Wall Street is the world’s biggest, rottenest casino and the sociopathic suits that run it spend their days gambling with our lives and devouring the fruits of our labor like great big pinstriped locusts. Here in New York, the bankers, their political fixers and their NYPD muscle have made our city into their own private superluxury playground. Upstate, they foreclose on family farms, build more and bigger prisons and pump toxins into our water so oiligarchs can extract a few trillions-worth of hydrocarbons from the land beneath us.

We support Occupy Wall Street and the demands of the labor and community groups marching today that government stop the $5 billion tax cut for New York’s richest, restore the billions cut from state schools and other services, and create real jobs in our communities now.

Among our own ranks, we have seen how the crises created by unfettered corporate control and left to fester by politicians have wrecked lives. We know first-hand about long-term unemployment, precarious work, unstable and unaffordable housing, inaccessible health care, slashed services for people with HIV, insane class sizes and student debt, and incredible worry for what the future holds.

We’ve had it with a system that sweeps the people who make our city go to its edges to make more room for the rich; with union-busting and block-busting gentrification schemes; with criminalization of communities of color; with defunding of schools and public services essential to the old, the sick and the poor; with gutting protections for renters and hawking fraudulent subprime loans.

Activist street bands like ours came into existence to reclaim public space for the needs of people and demonstrate solidarity with those fighting injustice. Occupy Wall Street is the embodiment of that, opening up an exciting space from which to confront corporate greed and yawning inequality with direct democracy and compassion. We will proudly make some noise for all the people there who are telling Wall Street: game over.