A small-town newspaper (scroll down to Section B after hitting the link) profiled a local land developer, explaining how he started and grew his own business.

Harry Fox, Jr. spent the past few decades becoming a successful land developer in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. (Fox generally does not build but instead acquires large tracts of land and goes through the necessary steps in order to subdivide the land into lots and bring them to market.) He mentioned to the newspaper that if he had tried getting into the land developing business today he would have a much harder time doing so because of all the government regulation that exists. I wanted to know what he meant by this so I contacted him and conducted an interview of my own.

South-central Pennsylvania on a foggy, autumn day. Photograph © Paul Hair, 2011.

I wanted Fox to explain to me all the steps needed to bring a piece of land to market in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. However, government regulations and requirements are so extensive that we couldn’t go through all the steps in just a few hours. So we focused on just one area: what a developer needs to do to bring a piece of land to market with that piece of land having a private septic system. The description that follows pertains only to Pennsylvania. Any errors made are mine and mine alone.

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Bill Ayers speaking to a crowd at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, PA on December 14, 2011. Occupy Harrisburg invited Ayers to speak. Photograph © Paul Hair, 2011.

This is the second time I have covered Occupy Harrisburg.

Bill Ayers spoke at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, PA on December 14 at the invitation of the militant Occupy Harrisburg. I estimated between 100 and 200 people attended the event.

Eric Papenfuse owns the Midtown Scholar Bookstore. Papenfuse, a former public school teacher, previously invited Ayers to speak in south-central Pennsylvania in 2010. He wrote an OP-ED explaining why he did so and The Patriot-News published it, revealing his radical, anti-capitalist views.

I summarize the night in a list of bullet points in the following section but I don’t go into extremely thorough commentary because there is a bigger point here than Bill Ayers and Occupy Harrisburg.

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The news of UC Davis police pepper spraying innocent #OccupyUCDavis revolutionaries shocked and outraged the nation. One can only imagine how outraged the nation will be once it learns of a shockingly underreported story that the Digital Video and Imagery Distribution System published last week. “Marines face OC spray” details the following:

One at a time, instructors lined up the augmentees, stood three paces away and sprayed real OC in their faces. The spray ran down their foreheads and into their eyes, causing them to immediately close. The Marines exhibited uncontrollable tearing, coughing, choking plus an extreme burning sensation on any exposed skin from the OC spray.

Outraged yet? If not, you will be soon! And if you are, well you may just want to stop reading now lest the next sentences drive you into uncontrollable hysteria.

After being sprayed, the augmentees had to navigate through an obstacle course of Marines holding pads, representing potential attackers. The SAF Marines fought through the course blindly throwing punches, knee strikes and baton strikes.

So, it wasn’t enough torture just to spray American citizens in the face with pepper spray, the federal government then forced them to run through an obstacle course even as they were incapacitated! Clearly, the legacy of George W. Bush lives on.

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Occupy Wall Street recently came to south-central Pennsylvania by way of Occupy Harrisburg. Occupy Harrisburg began its occupation of the Capitol at 12:01 a.m. on October 15, 2011 and ran through the day. Various media outlets reported that the group would extend its occupation through October 16, 2011, although they would legally be required to move from the Capitol. This report offers a brief reference list of how local media covered Occupy Harrisburg and then provides my firsthand account of what happened along with analysis of the event.

How Local Media Covered Occupy Harrisburg:

Various south-central Pennsylvania media outlets reported on Occupy Harrisburg. Some of the stories are written by the local media outlets and others are AP feeds. I did not do an exhaustive search to see if the media outlets that ran AP feeds did stories of their own. Also, I did not check every single local media outlet, although I tried to choose some of the major ones. I’m linking to some of them so that the reader can compare and contrast how these media outlets reported on Occupy Harrisburg with how my report on it is.

The Patriot-News: Harrisburg, PA:

• October 5: “Occupy Harrisburg holds first organizational meeting, allied with Occupy Wall Street movement”
• October 15: “Occupy Harrisburg comes to Pennsylvania Capitol”
• October 16: “Occupy Harrisburg plans to continue protests against ‘Wall Street greed’ at Capitol”

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