Intelligence expert talks about 'biggest change in life on Earth'

Foreign policy and intelligence expert Herb Meyer will speak in Grand Rapids about key global issues including “the world’s most under-reported news story.” Meyer contends more people around the world are emerging from poverty than ever before, and within our lifetime the majority of human beings will be middle class. “This is the biggest change of life on Earth that has ever happened,” Meyer said.

Meyer’s speech, “What in the World is Going On?” is sponsored by Grand Valley State University’s Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies. It will be held Tuesday, October 20, at 7 p.m. in Loosemore Auditorium in the DeVos Center, 401 W. Fulton St., on the Pew Grand Rapids Campus.

A roundtable discussion on Meyer’s talk will be held Wednesday, October 21, at noon in 302E of the DeVos Center on the Pew Grand Rapids Campus.

Meyer will also discuss the war between radical Islam and Western civilization and the political and economic implications of the “demographic implosion of the West.”

Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as a special assistant to the director of central intelligence, and vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. In these positions, he managed production of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates and other top-secret projects for the president and his senior national security advisers.

Meyer is widely credited with being the first senior U.S. Government official to forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he did in the early 1980s. Prior to his service with the U.S. Government, Meyer was an associate editor of Fortune. He is the author of several books including Real-World Intelligence, The War Against Progress, and Hard Thinking.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information call the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at (616) 331-2770 or visit www.allpresidents.org.