As a matter of fact I actually have heard it as a small mention now and again, particularly in reference to El Paso but other cities as well.

But with Trump screaming out pleas to China to help his campaign, text messages detailing the formation and bungled execution of the Ukraine debacle coming out, impeachment beginning, Iranian hackers going after the 2020 election, Volkner swaying in the wind, the GOP scrambling around like rats on a listing ship, etc, a story about Trump not paying his bills for campaign events?

He's been doing that for YEARS, and it's been reported many times.

It was covered. It is local news so a local news outlet covered it.

It's sort of silly to say the MSM isn't covering something when the article you just read is from the MSM, don't you think?

May seem "silly" to you but you know i'm meaning Radio or TV! Maybe you don't know.

No, I don't know what you mean by the MSM, apparently. Radio or TV only, eh? Does that include local broadcasters? Or are you only referring to MSNBC and CNN, both of which have had stories on the Trump campaign not paying its bills in local cities. Those stories always find their way to DU, because they do get covered by the MSM.

See, I'm really weary of hearing that the "MSM doesn't cover anything," if there wasn't a story about something within the last hour.

Every time someone says something like that, I go to Google News and search for the story. I always find that whatever the story was has been and is being covered by the "MSM." Links galore. That you didn't see a particular story in the outlets you follow doesn't mean it wasn't there. It just means you didn't see it.

Almost everything reported here on DU has been covered by that "MSM." That's how people find stories to post here. Before you say the MSM isn't covering something, I suggest you do a Google News search. You'll discover that it is indeed covering it, but you just didn't see it.

Make a mountain out of a mole-hill!

pay for police security. Protests are protected by the First Amendment. Campaigns are supposed to be funded by donors.

a trail of bad deals he has behind him. Now, we get the biggest, baddest deal ever.

Can you imagine the numbers of contractors and other people who might have been stiffed by him? If that's how you make it in business, that's corrupt, not that he did all that good of job, which probably was an inducement to stiff people. It's circular, like his thinking.

However, if he had enough in reserve, he could just say, "What are you going to do about it? Sue me. I'll sue you back. He talks about suing people so much that one can assume he used it as leverage when people tried to collect. It takes a lot of money and time to do it and sometimes, it is better to take a loss than go through all of that.

That's just my speculation, but it seems to hold some weight.

don't stiff contractors and employees. You can argue that they often don't pay enough, but they never stiff contractors or employees or customers. The businesses that do stiff don't last long, Trump would be history as a business person had he not gotten his hands on dirty money, sort of like how the Mob survives.

There seems to be a pattern of that evidently and even lawsuits to support it:

Meet the (Many) Small Business Owners Stiffed by Donald Trump

Recently several media outlets have dug up a handful of business owners with worrying tales to tell of Trump's bullying, unfairness, and failure to pay. And while their numbers aren't huge, there are enough of them to suggest a pattern of behavior that raises questions about whether pre-politics Trump was much of a friend to small business in practice. Here are a few of their stories:

A major investigation by USA Today has revealed one of the sordid secrets to the profit making in Donald Trump’s business empire: don’t pay your bills in full, whether from small businesses, contractors or even the lawyers you’ve hired to stonewall them.

The overall ugly picture that emerges goes far beyond Trump’s use of bankruptcy court, where debts can be forgiven or restructured depending on their category and type of federal bankruptcy filing. What’s most provocative about USA Today’s reporting, which goes beyond previous accounts of the same tactics or his mob connections, is how Trump has a longstanding pattern of ignoring his bills and walking away from debts owed contractors and employees.

takes dirty money to survive.

There is no need to single Trump out in that respect. I would refer to the Just-World Hypothesis here, which is a common bias wherein a preference for justice is based on an assumption that it exists.

There are scores of business people, CEO's and corporations that thrive on unethical behavior, injustice, corruption, payoffs, malicious lawsuits, etc. They can do extremely well at the same time.

In fact, you could say that the underlying premise that profit is the primary motive and morality is not a major issue with ethics being an aside and merely contextual. There is no dearth of information to support that and I would imagine you have seen many of the more prominent examples of this that garnered much attention in the past, so I won't cite any examples.

I would respectfully refute the idea that Trump is an exception and that only good businesses/business people are successful and trive. However, I get your point, and wouldn't it be great if it were true across-the-board. Capitalism can be ruthless and cutthroat while maintaining a rather respectable facade. Trump is an exceptionally good example of this, bigly. One of the best! However, not so much with the facade, now.

Can capitalism be improved, yes, that seems to be one of the drivers of Senator Warren's campaign. Please don't call Nordic countries examples of non capitalist countries, capitalism underlay the very foundation of their social democratic systems.

Yes, I agree with you fully on reforms, all things considered.

Thanks for bringing up the Nordic countries, and I don't think I said they were examples of non-capitalism. I think they present good, working models as examples, even with their flaws.

I would have to admit that I am not so fond of Oligarchy though and I do see that as a troubling issue at this juncture. I don't expect other people to share that because it does require a more in-depth analysis of how the signs we see of unequal distribution indicate a looming problem and how it can be diametrically apposed to democracy as we know it. The thing is, it is a complex subject and isn't really in the spotlight.

The increase in global, corporate corruption is also a big concern when it comes to the moral and ethical considerations as per our discussion. Concerns that come up regarding capitalism, and more specifically the corporate charter in regards to profit, are the effect on the environment, resources, the commons, public domain, etc. We do have many critical issues to address in relation to the flaws of capitalism.

If the above are left unchecked, then the prognosis is not good. I would seriously suggest a global rentier outcome, which we see signs of already. Having done some reading on the subject, I would refer you to this if you are interested in the corruption issue, but it is by no means exhaustive:

https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/good-corporation-bad-corporation/chapter/10-corruption-in-international-business/

are headed for big problems, even if we had zero climate change driven disruption. Growing income inequality is unsustainable.

We are in accord on that!

I have a pet theory, but it may just be a visionary extrapolation.

With the increasing complexity and growth of the digital infrastructure along with an increasing us of algorithms to control those complex systems and factoring in weak AI and eventually the introduction of strong AI, there could be a somewhat involuntary transformation of economics globally and that would lean more towards a resource basis. While it takes the micro-transactions of Neo-liberalism to an extreme, the structure of it would be far more dynamic and flexible.

Now, there is always the dualism of the results to contend with, so it is hard to estimate if that will be largely beneficial and egalitarian or merely an exclamation point at the end of the Anthropocene era, or even something unimaginably dystopian and foreign to our current sensibilities. There are too many perfect storms brewing to do anything but speculate about the effects of that and the current trends towards transhumanism and the singularity, which I assure you are gestating quite well in the womb of the current, burgeoning technological advances in progress. Nonetheless, those factors will play into our "progress" in the very near future, it's not science fiction anymore, and not only will the transformation accelerate, as per the singularity, it could very well become exponential.

Oh, Brave New World, its wonders to behold!

stated that I believe the combination will eliminate 85-95% of ALL jobs within 30 years.

In 1990 bank branches had 8-12 tellers and 3-4 loan officers on any day Monday-Saturday, depending on the branch. Today even the busiest branches have no more than 3 tellers and one loan officer/branch manager.

Robot designs and the AI that power their functions is moving forward rapidly. The problem is that creation of high paying jobs has not remotely kept pace. I am astounded by the number of young working aged people that appear to have completely checked out of the job market today, I did not see that 20 or even 10 years ago. Not all of those people are people that have no skills, many are highly educated, there just isn't the type of jobs they used to fill in existence today, intelligent machines have taken them. Owners of the intelligent machines that have taken jobs so far have largely refused to share their increasing profits with the rest of society, and this is where I think society will break down if we continue along the current path. Hillary Clinton proposed a Robot/AI tax and got ridiculed. But what owners of advanced job killing machines fail to realize is that if society falls apart around them, they are basically penniless as soon as chaos ensues.

They can't avoid helping to protect the president (small "p" in this case). So if they mandate that police officers, firefighters and EMTs take a role in Trump visits, they have to pay those employees for their time. One route cities can take is to tell employees that they can volunteer to protect a Trump visit unpaid, but that has it's own drawbacks.