Homicide rates may have nothing to do with voter fraud or voter turnout.

I'm not saying that the inner city black demographic doesn't have serious issues.

But black african americans are not the root cause of the problem.

Poverty. Failing city schools. Absentee fathers. Drugs. Unemployment. Lack of access to capital. Mental health issues. Lack of access to healthcare. Urban decay. Economic stagnation. Crime. Gangs. All issues that inner city blacks face. And all of them are issues that any given demographic has to contend with in some form or another or to some extent.

But trace the causes of these issues back to their source and you end up once again at politicians and oligarchs at all levels of government.

Most people seem to have this bottom up method of problem solving. They look at all the individual problems and want to address each and every one of them individually.

But when you look at the bigger picture, all these issues are the results of cascade failures that all stem from a single problem.

If you visualize our problems like a pyramid, you've got the one problem on top from which all other problems derive from. You can't fix any problems at the base of the pyramid until the ones further up the pyramid are addressed.

Let's take the matter of public schools, for instance.

You have identified the problems of drugs, crime, gangs and poverty as all stemming from your area's failing public school system.

So you set out to solve the problems by reforming public schools.

The solutions proposed are to:

• Increase funding
• Standardized testing
• Basic education standards that teachers are required to meet
• Schoolboard

But why did none of these solutions work?

Because there are a whole heap of other problems already in place.

• Teachers aren't forced to adhere to standards because of teacher's unions
• Money doesn't go where is should because of teachers unions
• Rig elections oust uncorrupted schoolboard members and local politicians who could back reform
• Big $$$ publishing houses maintain a grip on state backed curriculum and standardized testing

The results:

• Money wasted
• Standardized testing ignored
• Incompetent teachers and schoolboard members retained

And this is just one example that's part of a massive tower of societal issues.

At this point, our pyramid is too corrupted from top to bottom. It is impossible to correct problems at the base without eliminating the ones at the top.