The crackdown on pro-Palestine activists at Australian campuses by university administrations has begun. 
Monash University has taken the lead. Nine students, including myself, have been given notice of pending discipline, which could potentially lead to suspension or expulsion, and have been banned from attending the pro-Palestine encampment. We are accused of “causing or threatening to cause harm” to an individual who had repeatedly invaded our camp to disrupt it, by yelling at him and making noise near him.
Despite a lot of rhetoric from the Monash administration about how embracing freedom of speech is one of the “hallmarks of democracy” and pledges to “defend all those who peacefully protest”, as was spelled out in a recent statement from the Vice Chancellor Sharon Pickering, nine of us are facing expulsion for participating in a peaceful protest nevertheless. 
For the two or so weeks the Gaza solidarity encampment at Monash has been going, the activity myself and my eight co-accused have been participating in has consisted of camping, talking to fellow students about what is happening in Gaza, making banners and placards and holding speak-outs. Our aim has been to express our horror about and opposition to what is being done to Palestinians, and to add our voices to the growing international protest movement against the war. We also want to put pressure on Israel’s allies—including Australia—to cut military and other aid to Israel, and demand our universities end their complicity in weapons manufacturing and cut ties with Israel.
Attendees at our protest camp have behaved responsibly and respectfully in our pursuit of these legitimate goals. The same cannot be said of students and others on campus who support Israel, resent the stand we are making, and want to see us silenced. 
Our camp has been under constant harassment by Israel supporters since its establishment. As well as a series of more organised attacks, one particular individual has repeatedly forced his way into the camp to disrupt our activities. Over four consecutive days, he pushed his way in, assaulting people in the process. Three women students have been assaulted by him, one had a megaphone shoved in her face and another two have been hit. One of the incidents is subject to a police investigation. This is the individual we are accused of causing “harm” to or “threatening to cause harm” to.
Despite the university’s professed commitment to defending the right to free speech and peaceful protest, it has done nothing to stop this person from threatening the camp. Instead, nine camp participants are being disciplined for trying to stop him attacking fellow campers. The motivation on the part of the university is not to stop violence, but to intimidate people out of protesting and to clear away a protest that is becoming politically inconvenient to the administration. 
At Adelaide University, the Gaza solidarity encampment has now been attacked four times with improvised explosive devices, with video showing that the last two times, the explosives were dropped from a drone. Camping students have been lucky not to be injured. The response from the university administration and police has not been commensurate with the threat posed to protesting students, who the administration is more concerned might be harassing people than being injured by pro-Israel attackers.
Following Monash’s disciplinary lead, the Australian National University has called seven students into a meeting under threat of discipline and told them to leave the encampment. This is after they suspended another student for their involvement in the protest. 
At Deakin University in Melbourne, protesters have been instructed by the deputy Vice-Chancellor to disassemble. The encampment has been fenced off, and security are directing people away from it. Power has also shut off to the surrounding area, and there has been an almost constant police presence. 
Following the occupation of a building in the centre of Melbourne University’s Parkville campus, the administration have threatened protesting students with disciplinary proceedings and criminal charges, and have indicated they are willing to go down the “forceful route” if students don’t leave. And at the University of Sydney, a number of students have been threatened with misconduct proceedings for their camp, which has been going since 23 April. 
These are just the opening salvos in the universities’ growing attempts to force Palestine activism off campuses. Until the last week or so, universities in Australia had taken a more hands-off approach, probably because they saw how repression elsewhere only escalated the protests. But Palestine activism is not just petering out, and more pressure is being put on universities by the political right and the government to do something to stop it. 
Universities and the liberal ethos that traditionally underpins them means they see themselves as champions of free speech and freedom of expression. But this only really exists insofar as what is being said or protested is marginal or ineffectual. When this expression starts to draw wider attention to the crimes of those in power, and, importantly, leads greater numbers of people to question the legitimacy of that power, the limits of this freedom become clear. 
The Monash Vice Chancellor’s statement encapsulates this dynamic. Opening with a quote from Palestinian-American academic Edward Said, she outlines the university’s commitment to free speech in the classic style of the liberal establishment. But then implies that speech in support of Palestine can go beyond “offense” and causing “hurt feelings” to causing “harm”, which is not tolerable. Exactly how or why is not spelled out. 
The irony is that everywhere the encampments have sprung up around the world, the main purveyors of violence have been the police and Israel supporters. And that is not even to mention the horrific violence that is being inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza, a fact that seems of minor importance to those up in arms about a few tents on a university lawn. As historian Howard Zinn said about protests against the Vietnam war: “they’ll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.”
Universities take this approach because a major part of their mission is, as Pickering says, “developing future leaders”. For these future leaders, some things have to be sacred and beyond question. Right near the top of that list is unconditional support for Israel, an essential part of Australia’s positioning in the world hierarchy. What they, and the broader establishment is concerned about, is the prospect of a generation emerging who are not sold on this ideological pillar of Australian capitalism. 
A unique feature of this latest movement in solidarity with Palestine is that it as much against the liberal establishment as it is the conservative right. Previous eruptions of Palestine solidarity and anti-war feeling over the last few decades have been largely directed against reactionary figures like George W Bush, John Howard and Donald Trump. But the genocide in Gaza is being championed in the West by Democrat Joe Biden, Labor left figure Anthony Albanese, and university managers, like Pickering at Monash and Minouche Shafik at Columbia. 
Pickering recently told a meeting of the Monash Islamic Society that her “north star was a commitment to human rights”. If that leads her to crack down on students protesting a genocide, she needs to pick a new star.
Student protesters and their supporters will not be easily intimidated. At Monash, hundreds of people have attended rallies to defend the camp from attacks by pro-Israel mobs. At ANU, the administration expressed concerns about work health and safety, so the campers called in the construction union to make sure everything was up to scratch. Hundreds have also rallied there in support of the camp.
The student movement around the world is historic. On a scale we have not witnessed in a long time, it embodies what it really means to speak truth to power.

Luka Kiernan

Disciplined for protesting genocide: why the universities are doing Israel’s bidding

The Monash Gaza solidarity encampment, at the university’s Clayton campus in south-east Melbourne, has been attacked by Zionists and far-right activists repeatedly since its establishment on May Day. 
Inspired by events at New York’s Columbia University and by the encampment movement elsewhere in the US, Monash students set up our own to demand that the university divest from Israel and that the government stop providing support to the apartheid state. 
On the first night, around a dozen men, mostly middle-aged, invaded the camp at 2am. One claimed to be a serving member of the Israeli military. They smashed a gazebo and threatened activists with violence. They played <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uBLxYSUOEM">Hebrew songs</a>
calling Palestinians “swarms of rats” who “will die in the dungeons” and sang Advance Australia Fair. 
Eventually, police removed them. 
Four nights later, they came back. But this time, the handful of far-right Israel supporters was confronted by 70 people who arrived after a social media callout for solidarity. Their attempted “invasion” of the encampment was turned into a rout. 
“They fled, tails between their legs, resoundingly defeated”, Madi Curkovic, a Monash Students for Palestine organiser, said. 
Zionists have constantly harassed the camp in daylight hours, often taunting activists with statements such as: “What genocide? There is no genocide happening” and “Palestine does not exist”. A student wearing an Israeli flag as a cape forced his way into the camp and allegedly assaulted Madi during one of the Zionist mobilisations. He returned the next day and planted himself in the middle of the encampment for several hours, while dozens of others shouted from the outside.
While the Zionists yell their hateful slogans, activists and our supporters are rallying, chanting and forming human chains to defend the encampment. Rather than being browbeaten or intimidated, more students and supporters have joined us because of the attacks. 
It’s not surprising that the anti-Palestine presence has been strongest at Monash. The Australasian Union of Jewish Students, a pro-Israel student group, is particularly strong at the campus. It successfully campaigned to deregister the Socialist Alternative club in 2014 for its Palestine solidarity activism. Its members have largely been the ones harassing and intimidating activists at the camp.
This is the dynamic: Zionists and supporters of Israel’s genocide instigating campaigns of harassment, intimidation and threats of violence. Yet figures from both the Labor and Liberal parties have urged a crackdown on encampments around the country because Palestine solidarity activists allegedly are making people feel “unsafe”.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton labelled the camps “racist” and Labor MP Bill Shorten suggested they encourage students “to bully, coerce and intimidate”. It is absurd.
In addition to the attacks at Monash, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/zionist-thugs-attack-adelaide-university-gaza-encampment">fireworks have been hurled at the Adelaide University encampment</a>
on two separate occasions.
But the problem is not just the Zionists and the political right. The Monash Student Association, controlled by the Labor left faction, has been worse than silent. In last week’s student council meeting, Labor left members voted to prevent a discussion of the encampment. 
They followed the vote with <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C6sjjcapJIv/">a statement</a> saying that they were “gravely concerned with the recent violence” without saying who committed the violence, or even saying what the violence was about. It was essentially a “both sides are bad” statement—appalling in the context of both the genocide and of the mobilisation of forces against Palestine solidarity activism around the world.
Over the last few days, the university has started to move against the encampment. Campus security on 8 May began removing barricades established to defend the camp from the constant attacks. They issued a directive banning the phrase “from the river to the sea” and the words “intifada” and “genocide” from being used on campus and said that students ignoring the directive will face academic discipline. 
Former Israeli military officer turned Free Palestine Melbourne activist Nachshon Amir expressed his outrage at this: “I am shocked that Australian students are being told that they can no longer call for freedom ‘from the river to the sea’. Is Monash University also an Israeli occupied territory?”
Yet student activists are remaining strong and united. We’ve established night watches and held several campus rallies of between 80 and 110. Large quantities of food and supplies have donated by local supporters, of which there are many. 
Everyone involved is determined to keep fighting.

Defending the Monash Gaza solidarity encampment

US universities have exploded into action to oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Protests, occupations, hunger strikes, faculty walk-offs and even rudimentary barricades are a feature of dozens of campuses across the country. So too are mass arrests of students and faculty members.
The movement has been building since the beginning of Israel’s invasion, protests having been held at hundreds of campuses. 
Students have faced down a feral right-wing backlash. In January, Columbia University protesters were sprayed with “skunk”—a tear gas alternative—by former IDF soldiers studying at the university, <a href="https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/01/22/protesters-allegedly-sprayed-with-hazardous-chemical-at-pro-palestinian-rally-nearly-two-dozen-report/">according to reports</a> in local newspaper Columbia Spectator. 
At Harvard, scenes reminiscent of McCarthyite inquisitions resulted in the doxxing of students who had signed an open letter in support of Palestine. Conservatives paid for a truck to drive around the city with screens displaying the activists’ names and faces, slandering them as “Harvard’s leading antisemites”.
It hasn’t only been the political right attacking student activists. Palestine solidarity protests have caused a crisis for liberal university establishments, which make statements supporting free speech and intellectual inquiry but have tried to curtail activities critical of Israel. The contradiction came to a head in a December Congressional inquiry into anti-Semitism, at which presidents of various universities were grilled by Zionist politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, about whether they were doing enough to quash Palestine solidarity activism.
The university presidents called into this show trial generally accepted the bipartisan framing of the issue: that supporting Palestine is somehow inherently anti-Semitic. They just bumbled about the difficulty of balancing “the right to free speech” with the purported proliferation of “hate speech” (i.e. speech critical of genocide). In the wash-up, the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania were forced to resign. Other university presidents understood the lesson loud and clear: shut your students up or you’re next.
Yet the current wave of campus activism has taken the movement to new heights. It all started at Columbia University in New York on 17 April, when hundreds of students established a Gaza Solidarity Encampment. They demanded that the university disclose and divest from its financial ties to Israel and the weapons industry. The Columbia administration soon called in police to disperse the protesters. More than 100 students were arrested, and participants were suspended from their courses. 
After the wave of further arrests and suspensions, students set up a new encampment on another part of campus, joined by New York University students, who marched over from their campus. Hundreds of Columbia faculty members stopped work to support the occupation and formed a human chain around the protesters. 
In this re-established occupation, Jewish anti-Zionist activists celebrated Passover with a Seder dinner in the middle of the encampment. 
“On Passover, it’s important to stand up for oppressed people everywhere, whether they are Jewish or not”, one participant <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/23/us/video/seder-passover-columbia-university-protests-ny-digvid">explained to CNN</a>. “I had seen so many statements online about how Jews weren’t safe, about how Columbia had turned into a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Each of those statements further galvanised me to use my voice as a Jewish person to come here [to the encampment].”
The encampment movement has since spread like wildfire. At the time of writing, more than 40 occupations are ongoing at campuses around the country, demanding divestment from Israel and transparency in university investments. 
Police have been called to many, and hundreds of students and faculty from universities including Yale, Harvard, NYU and the University of Southern California have been arrested. Heavily armed state troopers, including some on horseback, were called into clear and arrest students in Texas.
Despite every effort she has made to undermine pro-Palestine sentiment, Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, is under fire from the political establishment. All ten New York Republican congressional representatives signed a letter to demand her resignation, asserting that “anarchy has engulfed the campus of Columbia University”. 
Shafik is the perfect embodiment of the modern university—a corporate institution integrated into global finance and the military industrial complex. She is the daughter of a wealthy Egyptian landowner whose assets were requisitioned under Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist government (1954-70). The family moved to the US. 
A dual British-US citizen, Minouche later became vice-president of the World Bank, a deputy governor of the Bank of England and a deputy managing director of the IMF. She then moved into the education sector as vice-chancellor of the London School of Economics.
Shafik is the first Arab and first woman president of Columbia University. Alongside Eric Adams, the second Black mayor of New York City, and Edward Caban, the first Hispanic New York City police chief, she is carrying out the type of political repression not seen on universities since the 1970s. The actions of the three prove that racial or gender identity means little when it comes to politics. People of all colours and creeds are capable of joining the ruling class or doing its bidding.
Strikingly, the Palestine solidarity movement has generally been strongest at prestigious, Ivy League universities, where socially mobile students are putting their futures on the line to stand with Gaza. They are fighting not only against the genocide, but for a vision of universities beyond degree-factories. 
The police and administration crackdowns so far have bred only more defiance and commitment. As one Yale student <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/22/yale-university-protest-arrests-israel-gaza-war/">remarked</a>
to a Washington Post reporter: “Not only are we not deterred, we may even be more engaged now ... We’re resolute. I’ve been involved in this struggle for a couple of months now and plan to be for the rest of my life.”

US campuses erupt in solidarity with Palestine

Student unions around Australia, with few exceptions, are controlled by the student factions of the Labor Party. And they have failed to stand up for Palestine. 
This comes as no great shock, considering the federal Labor government’s unwavering support for Israel even in the face of 33,000 Palestinian deaths in six months. But it is a huge disappointment. Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them university students, have rallied around the country in solidarity with the Palestinians. Yet student unions have been conspicuously absent from the movement.
Take the Monash Student Association (MSA), which is controlled by the Labor left student faction. The faction portrays itself as pro-Palestine and passed a lukewarm motion supporting the Palestinians. But when it comes to using the institutional weight of the MSA to support the solidarity campaign, these “left-wingers” duck, weave, obfuscate and hide behind bureaucratic procedure to avoid doing anything of substance. 
By contrast, Socialist Alternative members Madi Curkovic and Kelly Cvetkova—the MSA Queer officers—have thrown themselves into the campaign against Australia’s support for Israel. They have organised banner paintings to prepare for the weekly protests, hosted an on-campus rally and spoken at community protests against companies producing components for Israel’s military.
Yet they have faced many obstacles. The Monash Queer Affairs Committee (QuAC) is controlled by people who lost the last MSA election after campaigning “to keep the Queer department apolitical”. They have applied their “apolitical” stance (which just means accepting politics as it is) to the Palestinian genocide, moving motions to restrict Madi and Kelly from promoting Palestine solidarity rallies. Being “apolitical” at the best of times means siding with the oppressive status quo. Being “apolitical” during a genocide is a political and moral crime.
Last month, Madi and Kelly, on their department’s Instagram page, posted about the blowback they were receiving for their activism and argued that student unionists should participate in the solidarity campaign. They have both since been threatened with disciplinary action for this “potentially unsafe” and “politically motivated” post. The Labor left MSA president allowed MSA staff to log in to the Instagram account and take down the post, arguing that it made her, and QuAC members, feel “intimidated” and “unsafe”.
Her argument is simply this: elected student representatives shouldn’t be allowed to talk about the genocide in Palestine, or organise against the government’s complicity in it, because that might distress some people. Imagine being distressed because your student representative opposes genocide. 
Advocating for any political position could evoke unpleasant feelings in someone, somewhere on campus. So student unions should just organise parties and academic advice sessions—that’s basically what the Labor left is all about these days.
The supposedly “pro-Palestine” Labor students at Monash have in practice only stifled Palestine solidarity activism on campus, accepting and backing up the arguments made by the rest of the conservatives in the union. 
Around the country, the pattern is similar. In Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, student unions have at best passed motions rhetorically supporting Palestine, but then failed to organise anything. At worst, they have opposed Palestine solidarity activism and bureaucratically stifled organising efforts. 
At the University of Sydney, the Labor left has essentially boycotted Palestine solidarity activism all year, instead handing out lighters as part of a legalise marijuana campaign. The University of Melbourne Student Union has repealed a motion supporting Palestine. Every other student union in Melbourne has been silent.
The political inactivity of the student unions is striking, especially when they’re controlled by Labor students. Whenever their left-sounding rhetoric comes into conflict with their career aspirations, they go quiet. We need an alternative.
Student unions have a rich history of fighting against oppression and injustice. They led protests against South African apartheid, protected students dodging conscription during the Vietnam War and organised Freedom Rides for Indigenous equality. In recent years, they have initiated activist campaigns against attacks on higher education and played a role in the campaign for marriage equality.
Student unions should be playing this role with Palestine today. They could organise student contingents to rallies, call demonstrations against universities’ ties to arms companies, and much more. Socialist Alternative is proud to be doing just this.

Student unions abandon Palestine

Another day, another scientific study providing evidence of the terrifying extent of the global climate catastrophe. This time, it’s about global sea levels.
<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01818-x">The study</a>, titled “Unavoidable future increase in West Antarctic ice-shelf melting over the twenty-first century”, was published in the journal Nature Climate Change in October. It concludes that the West Antarctic ice sheet may already be beyond saving, and that rapidly accelerated melting of the Antarctic ice shelves over the next few decades is now unavoidable even under best case warming scenarios.
Kaitlin Naughten—an ocean modeller with the British Antarctic Survey and lead researcher of the study—was blunt about its significance. The kind of sea level rises that will be caused by this melting, she said, will mean “some coastal communities will either have to build [defences] or be abandoned”.
Scientists have been debating whether Antarctic melting would be gradual and steady—progressing in a linear fashion corresponding to temperature increases—or if there will be “tipping points” that, once reached, will cause the melting to massively accelerate. What this research suggests is that the more “optimistic” of these viewpoints is wrong. We may now already be witnessing a significant tipping point being passed, because of the melting of the crucial ice shelves. 
Ice shelves are masses of ice that sit on top of the ocean. The ice shelves around Antarctica play a crucial role in maintaining the stability of the massive ice sheets that sit on top of the continent. The shelves block the flow of the sheets down into the water. When the ice shelves melt, the door is opened for far more rapid melting of ice, as the sheets collapse into the relatively warmer temperatures of the ocean water.
Scientists have projected that if the West Antarctic ice sheet were to melt completely—something which this study suggests may now be unavoidable—it would cause a five metre rise in global sea levels. 
This is just the latest piece of bad news from Antarctica. Earlier this year, the area of sea ice around the continent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/15/antarctic-sea-ice-hits-record-low-climate-crisis">hit a record low</a>, with a net loss of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/12/antarctica-has-lost-7-5tn-tonnes-of-ice-since-1997-scientists-find">7.5 trillion tonnes</a> of ice loss since 1997. As one researcher told the Guardian in March, “The rapid decline in sea ice over the past six years is quite remarkable, since the ice cover hardly changed at all in the 35 years before”.
Neither are the Antarctic ice sheets the only ones that are melting. The biggest current contributor to rising sea levels is the Greenland ice sheet, which scientists believe is also beyond saving. Its loss is projected to add seven metres to global sea levels. Around the world, there has been a loss of <a href="https://tc.copernicus.org/preprints/tc-2020-232/tc-2020-232.pdf">28 trillion tonnes</a> of ice between 1997 and 2017.
More than <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/29/risk-from-sea-level-rises-unless-emissions-reduced">267 million people</a> currently live in areas less than two metres above sea level. A 2019 <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z#Sec2">study</a>—“New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding”, published in Nature Communications—found that: “In the case of Antarctic instability, a total of 300 (270–340) million people today live on land indicated as vulnerable to an annual flood event by mid-century, rising to as many as 480 (380–630) million by 2100”. 
Whatever the exact trajectory of warming from here, it’s clear capitalist-driven climate change will displace hundreds of millions of people over the coming decades.
Marx once wrote that the capitalist ruling class is “unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery”. When he wrote this, he meant by “existence” a decent livelihood for workers. Today’s capitalist ruling class is incompetent even to assure, for hundreds of millions of people, the promise of a future above water.

Antarctic warming makes catastrophic sea level rise inevitable

Review of Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food ... and Why Can’t We Stop? By Chris van Tulleken. Cornerstone Press; 384 pages.
The maiden voyage of the Terra Grande, also known as Nestlé Até Você a Bordo (Nestlé takes you on board), set sail from the Brazilian port city of Belém in July 2010. The barge was described as a “floating supermarket” as it embarked on an eighteen-day circuit up the rivers of the Amazon lowlands, providing 800,000 people in impoverished riverside towns with the glories of the modern Western diet. The best-sellers were Kit-Kats, an 80-gram serving of which contains 38 grams of sugar. 
The products rapidly infiltrated the communities. To compete, local stores began stocking the ultra-processed junk food peddled by Nestlé. In its wake, the Terra Grande left dietary chaos. High sugar, ultra-processed food became a core food group. Childhood obesity rates rose as high as 30 percent in some communities, and cases of Type 2 diabetes have since been reported in large numbers, a disease that was previously unheard of.
Nestlé complemented the floating supermarket with another program, Nestlé Até Você (Nestlé Comes to You), to better access Brazil’s urban slums. Seven thousand women were employed as door-to-door salespeople, and the program now visits 700,000 low-income households each month with its ultra-processed goodness. As one company supervisor put it: “The essence of our program is to reach the poor”. 
This story of a multinational food company destroying the health of impoverished populations is recounted in Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People. The book is an insightful scientific, political and economic look into capitalism’s global destruction of nutrition and health. It points the finger squarely at the profiteering multinationals and complicit governments, regulatory bodies and NGOs. Van Tulleken contends that the rise of “ultra-processed food” (UPF), defined as any food containing synthetic additives, has led to the deterioration of people’s health. Today, in Australia, the UK, the US and Canada, UPF constitutes <a href="blank">up to 60 percent</a> of the average diet.
A tendency has emerged across the world over the last 50 years regarding health that contradicts the rest of human history. In most countries, the poorest people eat the most calories. They are also the most nutritionally malnourished. “Diet quality and associated health outcomes follow a social gradient in Australia, and internationally,” concluded a recent <a href="blank">VicHealth study</a>. In the UK, working-class children are <a href="blank">getting shorter on average</a>, at the same time that they are getting fatter. Rich children continue to grow. 
From the 1950s onwards, savvy food companies figured out ever more novel ways of using additives and synthetic ingredients to mimic more expensive foods. Modified starches from potatoes or corn were far cheaper than dairy fats, and, once packed with bulking agents, flavouring and colouring, could appear close enough to the real thing. The cheapest forms of fats, proteins and carbohydrates could be processed in any number of ways to create a lucrative mass product. With added preservatives, food was much more suited to the logistics of the market. Beyond just reducing ingredient costs, these chemicals and methods of processing were used to “extend shelf life, facilitate centralised production and, as it turns out, drive excess consumption”, according to Van Tulleken. Excess consumption became increasingly central to the profitability of these products.
There are an estimated 10,000 additives in modern food production, according to a study published in the journal Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety: flavouring, colouring, foaming and anti-foaming agents, bulking and anti-bulking agents, preservatives, emulsifiers and gums, among many others. Some of these have known serious health effects, but the overwhelming majority haven’t been researched enough to determine their consequences conclusively. The average UK resident <a href="blank">consumes eight</a> kilograms of these substances a year. 
These additives are also incredibly effective at subverting the body’s natural regulatory system. Van Tulleken writes about studies that have shown that, when infants are given full access to a variety of nutritious foods, they feed themselves a nutritionally balanced diet, without over- or under-eating. This indicates that the body’s regulation of nutritional intake is as sophisticated as that for temperature or blood pressure. But the rise of UPF has disrupted these processes.
For instance, a <a href="blank">2019 study</a> by the US National Institutes of Health found that even when UPF and unprocessed foods have identical nutritional profiles (in terms of calories, and macro and micronutrients), people will overeat the processed food. 
According to Van Tulleken, there has been “an evolutionary selection process over many decades, whereby the products that are purchased and eaten in the greatest quantities are the ones that survive best in the market. To achieve this, they have evolved to subvert the systems in the body that regulate weight and many other functions”. That is, getting people addicted to calorie-dense, nutritionally lacking, additive-loaded products—to the immense detriment of their health—is the food industry’s main game. 
Coca-Cola, for example, is packed full of sugar: ten teaspoons per can. To make it palatable (because spoonfuls of raw sugar don’t taste good) Coca-Cola adds bitter flavouring that cancels out some of the sweetness, so that consumers get the unnatural sugar and caffeine hit without their body rejecting it. 
Like the quantity of additives in their products, the profits of these companies are immense. Nestlé, the biggest of them all, grossed US$45 billion last year, PepsiCo $46 billion, Mondalez $11 billion, Archer-Daniels-Midland $7.5 billion.
Van Tulleken makes a series of compelling arguments throughout the book regarding the social and economic factors behind the health crisis. He rejects the individualist, personal responsibility framework that dominates mainstream discussions of nutrition and health. The book is explicitly not a self-help guide. 
He writes that, across the West, “there was a dramatic increase in obesity, beginning in the 1970s. The idea that there has been a simultaneous collapse in personal responsibility in both men and women across age and ethnic groups is not plausible”. 
Over the past 30 years, childhood obesity in England has increased by 700 percent, and severe obesity by 1,600 percent. This can be explained only by tectonic shifts in the diets made available. 
In Australia, the number of people living with Type 2 diabetes has <a href="blank">tripled</a> (or doubled when adjusted for population growth and age structure) over the last twenty years, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Comprehensive meta-analysis has demonstrated <a href="blank">a conclusive link</a> between UPF consumption and Type 2 diabetes. Multiple studies have indicated that higher consumption of UPF also leads to <a href="blank">massively increased risks</a> of heart attack and stroke.
Consistent with this structural approach, the book centres inequality as a major factor in health outcomes. The consumption of UPF is directly correlated with income, the poorest eating the most. This can largely be explained by pretty simple personal economics. In the UK, a study by the Food Foundation charity shows that the poorest half of the population would need to spend a third of their disposable income on food to meet the minimum nutritional guidelines. The bottom 10 percent would need to spend 75 percent. There are twice as many fast-food outlets in the poorer suburbs of England as in the richer, and advertising is most concentrated in those areas. 
In Australia, age-standardised rates of Type 2 diabetes are <a href="blank">more than twice as high</a> in the lowest socioeconomic areas as in the highest. Van Tulleken makes the case that diet and access to quality food are major transmitters of the “health-wealth” gap, alongside smoking and access to health care.
The book also decries the crimes of the major food companies that get rich by destroying the health of billions. For instance, in the 1970s Nestlé was accused of getting mothers in sub-Saharan Africa hooked on free samples of baby formula to the point where they stopped lactating. Mothers were then compelled to purchase baby formula or have their children starve—which thousands of the poorest did. 
In Ghana, one of the poorest countries in the world, obesity rates have risen from 2 percent to 13.6 percent since 1980, as fast-food outlets and UPF companies have expanded their territory. Former CEO of YUM!, KFC’s parent company, justified their intervention by saying: “It’s so much safer to eat at a KFC in Ghana, than it is to eat, obviously, you know, pretty much anywhere else”.
The agricultural system that serves the modern food industry is equally as destructive. Brazilian rainforests are chopped down to grow soybeans, which are used to force-feed factory-raised animals and produce various proteins and fats in their cheapest forms. Indonesian peat forests are burned to clear land for palm oil production, generating thick blankets of smoke and unfathomable amounts of pollution. In 2015, the burning of these forests <a href="blank">emitted more CO2</a> in just a couple of months than the entire German economy that year. Modern agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to global warming, fuelled by the demands of the industrial food sector. 
There are broader dynamics at play than just the individual wickedness of CEOs. As Van Tulleken puts it, each company “is in an arms race with other companies ... all vying for that real estate in the shops that maximises sales. If Kellogg’s decided to take a stand [by making their food healthier and less profitable], the space would instantly be filled by another product from another company”. The nutrition crisis is a built-in product of modern capitalism, stemming from its competitive economic structures.
In this way, Van Tulleken approaches an anti-capitalist perspective. He argues that “shame and outrage are clearly inadequate to limit the survival of companies that are complicit in atrocities” and “their behaviour only changes when the flow of the money is diverted”.
Van Tulleken also lacerates the useful idiots and the actively complicit of the health NGO world. He slams the growth of “healthwashing”, whereby the worst offenders of the obesity crisis fund research about the very crisis that they are causing. He puts it firmly: “Organisations that take money from, for example, Coca-Cola, and claim to be fighting obesity are simply extensions of the marketing division of Coca-Cola ... the interests of [these companies] and those of obesity campaigners are not, and cannot be, aligned”.
However, Van Tulleken stops short of the full-blooded anti-capitalism that is required really to tackle the systemic issues he describes so clearly. While rejecting regressive proposals, such as sugar taxes, he falls back on milquetoast technocratic solutions. His proposals for policies like limits on fast food advertising and better regulated health research to prevent corporate influence would be welcome, but will not even scratch the surface of the structural causes behind the obesity epidemic. 
Elsewhere, Van Tulleken devolves into utopianism, arguing for a “fixing” of the agricultural system which today is based on monoculture crops, mass use of antibiotics and massive environmental destruction. But without a way to fight for such a system, the suggestions remain, as Marx put it 150 years ago, “recipes for the cookshops of the future”.
Ultimately, what Ultra-Processed People clearly demonstrates, but does not actually say, is that there is no solution to the health crisis under capitalism. For business, even the most essential of products, food, is just another way to make obscene amounts of money. The health of billions is sacrificed in the interest of profit.

How capitalism killed nutrition

It has been a fantastic few years for the Australian fossil fuel industry. 
Woodside Petroleum, now Australia’s largest oil and gas company, posted a more than 400 percent increase in net profit over the last year. Mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s net worth increased from $21.2 billion to $34.02 billion in the two years to August 2022, while Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest had an even more impressive increase, from $7.99 billion to $30.72 billion. Woodside’s Scarborough gas project, which will emit an estimated 1.37 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases, recently secured its final approval from the Western Australian Labor government. And the Albanese government has been vocal about its commitment to Australia remaining the third largest fossil fuel exporter in the world.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world overheats, chokes, burns, floods and freezes, sometimes all at once. And, as ever, it is the most impoverished and vulnerable who suffer the most.
Pakistan has been hit most severely by continuous natural disasters. More than 1,200 people have been killed in floods that have swept away infrastructure and destroyed 1 million homes. Around US$10 billion worth of damage has been done, according to government estimates. Rainfall has quadrupled in some parts of Pakistan since 1959, according to experts. In January, the central city of Nawabshah experienced record high temperatures of 49.5 degrees, while in the same month Murree, on the outskirts of Islamabad, was hit by unprecedented snowstorms, resulting in 23 deaths. 
In Europe, record-breaking heatwaves and wildfires have likewise wreaked havoc. In the UK, London hit a record-breaking 40.2 degrees this summer, and heatwaves caused an estimated 948 deaths across England and Wales. The resulting wildfires caused the UK fire service to have its busiest day since World War II. 
China’s third biggest city, Chongqing, with a population of nearly 18 million, recorded temperatures of 43 degrees, at least 10 degrees above its seasonal average. This heat, and its corresponding drought, have caused the Yangtze River (the third largest river in the world) to dry up almost completely.
Wildfires in France caused 40,000 people to be evacuated. Across the Iberian peninsula, nearly 240,000 hectares of land were burnt by wildfires, as Spanish cities were blanketed with smoke for days. In the US, an estimated 2.4 million hectares of land were destroyed by fire, an area roughly the size of the country of Haiti. Algeria had 10,000 hectares of UNESCO-heritage listed biosphere in the El Kala Natural Park obliterated. 
In Iraq and Syria, dust storms caused by desertification and drought that began in April have caused the deaths of at least four people and hospitalised thousands more. These storms are predicted to grow more intense and frequent as the region becomes ever drier and hotter. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification estimates that around 12 million hectares of productive land are lost to desertification every year. 
Australia is no exception to these global trends. Residents of Lismore who had their houses destroyed by floods will be lucky to receive $25,000 from the government to rebuild their lives from scratch, while many fire victims still live in tents or temporary housing, more than two years after the devastating Black Summer bushfires. The Australian government is much more generous to its friends in the fossil fuel industry, spending $10.3 billion subsidising the fossil fuel industry in the 2020-21 financial year. 
Despite climate change affecting the entire planet on which all human beings depend, we are not “all in this together”. “Eco-cities” for the super-rich, such as the Eko Atlantic project on the coast of Nigeria, are designed to help the wealthy escape the effects of climate destruction
With one planned skyscraper appropriately named “The Audacity”, the city boasts “Expansive marinas offering inspirational views from every direction”. Meanwhile, ordinary Nigerians received warnings about what to expect during the 43-degree days the country experienced in July: “increased respiration rate, heat stroke, fatigue, loss of concentration and dehydration ... worsen[ing] spread and fatality of infectious diseases such as Lassa fever, yellow fever, measles, chicken pox, monkeypox, cholera and Covid-19”.
Whether it’s eco-cities or the proliferation of doomsday bunkers, the rich who create the climate crisis, and the politicians who oversee it, are insulating themselves from its effects in comfort and security. Their expectation is that workers and the poor will continue to put up with snowballing environmental devastation and the terrible human toll it is exacting and will continue to exact. It is imperative that we prove them wrong.

2022’s climate carnage so far

The most shocking thing about the Pandora Papers—a massive trove of financial documents leaked to the <a href="https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/">International Consortium of Investigative Journalists</a>—isn’t the sheer volume of the revelations they contain. Nor is it particularly surprising that so many current and former politicians and heads of state (more than 300 public officials in 90 countries) <a href="https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/power-players/">are named in them</a>. It isn’t even the appearance of global political luminaries like former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Italian billionaire Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi or Chile’s billionaire President <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebasti%C3%A1n_Pi%C3%B1era">Sebastián Piñera</a>, among many others: following the previous release of the Panama Papers in 2016 and the Paradise Papers in 2017, we’re used to that.
What’s most shocking about the leaks is how much of the unconscionable offshore hoarding of wealth they reveal is completely legal. For the world’s super-rich elite, as long as bribery or money laundering aren’t involved, offshore tax evasion and money stockpiling are pretty much fair game.
In article after article about the leaks, journalists take pains to emphasise varieties of the statement that “there are perfectly legitimate reasons to have an offshore bank account/offshore company”. And they’re right: if you count yourselves among the class of people who have the means to move your wealth “offshore” in various ways, then there’s a whole legitimate system of wealth management that has been set up to serve your interests.
This system of offshore wealth management exists separately from the more “plebeian” system the rest of us rely on. Ordinary people by and large leave their savings in banks and superannuation funds. They are compelled to open their accounts to scrutiny to access bare-bones welfare payments, and any interest their money might accrue will be subject to taxation. Their retirement funds are exposed to risks from fluctuations in the stock market and so on. The super-rich, in contrast, can stash their wealth securely, anonymously and tax-free in the world’s network of tax havens.
US NGO the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates <a href="https://www.nber.org/digest/nov17/how-much-wealth-stashed-tax-havens">that almost a tenth of the world’s wealth</a> is held in offshore accounts. The Pandora Papers add weight to this claim, and expose many individual cases of unfathomable greed.
King Abdullah II of Jordan is estimated to have a personal wealth of US$750 million, and the leaks expose his extensive offshore property portfolio, worth a cool US$100 million. While the king acquires luxury beachfront mansions in Malibu, <a href="https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Summary%20English.pdf">more than a million Jordanians</a> languish below the poverty line. Of course, the King’s lawyers were quick to assure the world that “HM [His Majesty] has not at any point misused public monies or made any use whatsoever of the proceeds of aid or assistance intended for public use”. He is one among many despots with many zeroes on the end of their offshore bank balances.
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, a scion of the powerful Kenyatta political dynasty, possesses a family net worth of more than US$500 million. The leaks show that he and his family have set up a number of offshore companies, including one registered in Panama with at least US$30 million worth of stocks and bonds, as well as investments in real estate in the UK and Hong Kong. Congolese President Denis Sassou-Ngeusso—whose son<a href="https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/corruption-and-money-laundering/sassou-nguessos-laundromat-a-congolese-state-affair-part-ii/"> famously stole US$50 million from the state treasury</a> in another offshore accounts scandal—has set up a series of British Virgin Islands accounts to conceal his ownership of diamond mines and construction and real estate companies. 
It’s not just in the Global South that political leaders are engaging the services of the offshore wealth industry. Tony Blair and his partner managed to avoid paying US$400,000 in tax by purchasing an office building in London via an offshore company. Former French Finance Minister and IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn received millions in “consultancy fees” from Russian and Chinese firms—paid directly into an account in the United Arab Emirates. 
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s oligarchic associates Gennady Timchenko and Konstantin Ernst—of oil and media wealth respectively—have had revealed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of loans from Kremlin-linked banks funnelled through offshore accounts, and the US$100 million in secret wealth of Putin’s reputed mistress Svetlana Krivonogikh was also exposed. These revelations are just the tip of a very large iceberg. 
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/oct/04/no-stone-is-left-unturned-australian-links-in-pandora-papers-will-be-investigated-ato-says">According to the Guardian</a>, which has access to the full trove of information, 400 Australians are named in the Panama Papers. This includes, writes senior business reporter Ben Butler, “senior figures from the finance and property industries”. Shamefully though, the Guardian has “chosen not to identify them”. For the mainstream media, it seems, the privacy of super-rich individuals who stash their wealth offshore matters more than actually, for once, making them account for themselves before the public.
Why do the world’s governments continue to allow this to happen? Surely it can’t be that difficult to crack down on these much abused loopholes? To put it more sharply: how is it possible that most of the shady practices exposed in the Panama Papers are perfectly legal?
The answer is that capitalist states exist to serve capital, and when tax codes are written, the interests of big corporations and super-rich individuals will be prioritised over everything else. Which politician is going to alienate their mates and donors by forcing them to repatriate their offshore wealth (particularly, as is the case with many politicians, when they have offshore wealth of their own)? 
No doubt, in the aftermath of these latest revelations, there will be a few more superficial gestures towards clamping down on offshore tax evasion. Nevertheless, as long as the competitive system of global capitalism exists, a few things seem certain: there will always be some countries that choose to offer themselves as ideal (i.e. tax-free) destinations for the wealth of the global elite; there will always be an army of lawyers, accountants and others desperate to cream a bit off the top of that wealth by helping the rich shift their money to those places; and, finally, capitalist governments will always prefer cutting funding to welfare and vital services rather than actually imposing anything close to a fair tax regime on their wealthiest constituents.
To change all this will require much more than a bit of tinkering with tax codes here and there. What the Pandora Papers show, above all, is the need to mount a challenge to the entire rotten system.

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How capitalism killed nutrition

2022’s climate carnage so far

Pandora Papers expose shadow system serving the greed of the super-rich

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