The Center for Public Integrity

Anyone who thought the Democratic National Convention was only about presidential nominee Al Gore must have missed the nonstop parties aimed at wining and dining the Democratic Party's biggest donors.

A conservative group in Alabama has filed the first court challenge to recently passed campaign finance legislation that aims to force certain tax-exempt political groups to disclose their donors and expenditures.

In his January 1998 State of the Union address, after decrying the campaign-fund-raising "arms race," President Clinton proposed a major new policy that would address a big part of the problem—the high cost of campaign commercials.

On May 5, 1999, Vice President Al Gore announced the creation of the Parents' Protection Page, a White House sponsored web-site designed to help parents steer their children away from obscene material on the Internet. "With this new Parents' Protection Page," Gore said, "we will help ensure that children aren't surfing into dangerous waters when they surf the web."

A campaign finance law intended to resolve questions about unregulated soft money is generating as many questions as answers. The legislation targeting so-called "Section 527" groups has led to a flood of inquiries at the Internal Revenue Service amid confusion and complaints about the interpretation of which groups must file under the law.

The story of David Shaw and his company begins far from Wall Street and Washington, on the West Coast. Born in Chicago and raised in California, Shaw attended Stanford and earned his Ph.D. in computer science in 1980. Many of his peers at Stanford would later become the core innovators of the information boom of the 1990s, from the Internet and e-commerce to Shaw's blend of computer-based finance. From Stanford he made his first shift to the East Coast, taking a teaching position in Columbia's computer science department. In 1986, Shaw took his first plunge into the world of finance, accepting a position at Morgan Stanley in its analytical and proprietary trading group, which at the time was headed by the famous quantitative trader Nunzio Tartaglia. In a 1996 interview, Shaw described the transition from computers to dollars as a very natural one: "Finance is really a wonderfully pure information-processing business."

As the Democratic National Convention gets under way in Los Angeles, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is once again leading the way in soft money donations to the Democratic Party, pouring in just less than $2 million to the party over the 2000 election cycle, according to numbers compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. AFSCME's unparalleled support of the party (it is the largest soft money donor this cycle to the Democratic National Committee and related committees) continues the Democrats' tradition of keeping close ties to the labor movement. But while the news media focus on the union's financial generosity, little attention has been given to AFSCME's checkered history.

Under the guidance of Richard Cheney, a get-the-government-out-of-my-face conservative, Halliburton Company over the past five years has emerged as a corporate welfare hog, benefiting from at least $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans.

Only three days after Texas Governor George W. Bush was inaugurated in 1995, he declared the state of the Texas judicial system to be an "emergency" situation, and pressed the legislature to hurriedly pass legislation that would make it harder for consumers to sue companies for defective products.

WASHINGTON, July 28, 2000 — At the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, cars and drivers will be provided for all attending Republican members of Congress, along with 24-hour concierge service, staffed with 50 workers at the ready, according to news reports.