburgh. For Selig, the Baseball Writers of America (they decide who gets into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY) and others to continue to show such a lack of perspective is disappointing. A-Rod probably deserves a suspension, but the seeming effort to make us all forget he ever existed is pointless and will fail, just as it did with Bonds when it became inevitable he would break Hank Aaron's home run record. Neither Bonds or A-Rod were drug-induced flash in the pans like Brady Anderson or Troy Glaus who put up huge numbers for a year or two and then vanished. They're both legitimate first ballot Hall of Famers, and even after his transgressions if Braun comes back and keeps churning out 30-plus home run seasons he will be, too. If the boring blowhards who currently pollute the sports pages with their "commentary" want something to rail against there are plenty of other, more worthy, targets.

Update-10/5/13: http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/eye-on-baseball/24001081/alex-rodriguez-is-suing-mlb-claiming-a-witch-hunt
The lawsuit specifically accuses Major League Baseball of engaging in “tortious interference,” essentially interfering with Rodriguez's existing contracts and future business relationships.
The suit, in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, came just days after Rodriguez's lawyers began appealing the 211-game ban issued by Major League Baseball. It is unclear if the suit will affect the arbitration hearing, which is taking place behind closed doors.
The suit does not address whether Rodriguez used banned substances. Major League Baseball did not immediately comment on the lawsuit.

It will be very interesting to see how this turns out, though I thunk there's around a 90% chance A-Rod gets crushed by Selig's lawyers in court.

West Africa, The Sahel and the Maghreb: The World's new hub of lawlessness

Terrorism. Piracy. Organized crime. Endemic corruption. These are things we associate with troubled areas in much of the world, however a lucrative trafficking route for all manner of illicit goods stretching from the West African coast all the way to the Mediterranean ports of North Africa may be the one place where all those factors combine into such a colossal clusterfuck.What makes this situation even more confounding is each of these viruses seems to be fueled by multiple factors, sometimes working in tandem and other times spinning on their own crazy axis away from one another like dust devils popping out of the sands of the Sahara.

A brief overview of these issues: 

Piracy: In 2012, there were over 100 more maritime piracy incidents off the West African coast than there were in the waters off Somalia, an area which receives much more media attention when it comes to the issue.  see link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-22944460    As in Somalia, some of this has to do with overfishing by large commercial trawlers, most of whose catch becomes animal feed. I'm not going to go off on a tangent about how absurd it is that large agribusiness companies waste time importing that crap when we have more than enough soy and other products produced locally here in the US to use as protein in our pig and chicken feed, but it's certainly a valid point. Overfishing isn't anywhere near the main factor in this area, though. Oil is. Separatist groups and criminal gangs in Nigeria bring in millions selling stolen oil. The corrupt government of Equatorial Guinea brings in even more, enriching only themselves and an infinitesimal upper class while the majority of the population in a country that should be the African equivalent of Kuwait or Qatar lives in abject poverty. Where does the oil go? According to a 2012 report: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-20038724, the bulk of it ends up in either Eastern Europe or Singapore. It doesn't take a genius to see that as long as this racket is bringing in millions it will continue to grow. Certain analysts are also predicting many of these same groups will enlarge already profitable human trafficking operations as the economic situation in Brazil, only a short hop across the Atlantic, continues to improve.

Terrorism: At the moment, you'd be hard pressed to find a country in North Africa that isn't dealing with an Islamist insurgency. The problem isn't as pronounced in most of West Africa's coastal nations however in Nigeria, the economic hub of the whole region, the actions of a Taliban-like group called Boko Haram have turned the country's North into a war zone. They're against anything deemed Western influenced, and some of their most brutal attacks have targeted schools and churches. The recent civil wars and instability in nearby Libya and Mali, followed by mass looting of military facilities, have also made it much easier and cheaper for Boko Haram to acquire weapons. Not to mention that the country's border was already porous to begin with: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2013/05/how-al-qaeda-boko-haram-smuggle-arms-into-nigeria/

Further North in Algeria and Libya, the problem of Islamist infiltration has also been getting press as of late. A group known as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has been gaining traction in the region over the past few years, and like Boko Haram the civil conflict recently plaguing the region has been a boon for them.  Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has it's roots in the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s where it began as a group called the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, GSPC for short and its rise to prominence has a lot to do with the issues involving organized crime outlined below. Its current de facto leader/spokesman is Mokhtar Belmokhtar. He's been part of the global Islamist movement since the '80s when he fought with the Afghan mujahideen,  see link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23387147
The most obvious reason for increased Islamist activity in North Africa is a massive infusion of illicit money into the area. North Africa is now home to the world's most lucrative drug trafficking pipeline, and groups such as AQIM bring in millions providing protection along smuggling routes, and even engaging in trafficking themselves. Belmokhtar himself is widely referred to as "Mr. Marlboro" because of all the money he's made smuggling cigarettes into Europe. This brings us to the next problem:

Organized Crime: In the 1990s, just as the fall of Communism was unintentionally leading to a boom period for organized crime in Eastern Europe, drug trafficking organizations in South American countries such as Colombia and Peru who supplied the bulk of the world's cocaine were not only on the run from their own governments, but also the United States Drug Enforcement Agency. What followed was a mass migration of high profile members of South American cartels to Western Europe, in particular Spain  see links:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/8002367/Colombian-hit-men-blamed-for-200-murders-arrested-in-Spain.html  

 http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=410695&CategoryId=12393

Along with those unsavory characters came their drugs, money and connections, and today the EU is an even more profitable cocaine market than the US is. See links:
http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2012/09/feds_mexican_drug_cartel_was_building_europe_nh_pipeline

http://www.vice.com/read/is-cocaine-about-to-ruin-west-africa

http://euobserver.com/justice/119183

Unlike the trafficking routes along the US's southern border and through the Caribbean that are constantly disrupted by inter-cartel feuds, trafficking through West Africa into Europe is made possible by many disparate groups working together. The book McMafia by Misha Glenny describes how at a meeting on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten in the mid '90s involving high profile Russian gangsters, leaders of the major Italian mafias, and members of powerful Colombian cartels like the Norte Del Valle organization, ground rules were laid out and various agreements made which led to the globalization of organized crime. South American cocaine is brought to ports on Brazil's Atlantic coast, moved across the water to countries like Nigeria, and eventually makes its way through North Africa into EU nations, primarily Italy and Spain. Islamist groups that would kill a man for smoking hashish in public have no problem working hand in hand with the most unseemly of drug traffickers, because the amount of money they stand to make by doing so is so great. Even more distressing for the region is the new phenomenon of drug trafficking organizations based out of West Africa itself, which has been observed by Interpol and other arms of law enforcement:  

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/02/africa-cartels/

At the end of the day, what really makes this possible is a demon that these countries have been dealing with long before drugs were a problem: 

Corruption: In 2009,the President of Guinea-Bissau and the the country's top ranking General were assassinated on the same day. President Joao Bernando Vieira had accused General Batista Tagme Na Waie of being involved in drug trafficking during his election campaign a few months prior, and the men had a long-standing rivalry. In fact, shortly after the country's November 2008 election Waie narrowly escaped an earlier assassination attempt which he blamed on the President's personal militia. As more information came out about the assassinations, though, it became clear that the rivalry between the two men was less of a factor in their deaths than the increasing presence of Colombian cartel influence in Guinea-Bissau. Even before these events took place, Guinea-Bissau had been referred to as a "narco-state" by regional analysts and even the DEA. Following the death of these two men, even more cocaine started to flow into the country, and now the prevailing theory is that the assassinations were ordered from Colombia to help make that possible. Not only was the military junta that came into power in 2009 more amenable to the Colombians, they even started moving drugs themselves, see link:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/7/dea-breaks-suspected-colombiaguinea-bissau-drug-ri/
In the extreme case highlighted in the article above, the head of Guinea-Bissau's interim government and former head of its Navy was among those implicated in a scheme where surface-to-air missiles were traded for copious amounts of cocaine. Guinea-Bissau is far from the only West African state dealing with massive corruption, and it isn't always illicit goods that government officials are using to build their fortunes. In the case of neighboring Equatorial Guinea, a 2011 report by the US Department of Justice exposed embezzlement and fraud amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars being perpetrated by Guinean diplomats currently living in the US. See link:http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/equatorial-guinea-corruption-us-assets The most egregious perpetrator was the Prime Minister's eldest son, as shown in this excerpt from the link above: Investigators have focused particular attention on the actions of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue (Teodorin), the eldest son of, and potential successor to, the country's president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasago, in power since 1979. The complaint seeks to seize a number of Teodorin's assets purchased in the US, including a $30m seaside mansion, a $38.5m Gulfstream jet, a $533,000 2011 Ferrari and more than $3m of Michael Jackson memorabilia. He is said to have purchased these goods using money obtained through corruption.
That particular report doesn't even take into account the Obiang family's considerable European assets, including a block of some of the most sought after real estate in central Paris which includes the mansion below. 

As mentioned in the section on piracy, Equatorial Guinea's ruling elite has turned enriching themselves through their tiny nation's considerable oil, gas and timber reserves into a science. Really though, when it comes to corruption in West Africa, the area's largest economy, Nigeria, is king. The problem goes beyond the inner-workings of the government, after all this is where the famous "419 scam" originated. See link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/419_scam, this is an easy way to make money that criminals in neighboring countries like Ghana and Benin have also picked up on. 419 scams are small potatoes compared to the million and even billion dollar  fraud and bribery schemes people within Nigeria's government tasked with promoting the public good have pulled off. The most recent case making the rounds in various new outlets African coverage involves a 1.3 billion dollar oil exploration deal involving Shell and formerly state-owned Italian oil giant ENI. See link: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/British-Police-Investigating-1.3-Billion-Shell-ENI-Nigerian-Oil-Bloc-Corruptio.html

Within this problem, in my opinion, lies the root of all the other problems in the region. Corruption has created an environment where lawlessness and terrorism were able to take root in Nigeria, and is now doing the same thing across a large swathe of the African continent. The governments of countries outside the region with economic interests there could help by making an effort to deal with their own problems regarding corruption and economic mismanagement as well. Corruption in Balkan countries like Bulgaria and Montenegro makes it possible for stolen oil to be refined there, and part of the reason stolen Nigerian oil so often ends up in Singapore is that nearby former net oil exporters like Malaysia and Indonesia still provide their citizens with unrealistic fuel subsidies that they show little sign of curbing yet know they can't afford. Until the small political and economic elite which alone is benefiting from the chaos across West Africa and the Maghreb wakes up and starts doing their job, or is removed from power in favor of someone who does it better, the area will continue to develop into the new center of transnational crime and terrorism.


Update: Proceeds from stolen oil in Nigeria continue to be laundered abroad: 
The London-based think-tank Chatham House said Nigeria's oil was being looted on an "industrial scale".
Africa's biggest oil producer should be more proactive in sharing intelligence so foreign governments can help crack down on the organised crime, it said.
Losses account for 5% of Nigeria's total oil output, the report said.

Read more here:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-24175264