Apple is next in our series on our latest project, Who’s Behind the Bay Area’s Most Powerful Companies?, which Kyle and Matthew have kicked off with posts on Chevron, McKesson, and Hewlett Packard.  The project is being funded by our pitch on Spot.us.

It’s no secret that Silicon Valley has a cutthroat employment cycle. Companies borrow employees from one another left and right and, generally, if one employee makes the bold move to switch over to a competing company, he usually takes others with him.

Apple is no exception. As one of the most established tech companies in Silicon Valley – and number eight on our list of the 10 most powerful Bay Area Companies – it’s only natural that a lot of employee turnover take place. Apple employees past, present, and future have ties to IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google – all the biggest Silicon Valley players, as well as smaller start-ups. Follow along with these relationships at Apple’s interlocks page.

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The Senate Finance committee will consider the public option today. (TPM)

Exelon leaves the Chamber of Commerce over differences on climate change. “The carbon-based free lunch is over,” said John Rowe, CEO of the large utility company. (NYT)

Reid secured a deal for home state of Nevada in Baucus bill: the federal government will pay 100% of new Medicaid costs. (NYT)

The FDIC is likely to propose that most banks pre-pay three years worth of fees in order to replenish the funds it uses to insure accounts. (WSJ)

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 and affiliates with specific involvement in Bay Area organizations, corporations, committees, and educational systems.

Excited about this stuff?  Show your support by making a small donation at our Spot.us page.

Executive Team

David J O’Reilly: Appointed the chairman and CEO of Chevron in 2000, O’Reilly has been an employee of Chevron for nearly 40 years. Before becoming CEO, O’Reilley worked as Vice-Prsident of the Chevron Chemical Company, Director of Chevron-Texaco, and Director of Caltex. O’Reilly is a director of the American Petroleum Institute, a member of the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors, and the Bay Area Council.

Charles A. James: Joined Chevron in 2002 after serving as assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division at the U.S. Department of Justice. Previously, he was an employee of the Federal Trade Commission and a partner with Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Washington.  James also serves as a Trustee on the board of the San Francisco Ballet.

John S Watson: elected Vice Chairman of Chevron’s board in April, Watson oversaw the Chevron-Texaco merger in 2000, becoming Chevron-Texaco’s CFO.  Watson is also director of the American Petroleum Institute.  He holds a degree in agriculural economics from the University of Calofirnia Davis and is a director of the San Diego Padres.

Peter J. Robertson: Recently retired from Chevron’s executive board, Robertson is also co-chairman of the US- Saudi Arabian Business Council. In terms of local involvement, Robertson is the director of the Bay Area division of United Way of America, an organization dedicated to improving childhood literacy and community improvement.

Patricia A Woertz: Despite recently retiring from Chevron, Woertz worked for Chevron and its subsidiaries for nearly 30 years, including Gulf Oil, Chevron International, Chevron Canada, and Chevron Texaco.  Previously, she worked as an accountant for Ernst & Young, a Big Four accounting firm.  Woertz is also a regular member of the Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women in America list.  She sits on the board of directors of the California Chamber of Commerce, the Board of Trustees of the University of San Diego, and has addressed the Women in Leadership Conference at the University of California, Berkeley.

Patricia E. Yarrington: became Vice-President and a Treasurer of Chevron on January 1st, 2009.  Yarrington is also a member of the San Francisco Economic Advisory Council, where she serves as a director and advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.  Yarrington is also a Bay Area resident.

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Yesterday, I heard billionaire Steve Forbes speak in Buffalo, NY, as part of a traveling motivational seminar. I was on assignment for Artvoice, Buffalo’s alternative weekly newspaper. Forbes shared the bill with the power elite: former Secretary of State Colin Powell, football great Joe Montana, and former mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani. The “Get Motivated!” seminars rent out sports stadiums around the country for all-day sessions and offer discounts to employers who take their whole office as a substitute for a day’s work.

Here’s what Forbes — the editor of Forbes magazine and CEO of Forbes Inc. — said to the 19,000-plus Buffalo crowd:

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After an extended period of blog lethargy, I’m making my debut on Eyes on the Ties today in order to announce a LittleSis research project: we’re working to develop a comprehensive list of all the connections between Goldman Sachs executives and influential government officials and lobbyists.

Serendipitously (or perhaps not), Senator Carl Levin has also made an announcement today: namely, that the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has subpoenaed Goldman Sachs in order to comb for evidence of fraud during last year’s mortgage-market meltdown. The Daily Kos blog team was the first to pick up the story: Read more…

As the health care fight intensifies, a wide range of research and journalism initiatives are taking a closer look at the special interests seeking to influence upcoming legislation. One of the more innovative efforts is the Health Care Investigative Unit, a project of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. We’re pleased to announce that starting this week, LittleSis will be partnering with the HCIU as it follows the money in the healthcare debate and tracks lobbyists’ connections to Congress.

The HCIU is mobilizing a team of citizen journalists to dig deeper on the key players in the healthcare debate:

The true influence of lobbyists, health care companies, and special interest groups is unprecedented as this historic battle looms. The Health Care Investigative Unit’s large-scale, citizen-powered effort will cover this influence from new perspectives and unearth new facts about how Congress really makes decisions.

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The healthcare reform fight is heating up on Capitol Hill, pitting the health insurance industry, big pharma, the docs, the hospitals, the medical tech industry, and the biotech industry against…well, I’m not exactly sure. A very scary coalition of uninsured people, the middle class, unions, and liberal think tanks? Perhaps the lines are not so clearly drawn, as the AMA has been unclear about its position on the public option (a government health insurance plan).

One group that is clear in its opposition to the most significant reforms on the table is America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Led by Karen Ignagni, AHIP is the main lobby for the health insurance industry. According to the Globe, Ignagni has been doing a decent job of convincing people that her lobby is not pure evil. She has also paid off quite a few politicians, says the Center for Responsive Politics in a recent blog post.

There’s no question who AHIP works for, though there’s some question as to who works for AHIP. Yesterday, noticing that Ignagni and the AHIP board had been added to LittleSis, but no other staff, I tried to find out who the key staffers at AHIP are, other than Ignagni.

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The Times reports today on extensive financial ties between financial industry players including Citigroup and D.E. Shaw and leading Obama economic advisers Lawrence Summers and Michael Froman. Some in the media, ranging from this blog to Times columnist Frank Rich, have been sounding alarm bells for months about the cozy relations between the White House, zombie banks like Citigroup and vampiric hedge funds like D.E. Shaw, which qualifies for massive subsidies under Geithner’s scheme to burden taxpayers with trillions in toxic asset liabilities. The don of this crony capitalist cabal is former Citigroup chairman Robert Rubin, who mentored Summers and Froman, served as an Obama campaign adviser and successfully moved most of the leadership of his Hamilton Project think-tank into the White House.

Today’s Times article is something of a Saturday weather balloon, designed to gauge whether coming clean about Summers’ $7 million in payments from D.E. Shaw, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and other recipients of Federal largess will enable the White House to convince a gullible press corps that conflicts of interest are in the past.

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LittleSis is a latecomer to Twitter, and we’re still learning the ropes, but one thing is clear: microblogging makes nuanced argument difficult, but is quite effective for documenting simple facts and leads. What better model to mimic, then, for LittleSis’s much-needed analyst note system?

We’ve decided to modify Twitter’s format to make it more flexible for LittleSis analysts, thus feeding many birds with one worm:

1. Notes let analysts keep memos — public or private — that make their own research easier and more complete. Notes are more useful when concise, but aren’t limited to Twitter’s 140 characters.
2. Notes let analysts “alert” other analysts using Twitter’s @username format. Multiple analysts can be “alerted” within one note. A private note can only be viewed by its author and any analysts it alerts.
3. Notes can link to any combination of entity, relationship, and list pages using a simple markup. For example, @entity:1 will create a link to Wal-Mart Stores, whereas @entity:1[biggest company in the world] will create a link to the biggest company in the world. @rel and @list work the same way.
4. While notes are designed to the above needs, all of which LittleSis analysts have asked for, we encourage you to experiment with them and find new uses we haven’t thought of.

We hope the new note system, available as of this post, will strengthen the social layer on LittleSis, which is essential to keeping our data fresh, accurate, and relevant. Notes are still a work in progress, so let us know what you think!

PS: As you can see, we’ve also taken the opportunity to reshuffle our start page layout. Feedback about that is welcome too.

A quick but important note about References on Littlesis.

From now on we’re encouraging Littlesis analysts to only use original sources when contributing data. Sites like Wikipedia that aggregate information from elsewhere without requiring documentation, though abundant with largely accurate information, are less useful to Littlesis users looking to verify information.

Wikipedia pages often contain inadequate documentation of the info they contain. When a reference is provided at the bottom, it’s often not directly linked to the relevant text above. Moreover, Wikipedia pages often change, and information that you source one day might be gone the next. And as we all know, Wikipedia is still considered an illegitimate source of information in many circles.

I personally love Wikipedia and use it for learning all the time. I often feel it’s the most useful public website in existence. And Littlesis probably wouldn’t be possible without the crowdsourcing success story of Wikipedia paving the way. But for documenting my work on Littlesis, it’s more helpful to others if I enter sources that will allow other users to quickly confirm my info if they so desire.

Of course, Wikipedia is often the best starting point to look for original sources. And we still encourage you to add Wikipedia pages as references to an entity’s profile directly, just not as the only source for a relationship or other important piece of info. The ‘References’ section on any profile contains a details link at the top that allows you (if you are logged in) to add new references independently of the entity and relationship editing process. For example:

http://littlesis.org/reference/list?model=Entity&id=33346

Soon you’ll see an adviso like “original sources only — not Wikipedia!” below the ‘Source URL’ field in editing forms. Understand we’re not hating on everyone’s favorite ‘pedia, just trying to keep it real.