Let's play "Fill in the blank" for this story from The Times:

In ________, Those Who Feed Off Anarchy Fuel It
Beyond ____ _______ and _______ fervor, an entirely different motive is helping fuel the chaos in ________: profits.

A whole class of opportunists--from ________ ________ to _______ gunmen for hire to vendors of __________ ____ _______--have been feeding off the anarchy in _______ for so long that they refuse to let go.

OK, here's the answer:

GALKAYO, Somalia — Beyond clan rivalry and Islamic fervor, an entirely different motive is helping fuel the chaos in Somalia: profit.

A whole class of opportunists — from squatter landlords to teenage gunmen for hire to vendors of out-of-date baby formula — have been feeding off the anarchy in Somalia for so long that they refuse to let go.

Funny, these opportunists who benefit from chaos sound just like Republicans!

Omar Hussein Ahmed, an olive oil exporter in Mogadishu, the capital, said he and a group of fellow traders recently bought missiles to shoot at government soldiers.

“Taxes are annoying,” he explained.

And this guy wants to drown government in a bathtub:

Maxamuud Nuur Muradeeste, a squatter landlord who makes a few hundred dollars a year renting out rooms in the former Ministry of Minerals and Water, said he recently invited insurgents to stash weapons on “his” property. He will do whatever it takes, he said, to thwart the government’s plan to reclaim thousands of pieces of public property.

“If this government survives, how will I?” Mr. Muradeeste said.

Of course, in this country the chaos feeders work on a trillion dollar scale. We don't call them "warlords." We call them the National Security State:

[Since World War II, we've experienced] a long-term trend towards an authoritarian national security state. Many of our media, economic, cultural, and political institutions have been directed towards such a state, and this is very much a bipartisan trend.

he roots of this state are traceable directly to an authoritarian South, a one-party unique region in America that has held the balance of power since the 1930s and that was and is dedicated above all to a race-based hierarchical society. Through shaping even progressive legislation, like the Wagner Act, Dixiecrats ensured that broad-based class movements failed. It's not widely-understood, but the reason the South flipped to an anti-labor stance in the 1940s is because the CIO had tremendous success in organizing multi-racial unions as World War II labor markets tightened. This was a direct threat to Jim Crow, and so Southern Democrats cooperated with Republicans to pass Taft-Hartley, a piece of legislation which basically made labor organizing impossible and turned unions into groups that can only advocate for their own survival. At the same time, there were massive pre-McCarthy purges of leftists and decertifications of leftists unions, leaving unions open to infiltration by the CIA, FBI, organized crime, and bureaucratic inertia. The biggest movement for social justice in American history - the labor movement of the 1930s - ran up against the South, and the South turned it into a pro-Vietnam reactionary force that rejected the New Left in the 1960s.

nd where were the liberals? Well, the liberals were going along with it, helping to cooperate with the Southern autocrats to destroy what they perceived as the existential communist threat (and eliminate their Henry Wallace-ite rivals within the Democratic party). The people that Peter Beinart fetishized destroyed the left from 1946-1948, and so the Cold War took the path it did, and television became the king's telescope into every American home. We adopted the constitution of television, which was sketched out in the 1930s but not adopted until they got rid of the first set of dirty fucking hippies, the radical organizers of the 1930s who kept bothering everyone about class and race and social justice and ending the draft and the like.

Like an organism, American adapted to this constitutional order. Highways sprawled outward, suburbs ate the landscape, cities died and were reborn, and American dotted the world with military bases. Education turned into a competition for credentials, a cultural war where the winners turned to legal drugs and the losers turned to illegal drugs upon which there was apparently a war. Wars on concepts actually became quite popular, often initiated by those from Texas. Democrats became the party of the status quo, Nixon criminalized politics, David Broder-esque pundit middle-managers infected discourse, TV became Geraldo-ified and the civil rights movement detached from its class-based origins and moved to a rights-based model even as black nationalists convulsed from within. The culture became lost in dreams and pain, addiction mainstreamed itself, a superwealthy class helped itself to everything, and young boys and girls adopted the role model of 'more'. The religion of America turned to anticommunism, which morphed nicely into anti-enlightenment and anti-reason. America today is full of promise, but this last fifty years has been ugly and full of spite. Better living through chemistry, baby.

ut reversing 60 years of a top-down national security state based political system doesn't happen with one election, nor should it. The public chose to be here. Now it's time that all of us, and all of us do have blood on our hands, choose to work to go in a different direction. It is messy. There is no one magic bullet, and in fact, the magic bullet concept comes from the top-down Hollywood consumer dream so prevalent in the national security state. No, this is one step at a time, let's force the Democratic Party to hear us, to be us, and let's make sure that the Democratic and Republican nominees in 2008, in our great debate about the future of the country, hear that the public wants an end to the tyranny, and that means that keeping troops in Iraq for 'vital national security interests' is not ok.

This is an important post from Matt Stoller that all should read What I take away from it is that we should think of ourselves as in a time of hope. Why? Because Nixon's Southern strategy has finally turned rancid, and the Republicans are turning into a regional rump party. And most of the National Security State infrastructure is located there. So, why should the rest of the country subsidize it? We don't profit from chaos, so why should we let them create it?