Searching for Bobby Rubin

With the Geithner “wunderkind” and Summers “socratic genius” brands badly damaged, Obama faces pressure from a broad and growing spectrum to find new front men for his economic policy team.  This was in evidence last week when Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee were trucked in from oblivion to champion Obama’s new bank reform agenda. Volcker …

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Intel Inside? Let’s Try ‘Inside Intel’ Instead.

Lobbyists Groups Hired in 2009 ($80,000 or more): American Continental Group Cassidy and Associates Board of Directors: Noteworthy Members: Reed E. Hundt: according to an official Federal Communications Commission biography, Hundt was named Chairman of the FCC by President Clinton and was sworn in by Vice President Gore in1993, a position he filled for five …

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Almost There! Only $115 to go on Bay Area Funding

After about six weeks of drawing interest, building new friendships, and researching our brains out, we’ve managed to collect 27 donations from organizations and individuals who are rallying behind the Bay Area Research Project.  The result?  We’re inspired, and working harder than ever to close the funding gap, and publish our final research. Why Donating …

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Findings from Hewlett-Packard Research

Being one of the largest and most-established producers of consumer technology in the world, it is no surprise that Hewlett-Packard maintains a dominating presence within northern California’s business, commerce, and and information networks. (Want to learn more about the ties behind the Bay Area’s biggest companies? Donate to our investigation on Spot.Us.) …

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Baucus offers higher subsidies, other changes to healthcare bill

The new markup of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus‘s healthcare proposal offers higher subsidies for the financially strapped, and limits penalties and those affected by a new tax. The overhaul is expected to return favor from key Republican Senator Olympia Snowe. (LATimes) The Massachusetts Senate voted to allow Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick the final …

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Bay Area Research Project News Clips

I’m going to start posting a locality-specific version of the NameWire (let’s call it SFNewsWire) in order to shed light on recent activity and happenings affecting the Bay Area organizations we’re researching with Spot.us. AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah partners with IBM for Green Data Center (Routers.com) Lloyd Dean, CEO of Catholic Healthcare West, …

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Chevron: The Bay Area’s Biggest Company

Research for the “Who’s Behind the Bay Area’s Most Powerful Companies?” project is now in full swing.  last week, I sifted through hundreds of Chevron-related press releases, financial documents, and executive board summaries in order to pull together the profiles highlighted below. Note: I have made a special effort to call attention to Chevron executives …

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Analyst challenge ends, 450 staffers-turned-lobbyists identified

Friday ended our first ever analyst challenge, and we here at LittleSis couldn’t be happier with the results. In just a few weeks, our analysts identified 450 former congressional-staffers-turned-healthcare-lobbyists! And we certainly could not have hit that number without the work of our contest winners: @ddwriter, @Priscilla and @Reed.Young.  These three analysts went above and …

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Yet Another Goldman Tie to the Federal Government

In 2005, another example of questionable ties between lobbyists and government positions drifted into the fore, raising the eyebrows of some political pundits and government watchdogs: James C. Langdon Jr., Chairman of George W. Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, lobbied William Wicker, a high-ranking executive at Goldman Sachs Asia, in order to secure a major …

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Partnership with Responsible Endowments Coalition

LittleSis is excited to announce a new partnership with the Responsible Endowments Coalition (REC). REC trains and supports college students making social change by pushing their universities to make responsible investment common practice. I got to meet a bunch of these students at their retreat in Brooklyn last weekend. They are working on some really …

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LittleSis Launches Citizen Journalist Project, Spot.us Partnership

In an era where the traditional means for funding journalism projects have all but evaporated, David Cohn has a sharp sense of where the future of journalism is heading. As the founder and ringleader of Spot.us, David’s ideas have materialized into an open source platform that has pioneered an innovative, original model of”community funded reporting”: …

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How to Profile Investors on LittleSis

In response to a couple of questions I’ve received from analysts lately, I wanted to provide a simple set of instructions for profiling investors on LittleSis. Why Profile Investors? When prominent investors such as John Paulson make investment decisions, it can have a large impact on the public perception of a given industry.  For example: …

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