ARIANNA HUFFINGTON IN CONVERSATION WITH ART KLEINER

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Breakfast: 7:45-8:30am

Forum: 8:30-9:30am (followed by book signing)

Crawford Family Forum at KPCC

474 Raymond Avenue

Pasadena, CA 91105

**The first 100 attendees will receive the current issue of Strategy + Business magazine**

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of thirteen books. She is also co-host of “Left, Right & Center,” public radio’s popular political roundtable program. In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that has quickly become one of the most widely read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands on the Internet. In 2006, she was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine's list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species and that the American Dream of a secure, comfortable standard of living has become as outdated.

“The United States of America is in danger of becoming a third world nation and that the evidence is all around us,” says Huffinton, and she cites the following: Our industrial base is vanishing, taking with it the kind of jobs that have formed the backbone of our economy for more than a century; our education system is in shambles, making it harder for tomorrow’s workforce to acquire the information and training it needs to land good twenty-first century jobs; our infrastructure—our roads, our bridges, our sewage and water, our transportation and electrical systems—is crumbling; our economic system has been reduced to recurring episodes of Corporations Gone Wild; our political system is broken, in thrall to a small financial elite using the power of the checkbook to control both parties.

America’s middle class, the driver of so much of our economic success and political stability, is rapidly disappearing, forcing us to confront the fear that we are slipping as a nation – that our children and grandchildren will enjoy fewer opportunities and face a lower standard of living than we did.

Art Kleiner is the editor of Strategy + Business magazine and a business journalist and the author of several critically lauded books on business history and organizations. He is the author of Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege and Success. Between 2001 and 2004 he was the director of research and publications for the Dialogos consulting firm in Cambridge, MA. He has contributed to the Harvard Business Review, The New York Times Magazine, and numerous other publications.