Independent hip-hop artist Immortal Technique stopped by the “Occupy Wall St.” protest in New York City early Tuesday morning to rally activists and call for more demonstrations, urging the crowd that if they “really want to make a change,” they should “come down here to Wall St.”

“Realize what’s really at stake here. The future of not just this country, but of this world, is all about to go. Not on some 2012 shit, but realistically speaking. The resources are running out. You’re going to look at this video years from now and say, ‘Damn, yo. He was right, we should have been focused on this.'”

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“If you really do want to make a change, you want to have some kind of effect, if you want to build your life around the people, come down here to Wall Street. People are still here. They’re still working. They’re still willing to have a conversation. They’re still willing to debate with people. They’re still willing to have that debate. That’s how you know somebody’s a fraud: they’re not willing to put their ideas up against somebody else’s. They’re not willing to measure the failure of their own system.”

“If we don’t change our minds about how this country works, then we’re not going to have a country anymore.”

He concluded: “We talk about democracy so much, but we have supported so many governments around the world that are the farthest thing from a democracy, as long as they give us access to their natural resources. As long as when we say jump, they say how high. That’s it. We have employed bin Ladens plenty of times, when it serves our purpose. We employed Saddam Hussein when it served our purposes. And I say ‘we’ because we are the people that have a responsibility to change that sort of behavior in this country. And if we don’t, we will suffer the same fate as everything that never evolved. We will become extinct as a species. That’s your fuckin’ option. Change and get better and accept that this system is flawed and needs to be changed, or become extinct.”

This video is from the Occupy Wall St. protest in New York City, published on Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2011.