However you feel on animal rights,there is a bigger story going on here. This is about corporate power that is used to running unchecked suddenly shuddering in fear of a movement using aggressive new tactics against just one of the vast many abuses the Big Pharmas are responsible for.

The Big Pharmas like Novartis are the same companies that price precription drugs out of most peoples reach. People die every day because of that shit-many of them right here in DC.

They are the same companies that file patent lawsuits against less wealthy nations that dare to produce drugs locally. That has cost thousands of lives to AIDS and millions to other diseases.

Novartis, like Monsanto, is in the GMO seed business, which among other things depends on suing small farmers for "patent violation" when pollen blowing in the wind contaminates their supposedly GMO-free crops. Their idea of a "Green Revolution" and global trade has so ruined small farmers as to cause a wave of farmer suicides in S Korea.

And oh yeah, some of these Big Pharmas also do business with HLS. Dumping HLS might get animal activsts off their backs, but those of us who are committed to social justice should see that as an opening for dealing with the REST of their abuses!

These corporate criminals all share the business ethics of Nestle,whose "free samples" of infant formula in Africa killed millions and of Coca-Cola, known to hire death squads to kill unionn activsts in Colombia.

Here in DC, if corporations think you are a threat, their police buddies come downn on you with everything they can get away with! It's not the death squads of Colombia, nor the three-months-on-high-bail that kids in the community get, but they hit you as hard as they think they cag get away with.

Animal rights protesters have discovered methods and tactics that strike fear into the hearts of Corporate Amerikkka, so the police treatment they get is far different that that received by a nonviolent sit-down against the war.

The REAL fear of the capitalists is this: That SHAC style tactics will spread to other issues! What's good for shutting down those who torture animals is also good for things like putting landlords who burn out tenants and convert to condos out of business for good.

What's good against the vivisectionist is good against the payday lending loan shark, the pro-police yuppie neighborhood council, companies like Deutche Bank that fund condo conversions, and the whole rest of that rotten stinking mess.

In the real work, those who support an enemy are treated as the enemy. For instance, the Tamil Tigers are known to execute farmers for selling rice to the Army they are fighting against.
By this same simple and direct logic, there's no reason why a bank that accepts deposits from a condo-building developer or an arsonist landlord cannot receive the same treatment the developer or landlord would get from the community.

To the FBI, the cops, and their masters, animal rights protesters at the gates of HLS customers are seen as a dangerous example. Their real fear is what happens when say, the entire congregation of an AME church starts invading branches of banks funding condo conversion. Internal law enforcmeent documents say they fear this sort of spread of SHAC style tactics. The vision of community activsts and neighborhood kids protesting outside stockbroker's house(over developer stocks) must be giving them nightmares. That kind of shit could throw a real monkeywrench into the Plan to "retake our cities" the upper class whites have had since school desegregation!

That, in turn, means the police and the FBI want to snuff out this sort of thing NOW while it's still confined to animal rights and not have developers face the same economic calamity that has befallen HLS. There is no way in Hell that Deutche Bank, Deauville Partners, Clark Construction, et all want to see their stock driven off the NYSE and sometimes trading as low as 8/1000 of a cent!

Even a limited spread of these tactics to other issues involving the Big Pharmas could cost them billions. It's one thing to have to dump HLS, quite another to have to give up pushing GMO's in Latin America and India or sacrifice every one of those drug patents. The day they have to sell their brand name drugs at a government-regulated price similar to that of generics is what they REALLY dread.