Via America’s Lawyer: A Harvard scientist has been convicted of concealing financial ties with the Chinese government, while actively trying to recruit his colleagues to do the same. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: A Harvard scientist has been arrested for working on behalf of China and failing to disclose his financial ties to the country as he recruited other scientists to do the same. This story is interesting on so many levels because of what’s happening in the Universities all over the world. Corporate America is now in charge of telling these professors, you come work with us, come work with us and you’re gonna make a lot of money. This is just one of those stories, just a different take on it.
Farron Cousins: It, it, it absolutely is. And of course, this one is a, a, a little bizarre here too. You’ve got this Harvard professor. He is approached by the, what was it, the Wuhan University of Technology and they say, hey, come do some research for us, which is totally legal, by the way. So everybody understands. What’s not legal though, is that he had a Chinese bank account that he didn’t disclose.
Mike Papantonio: Offshore.
Farron Cousins: Didn’t disclose any of the work he was doing. So he was effectively, I, I guess you would call it a, not necessarily a foreign agent, but very similar. Didn’t disclose any of it, hid it and of course, as you said, recruiting other scientists to do the same thing. Come work with us over here. They’ve got lots of money.
Mike Papantonio: You understand this is becoming a criticism of Fauci now, this connection, this connection up to. Not the, the, the criticism is being that the, the pharmaceutical industry is run by a cabal, a very small cabal that they run all parts of the pharmaceutical industry. Now, these folks, these, this kind of Harvard professor here is being sucked into that. We see it in cases every day, where some cat from Harvard or Princeton or Yale, the company, the, the, the drug company approaches them. Look at Duke University. It is like, they’re turning ’em out like a fire hose, these scientists who will say anything for corporate America. That’s what this is, isn’t it? I mean, to me, I don’t know how to look at this any other way.
Farron Cousins: It, it really is. And part of it is because of the failures that we have with the higher education system today. These professors, you know, just two decades ago were 90% of the faculty. They’ve now moved to 75% across the country here.
Mike Papantonio: What, what do you mean now? Talk, talk to me about that?
Farron Cousins: Well, well, they’ve moving to adjunct faculty.
Mike Papantonio: Okay.
Farron Cousins: So they’re paying people less. They’re cutting off tenures. They’re getting rid of the good professors. The few that are left, there’s no money in it. So they’re almost squeezing them to the point and I know they have a moral, they could, you know, act on their morals, but they’re squeezing them so that some of these folks are left with little alternative to say, listen, if I want to get by, I’m gonna have to, you know, put my moral compass aside and go work with these corporations. So I think that’s a part of it too that gets overlooked sometimes.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, and we’re seeing it virtually every major pharmaceutical case, every major environmental case, we’re seeing ’em turn up from Duke University, Princeton, Harvard, where they come in and they will say any thing the corporation wants. It’s kind of fun because the cross examination of these folks is so much fun. But the point being it, it’s really an ugly statement about what’s happening in higher education.
Farron Cousins: Well, and they have lists of them too, just so everybody understands. There’s lists of these professors that the corporations use they go to, they’ve got broken down by category.
Mike Papantonio: They have services. They, these folks will say what you want ’em to say, we’ll get ’em for you and they’ll protect you in trial.
