Now try to remember the last time you bought something that came from Russia. An actual product, made in Russia, that you picked off a shelf. For most of us the honest answer is a long time ago, if ever. The scale of Russian’s supplier irrelevance is almost funny: in 2022, Saskatchewan sold twice as much to the United States as all of Russia did. Today, with sanctions in place, Saskatchewan sells closer to ten times as much. A single prairie province of 1.3 million people out-supplies a global power of 140 million.

But that dynamic was twisted, for a while, by two sporting events: the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Those events did not make Russia a better supplier of anything. But, for a few weeks Russia was not just a petro-state run by a former intelligence officer. It was the global host, draped in the logos of Coca-Cola, Visa, Samsung, McDonald’s and Budweiser, beamed into living rooms everywhere as modern, confident and welcome.

Here is a part worth paying attention to. Between 2010 and 2018, while we paid at the pump, at the supermarket, at the counter where we tapped our card, a steady river of that money ran through the International Olympic Committee and FIFA and into the Russian state.

We became Russia’s financier. Not because it won our business by making something we needed, but because our money was quietly routed there, through companies we do buy from.

Four days after the Sochi closing ceremony, before the flame had even gone cold, Russian forces moved into Crimea. The 2018 World Cup, already awarded, was not taken away. Three and half years later came the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest land war in Europe since 1945.

→ See the full money trail: supplierism.com/russia

Sarah Gooder was eight years old when she worked in a coal pit, sitting alone in the dark for twelve hours opening and shutting a ventilation door.

“I’m a trapper in the Gawber pit,” she told a government investigator. “It does not tire me, but I have to trap without a light and I’m scared. I go at four and sometimes half past three in the morning, and come out at five and half past. Sometimes I sing when I’ve light, but not in the dark; I dare not sing then. I don’t like being in the pit.”

Patience Kershaw also worked in a coal mine. By seventeen she had spent a decade underground. She dragged wooden carts along the low tunnels for a mile or more to the shaft and back again.

“I never went to day-school. I go to Sunday-school, but I cannot read or write. The bald place upon my head is made by thrusting the corves. Sometimes they beat me, if I am not quick enough, with their hands. I would rather work in mill than in coal-pit.”

Elizabeth Bentley began working in a flax mill at six years old, pulling the full bobbins off the spinning frames and pushing empty ones on, so the machines never stopped. In the busy season she did it from five in the morning until nine at night, sixteen hours, with forty minutes to eat.

Reports of these horrors prompted the government to act. The first child labour law passed in 1802, and others followed, but with no one to enforce them, each was simply ignored. A pattern repeated itself for decades: a commission would take the children’s testimony and reforming MPs would introduce a bill. The manufacturers would then fight it, claiming that protecting children would make British goods uncompetitive.

It took until 1918 — one hundred and sixteen years — to finally get children out of the factories.

None of this is really that long ago. The clothes my grandparents wore as children were made by other children, in conditions that violated everything they believed in. I don’t reflect on that to somehow imbue the past with a capability it never had. Rather, the point is to inspire new thinking.

So here is a new perspective on the child abuse that lingered in England for over a century: English contract law gave buyers everything they needed to refuse child-made goods. Then, as now, the courts held that two parties could agree to the terms they chose, and a judge’s task was to enforce the agreement. A buyer who contracted with a supplier could have written a ban on child labour into the agreement, and could have sued if it was broken.

The power to stop child abuse was there the whole time, in plain view. But culture and psychology are stubbornly attached to the idea that regular people are powerless. A theory of social change almost always assumes that governments must step in to manage our suppliers for us. History tells a different story. In reality, governments tend to produce slow, watered-down, and ineffective laws.

Here are nine global supplier problems that governments have tried and failed to regulate:

• Carbon emissions

• Forever chemicals

• Conflict minerals

• Antibiotics in livestock

• Electronic waste

• Plastic pollution

• Data harvesting and privacy

• Social media harm

• Corporate corruption

In every case, the contract law to end the problem already exists. Buyers need only use the powers they have always had to set the terms their suppliers must meet.

The right to set terms is old. The only new part is deciding, together, to use it.

The core of this newsletter rests on the uncomfortable fact that the biggest buyer groups in the world ignore this rule entirely. You and I are members of those groups, and our suppliers have become experts at quietly taking advantage of us, transferring massive costs onto our shoulders. Climate change, the mental health toll of social media on children and corruption are just three examples. Each one makes our lives harder, more expensive, and less safe.

Because companies need our money to survive, regular buyers possess apex economic leverage and have the right to dictate the rules for accessing our wallets.

We should set terms and conditions with our suppliers, but we don’t, leaving unlimited potential value on the table. Value that could solve the world’s biggest problems.

The most obvious case is kids.

When a child gets their first phone, tablet or computer, they should have terms and conditions that legally protect them from being harmed. Their mental health and attention are not for sale. Harm a child and you should pay a penalty. It’s that simple. Family-oriented buyers spend $9 trillion a year¹. That’s twice the GDP of Germany. The potential penalty for violating their rules becomes the deterrent that prevents rational suppliers from harming a child in the first place.

The next most obvious case is Donald Trump, who runs the American presidency as a personal business, in plain sight.

Citizens who do not want their money going to Trump — or any politician — spend $5 trillion each year². And yet their suppliers regularly transfer money they got from their customers to politicians.

So here are two questions: Are you funding Trump? And what can you do about it?

Click here to find out.

¹ ² Each figure is the share of global adult consumers who say they strongly care about the issue and would act on it, multiplied by average annual consumer spending. Family-oriented buyers: Pew Research Center (2023). Citizens avoiding political spending: Edelman Trust Barometer (2025). Full methodology at supplierism.com/leverage.

As a kid, I spent my summers at Rideau Lake in Ontario, three thousand seven hundred kilometres from Ootsa Lake, where Alcan’s dam had flooded the traditional territory of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation.

One sunny August afternoon in 1980, while my father drove the boat, I took one last lick of my popsicle and tossed the stick into the water. He frowned, then made a hard turn, banking the boat and sending me sideways. When we had circled back, close enough to see the stick bobbing on the surface, my father gestured for me to jump in and retrieve it. Another lesson from parents with a very low tolerance for a litterbug, or a jerk.

Popsicles from the marina store were a solid choice, but my go-to sugar high for years was a can of Coke. When every drop was gone, I would try to crush the can with one hand. The only person I knew at Rideau Lake who could do it was my cousin Johnny Askwith. To me, he had superhero strength to go along with the character we all admired. He always did the right thing. Always defended the little guy.

That summer, the pop cans changed. The new ones were made of Alcan aluminum, not tin. Now, every day I drank my Coke, then crushed the can with one mighty squeeze, the way Johnny did. And for a second I had his strength too.

The Coke cost forty cents. The aluminum in it was worth a penny or two. In 1980, as a kid who believed in superheroes, I spent about thirty dollars on Coke. And roughly a dollar of that went to Alcan, who used my money to abuse the Cheslatta Carrier Nation, continuing a legacy of cruelty that began in the 1950s and did not end for sixty-seven years.

We are on a mission to break this cycle, to stop spending our money on things that contradict our values. Not just because it feels wrong. It is bigger than that. Supplierism argues that every large-scale social, environmental and economic failure in the world is linked to decent people using their own money to fund bad outcomes that ultimately make their lives more expensive and less safe. Climate change is the most obvious example.

The dollar I sent Alcan that summer may seem small. But it adds up. In July, I wrote about the sheer scale of our purchasing power. Over a lifetime, the average Canadian spends nearly $2.4 million on products and services. Across Canada, the United States and Britain alone, that comes to roughly $965 trillion of purchasing power spent blindly over our lifetimes.

So, yes, it does add up. Those aluminum cans of Coke matter.

Supplierism treats every citizen as a sophisticated buyer who, thanks to the technology now in our pockets, can set their own terms and conditions (T&Cs) with the companies they buy from. Not just to prevent harms, but to use our money as an incentive for innovations that can solve the world’s biggest problems.

In the first post, we looked at the harm Alcan caused at Ootsa Lake. Here I want to imagine the benefits that same company could have created, if only we had used our purchasing power effectively.

So, let’s go back to Ootsa Lake, and take stock of what Alcan engineered there in pursuit of our money. But this time, with no illusions. Just look at what was built, and ask ourselves what else they would be willing to do in pursuit of our money, if we set the terms well.

Can our suppliers reverse climate change? Stop wildfires? End corruption?

Set against the mind-boggling engineering of Alcan in British Columbia between 1950 and 1954, none of those goals looks as impossible as we tend to assume.

The dam at Ootsa Lake

To make the hydro dam, Alcan piled over three million cubic metres of rock and clay across the Nechako Canyon, nearly a hundred metres high and half a kilometre wide at the top. When it was finished it was the largest rockfill dam in the world.

That was the easy part. The real engineering challenge was the river. It flowed the wrong direction. So Alcan turned the river around and sent the water to the west coast.

Next, Alcan blasted a tunnel sixteen kilometres long, wide enough to drive a two-lane highway straight through the heart of a mountain, boring through solid granite from two directions. When the headings met deep inside the mountain they were aligned to within a few inches. This was the early 1950s. There was no GPS. Alcan used rudimentary survey instruments, geometry, and nerve. From there, the water dropped almost eight hundred metres, nearly straight down, with enough force to spin the giant hydro turbines.

The power station itself was carved into the base of a mountain near the coast. A cavernous structure that looks like the lair of a James Bond villain, Kemano is inaccessible by road. Everything used to build it was shipped in by boat or helicopter.

Then power transmission lines were strung eighty-two kilometres over some of the most brutal terrain on the planet, fifteen hundred metres above the sea, through a landscape of ice and rock and avalanche, reaching the site chosen for Alcan’s new smelter and deep-water port, both built from scratch.

Alcan hired planners from New York to design Kitimat. They built homes, schools, churches, hockey rinks, a hospital, and streets laid out for a population they expected to reach fifty thousand.

The whole supply chain of power and metal and people was built in roughly five years. It was, at the time, the most expensive project ever attempted by private industry, anywhere on earth.

Alcan turned a river backwards. They bored sixteen kilometres through a mountain and built a power plant in a place with no roads, then flung power lines across frozen peaks into a deep-water port, a smelter, and a whole city, all conjured out of a remote inlet to serve a factory that turned Ootsa Lake electricity into aluminum, so that we could have airplanes and foil and a billion drink cans a year, and so I could drink a Coke on a summer day in 1980.

None of this is shared to make you admire Alcan. I’m sharing this because of what it suggests: when our money is valuable enough to a supplier, there is almost nothing they cannot or will not do. And they do it with breathtaking speed and skill. Their ingenuity is real. The capabilities of our suppliers are almost limitless.

The genius of Alcan could easily have preserved the Cheslatta way of life from day one. It was not beyond them. It simply was not demanded by people like me, aged ten; by my father, who hated the idea of fouling a lake with a single popsicle stick; by my cousin Johnny Askwith, who would have stood up for anyone being bullied; or by the millions of ordinary people who spend trillions on their suppliers every year. The capability to solve the world’s problems has always been there. Just the instructions are missing. The ones only we can write as terms and conditions.

Twenty years ago, Wired Magazine travelled to Ootsa Lake to learn how a company I founded was becoming the world's largest supplier of reclaimed wood. The Wired article, and a link to the company (now owned by Voltalia), are at the end of the post.

Ootsa Lake is in the north-central interior of British Columbia. It is a remote place to work, where groceries and hardware were a five-hour round trip over dirt roads from an off-grid crew camp. Ours was a row of linked trailers behind a steel gate, to keep the grizzlies out at night.

But reclaimed wood is only a small part of Ootsa Lake’s history. The full story is about a much bigger industry, and about the lessons the lake is still surfacing today.

When you stand on a ridge and take it in, Ootsa Lake is immediately deceptive. A fiord-like body of water opens west, stretching two hundred and thirty kilometres across the heart of British Columbia.

The first deception is the absence of human activity. It can appear almost vacant, as if no one was ever here before, or stayed for long if they were. Water, forest and sky pan out, uninterrupted. The lake is calm, surrounded by an evergreen horizon. A deep breath of the cold, fresh air can trick a mind in search of serenity.

The water snakes into the distance toward the west coast. It looks like a winding escape from the modern world, a journey away from human consumption and industrial globalization.

That is the second deception.

Breathe again. Open your eyes wide. Then let the illusion burst.

The lake you are looking at is not natural. It is an encapsulated chapter of industrial history. Serenity is its greatest illusion. A mirage. Look closer, under the surface, and you start to see how this colossus was made. Not wilderness, but a human construct displaying the full arc of globalization in one frame. A dark, complex exhibition of our relationship with the things we buy, and the power we grant our suppliers.

At Ootsa Lake, everything you are looking at is part of a supply chain, engineered to make a product you and I have been using our whole lives.

Aluminum

Aluminum is the most common metal in the Earth’s crust, yet it’s bonded to oxygen so tightly that it can only be freed by passing a massive, unbroken electric current through it. A single smelter can draw as much power as a city. An ingot of aluminum is, in a real sense, congealed electricity. Which is why the story of aluminum is really the story of power. Hydro power.

Two hundred years ago aluminum was so hard to produce that it was worth more than gold. Global conflict changed that. Aluminum became abundant as the single most important strategic metal of the Second World War. Countries that could make it at scale supplied the planes needed to defeat Adolf Hitler.

During the war, Canadian aluminum came mostly from the region north of Quebec City. Alcan’s smelter there was the largest aluminum plant in the world. At its wartime peak Alcan produced close to two-thirds of the aluminum used by the Allied forces. The plant was considered so vital to the war effort that it was ringed with anti-aircraft defences.

When the war ended, Canadian capacity fuelled a rapidly expanding aluminum economy, with a parade of applications in cars, cookware, window frames, lawn chairs, cans, and of course aluminum foil. It was the metal of the modern world.

In 1945, Alcan was indispensable. Even heroic.

In the years that followed, Alcan used that reputation as leverage. It moved west, in search of more hydro power, and British Columbia was eager to be the place where the company built next. In the Nechako Valley, Alcan found the river and dam site it was looking for.

On December 29, 1950, Alcan and the government of British Columbia signed an agreement that granted the company the right to create hydro power by flooding the Nechako Valley into an 880-square-kilometre hydro reservoir that is today commonly known by two names, depending on who you are speaking with: The Nechako Reservoir and Ootsa Lake.

Construction ran for three years and employed six thousand workers. It took three more years to fill. By 1957, the reservoir held over 30 billion cubic metres of water, completely flooding tens of millions of mature pine and fir trees in the process.

But more than trees flooded in Ootsa Lake. No label on a roll of foil ever mentioned it. The press did not report it. And the licence granted to Alcan by the Government of British Columbia did not disclose it.

Underwater

For at least ten thousand years, the Cheslatta Carrier Nation lived in the Nechako Valley. They hunted and fished, raised their children and buried their relatives in the land flooded by Alcan.

In 1952, they were given two weeks to leave their villages and relocate to higher ground. I have been told by Cheslatta Carrier Nation band members that those who resisted were beaten with clubs. The rest left on the promise they could return for what they could not carry. When they came back later that summer, their homes had been burned.

You can be forgiven for thinking this story sounds familiar. In 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company was handed a commercial monopoly over nearly four million square kilometres of Indigenous land. The East India Company spent a century displacing communities in the interest of its trade monopolies, backed by its own private army. In the Congo, entire populations were driven off their land and worked to death to feed Europe’s rubber boom. In the American Southeast, the Cherokee were marched a thousand miles west so their land could be turned into cotton and gold.

The Cheslatta story is not new.

Except, I find myself thinking of them when I hear land acknowledgements. This one was read at a sports event I recently attended:

We recognize that our organization is based on Treaty 13 lands – traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit. We also recognize that we are located on the traditional home of many other nations including the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Chippewa, and Wendat Peoples. We are honoured to work with and learn from communities all across these unceded lands throughout Canada.

You feel something different while floating in an aluminum boat on Ootsa Lake. The land is gone. Villages, art, burial grounds. History. All of it deep underwater.

It is especially different to visit these flooded places with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), as my company did in 2005 and 2006. Equipped with video cameras, our submersible ROV would fly over the tops of flooded trees, the pine cones still visible on branches, perfectly preserved for decades by cold fresh water. The ROV then dove into small enclaves where, on occasion, we could see evidence of the Cheslatta people one hundred feet underwater.

What exactly are we supposed to acknowledge floating above this land on Ootsa Lake?

Where exactly are we, when hovering in a boat one hundred feet above the traditional territory of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation?

You have a lot of time to think when working at Ootsa Lake. It’s a vast place, full of difficult questions and seemingly intractable conflicts between the past and the future we want to live in.

Twenty years ago, I had the privilege of working under a three-party contract with the Cheslatta and Alcan to help recover timber for a sawmill owned by the band. I got to see firsthand how reconciliation can take shape.

In 2012 Rio Tinto Alcan returned eleven thousand acres of traditional territory to the Cheslatta. In 2019, after a decades-long battle, the nation signed a settlement with British Columbia that included compensation and the return of land. Chief Corrina Leween noted that for sixty-seven years the Cheslatta people had worked tirelessly toward resolution of this historic wrong.

Of course, reconciliation is the last resort. The one used, in this case, to begin compensating for hypocrisy engineered into every plane, car and can of pop produced by one of our most common and important suppliers.

It is worth saying plainly: The dam is valuable. Aluminum is crucial to our way of life. We needed it to beat Hitler, after all. But needing something is not the same as handing over everything to get it. We blindly surrendered our money, and our values, to our suppliers. Our parents and grandparents did it for nearly seventy years without ever letting our money negotiate a better life for the people who paid the price.

In the end, we allowed our money to finance things we cannot explain to our own children.

The better way is the whole point of Supplierism. When you buy something valuable, it should never leave behind harms you could not explain to the people who will inherit them. That’s the first of two enduring Ootsa Lake lessons I took from my work in the region. The second is in the next post.

***
https://www.wired.com/2007/02/logs/

https://tritontimber.com

At the time, one of Lisa’s jobs was to enter the coordinates that would place each of Patagonia’s supplier factories on a Google map. With her headphones on and loud music playing, Lisa set point after point on the screen.

Somewhere in the tedium, the points all stopped being just data on a computer display. From boredom to a single thought, Lisa was considering a transformational idea.

Suddenly, in her mind, each pin on the screen was a real place, full of real people working every day in a real factory.

She turned off the music and stared at the map.

Until that moment, outsourced manufacturing was not a good story to tell. What happened inside a supply chain was kept out of sight. Murky, at best. Opaque by design. Where your shirt was sewn, who did the work, and under what conditions, was not something most brands would discuss, let alone publish.

Lisa kept thinking. She put the headphones back on and finished her data entry job. But the pin had turned into something she could not un-see.

Lisa later shared her thoughts in Patagonia’s newsletter about the inspiration of The Footprint Chronicles. If her spending was part of why that factory existed, then her money was also a lever she could pull. She had always thought of herself as one small person, her choices too minor to register against a global industry. Now the map was telling her something different. The factory was there because buyers like her willed it there, dollar by unthinking dollar. And what buyers can will into being, they can also change.

The realization landed hard for Lisa. I picture it like a sudden jarring chord change in a punk song. That’s what I felt when I first saw what she had done. Because it was radical. And, because Lisa loved punk music, it’s not unfair to assign this metaphor.

Thanks to Lisa Polley, The Footprint Chronicles launched in 2007 with a directive to be completely honest about where Patagonia’s products came from.

It let anyone with a browser trace a product to the specific factories and people who made it. A visitor could pick a Patagonia garment and follow it backward into the supply chain, seeing the materials, the manufacturing, and the real environmental and human costs behind that one item.

I was blown away, to say the least.

Nearly twenty years later, the reality is that enlightened suppliers like Patagonia can only do so much. Buyers need to push entire industries to change, not just reward an outlier like Patagonia, which is not a perfect company. As recently as 2023, journalists reported that Patagonia’s clothes were made in the same Sri Lankan factories as Primark and Zara, by underpaid workers. Radical change will only come when Primark and Zara also feel the power of their customers.

The Footprint Chronicles showed that we can easily see inside the factories, but it asked buyers to do the auditing themselves using the online tool. Inspiring, but not always practical. That was its flaw. Life is too busy for most people to manage their suppliers one by one.

But technology is changing how regular people can interact with their suppliers.

This week, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang spoke with Ezra Klein about where the world is headed. The two men had a full discussion about the existential risks of AI, then Huang said the following:

“So now, you just have to speak human (to a computer). Tell it your hopes and dreams and then it gets the work done.”

The hope, dating back to Lisa Polley’s Footprint Chronicles, is that everything we buy is audited for its ethics and aligned with our values.

The dream is for our suppliers to chase our money in exchange for a contractual obligation to make the world just, fair, and free.

Be careful what you wish for, Jensen Huang.

In 1947, Frank Urich opened a gas station in Los Angeles with a sign that read: Save 5¢, Serve Yourself.

In 1967 a Barclays branch in London introduced a machine that turned customers into bank tellers.

In 1983, a dentist in Michigan placed the first online trade himself, over a home computer network. The company behind it became ETrade.

Soon, their ads joked that anyone could be a stock broker.

In 1996 Travelocity introduced travellers to a self-service airline reservation system. We became our own travel agents.

IKEA took self-service to another level. Remarkably, we do three jobs at once for this supplier: the warehouse picking, the shipping, and the factory's final assembly.

Self-Service 1.0

Over the last hundred years or so, our suppliers radically changed life using the same playbook over and over again: they outsourced jobs to us (the buyer) in exchange for better, faster, and cheaper stuff. Call it Self-Service 1.0.

It has made regular people mind-bogglingly productive. On top of the jobs already mentioned, we now write and instantly send volumes of correspondence every day, work that once required a typist and took weeks to reach its destination. We take, edit, and publish limitless photographs that once needed a studio and a darkroom. We file our own taxes, curate our own music collections, design our own invitations, teach ourselves languages. We can research medical, legal, and financial questions while lounging on the sofa, answers that once cost thousands of dollars to acquire and were the exclusive domain of wealthy people. We produce more words, images, and decisions in a week than our grandparents produced in a year.

Self-Service 2.0

In the global economy, the one that revolves around your attention and money, you are not a small, solitary individual. You are, in fact, a productivity phenomenon, with the capabilities of a corporation from just a few decades ago.

The problem is that we are good at production and bad at managing our broader interests, like privacy and security. We get ripped off easily and leave way too much leverage on the table. That's by design. Our suppliers have happily outsourced jobs to us under the banner of self-service, as long as it makes them more money and increases their own influence.

But self-service is not a genie that our suppliers can put back in the bottle. The next generation is ready to do the jobs our suppliers don't want us to take over. Namely, managing them. Today, these technologies can equip you with a virtual team: researchers working around the clock, procurement agents qualifying every supplier and hunting down the best deal on everything you buy, paralegals drafting agreements and combing every detail of every contract, negotiators who know exactly how far the best suppliers will go to improve your life in exchange for your money, and a strategic consultant planning how to get from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow.

Self-service banking, stock trading, and travel booking once seemed like science fiction. Now we take them for granted. Managing your suppliers, and the terms of every deal you make with them, is simply the next thing we'll do for ourselves.

***

Image credits

Piggly Wiggly interior, Memphis, 1918 — Clifford H. Poland / Library of Congress. Gilmore “Gas-A-Teria,” Los Angeles, 1948 — colourized; original from the Gilmore Oil Company archive. Barclays first cash dispenser, Enfield, 1967 — press photograph, rights holder as noted. ETRADE at the NYSE, 1999, and the ETRADE “boat” campaign — © E*TRADE / MullenLowe, shown for commentary. Travelocity logo, 1996 — trademark Sabre Holdings, shown for identification. IKEA flat-pack haul (AI-generated illustration); IKEA marks belong to Inter IKEA Systems B.V.

Teams are paid to leave or extorted to stay. That’s the game.

Thirty-five billion dollars of taxpayer money has been spent in North America building 119 stadiums and arenas. Economists agree that no growth or net new jobs have come from subsidizing sports teams.

The list of franchises lured away by free cash includes the Baltimore Colts, the Minnesota North Stars, the Quebec Nordiques, the Winnipeg Jets, the Houston Oilers, the Seattle SuperSonics, the St. Louis Rams, the San Diego Chargers, the Oakland Raiders and of course the Expos.

Most cities hand over taxpayer money to team owners because they fear losing their club. It’s emotional blackmail. The most historic example is told through the eyes of the man credited with saving the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1991. His name was George.

George went to Andover and Yale, the same schools his father attended. He was a cheerleader and graduated with a C average.

In 1968, George got into the Texas Air National Guard despite scoring in the bottom quarter on the pilot aptitude test. It was a significantly more comfortable place to serve his country during the Vietnam War, where 650,000 draftees were sent to fight. He became a second lieutenant without going through officer training and spent two years learning to fly a jet the Air Force was about to retire. Then there was a stretch in the National Guard in Alabama, where his commanding officer never saw him once. He skipped his flight physical and then left eight months early, released from the remainder of his military obligations to go to Harvard Business School, equipped with that C average.

Lucky George.

In 1977, he decided to go into the oil business. He was set up with a company, Arbusto Energy, and a few million dollars. This time George wasn’t so lucky. The company never made any money and folded nine years later.

He loved sports and wanted to be the commissioner of baseball, but that job had been offered to someone else more qualified.

He stumbled on some more luck when, in 1989, the owners of the Texas Rangers asked if he’d like to join their team. All he needed was $600,000 (borrowing that part was easy) and a willingness to extort stadium money from the city of Arlington, where the Rangers play their home games.

Texas was climbing out of the 1980s oil bust. Arlington was the largest city in America with no public transit system. Its voters had turned down a 0.5% sales tax for buses.

But the Rangers wanted a new stadium. For free. And if they didn’t get it, then the team threatened to pack up and leave.

George turned out to be good at this job. A Reagan conservative by brand, he helped the Rangers secure a sales tax, charged mostly to working-class citizens, that raised $135 million for the new ballpark. He and the Rangers also picked out the land they wanted. When the people who owned it refused to sell, the land was expropriated so the ballpark could be built there anyway.

George had “saved” the Rangers.

While he had not done much else, that was enough to make him a candidate for Governor of Texas. That and his last name.

George won and was elected governor in 1994.

In 1998, the Rangers sold for $250 million, three times what the group had paid. The stadium and the land around it were most of the reason. George’s $600,000 — and his bonuses — suddenly became $14.9 million. He was now himself rich. Not just the son of a rich man. He was re-elected governor the same year and soon after announced his decision to run for President.

In 2000, he was elected the 43rd president of the United States and, as commander in chief, presided over the country on September 11, 2001.

***

The teams we love are mostly owned by our suppliers, who blackmail fans while taking taxpayer money to subsidize valuations and salaries. Here are fifty of them.

There are important changes coming to Meta, thanks to the lawsuit. But the settlement is backward thinking.

First, the governments that failed to protect kids get all the money.

Second, lawsuits are what you do after harm is caused. We need a system that protects kids before they get hurt.

Can we change the system? Yes. Here’s how.

In June, I wrote:

…the company creating the risks that may harm you and your family also gets to decide whether those risks stay invisible to investors, insurers, banks, regulators, and you.

Frances Haugen blew the whistle on Meta in 2021 saying the company knew it was harming kids. Even so, Meta’s financial disclosures assigned no value to the risk of harming children. Meanwhile, they made money by writing user contracts that legally favoured themselves and hid liabilities. This is so obviously wrong and bad for society.

And it’s fixable.

The first move is to use a very old economic principle:

Buyers with leverage set the terms and conditions with the supplier. Not the other way around.

The bigger the buyer, the more leverage they have. That’s the natural order of commerce dating back hundreds of years. Suppliers setting their own preferential terms, at the expense of the buyer, is a new digital phenomenon that betrays basic economic principles and traditional marketplaces.

Young people have enormous unused financial leverage. Children are roughly 20% of the world’s population and account for something close to 10% of global consumer spending. They are a $7.2 trillion economy with a common interest in not being harmed.

When a kid signs up for social media, their terms and conditions need to define the remedy for causing harm. That’s the way the problem starts to get solved.

Here’s a simple example, with a more legalistic version pasted at the end of the post. Both were created using Supplierism’s free terms generator:

What you can't do to me. You can’t build things designed to keep me hooked. You can’t ignore me when I report bullying. You can’t hide your own research showing your app hurts people my age.

If you break any of these rules then you owe me $10,000.

The key is to set the cost. I chose a $10,000 remedy because it is roughly the cost of therapy for a year and a half. It could easily be much higher.

I also wanted a concrete number to workshop the solution and $10,000 works fine.

When we enter into well-crafted legal agreements with our suppliers, they commit to be honest in exchange for our money or attention. So, when Frances Haugen blew the whistle on Meta, a contingent liability should have been applied to their balance sheet for each child they were potentially harming. That comes to $250 billion, or $10,000 x 25 million kids. (Harvard researchers counted 16.7 million American under-18s on Instagram and 9.9 million on Facebook. For simplicity, I counted each as one user and rounded down to 25 million.)

What happens when the auditor puts a $250 billion contingent liability on the books? The stock crashes and executive bonuses are docked. A 25% drop in Meta’s stock is about $154 a share. Mark Zuckerberg owns 330 million shares. That would cost him $51 billion.

Supplierism always asks two questions:

• Who owns the cost of a harm?

• And what value was assigned to it?

The cost of depression or low self-esteem for a child, and the true value of their attention and time, are virtually impossible to price. But, to change the system, we have to be good at playing their game. So, your terms generator should always put a value on the cost of harm so that it can be transferred to our suppliers, where it belongs, as a contingent liability.

A $250 billion contingent liability is a deterrent pointed at the central nervous system of a corporation. It gives executives a reason to fix the problem before a child gets hurt, not years after. It reprograms corporations to protect kids and not treat harm as an affordable cost.

Settling for $17.1 billion lets Meta off the hook while a contingent liability for $250 billion would have forced them to change long before a child was hurt or a lawsuit filed.

***

Here’s an example of the actual clause that all kids and their families should create, and force suppliers to accept, before a child opens a social media account of any kind.

Clause 7. Harm to the child user.

7.1 Prohibited conduct. The supplier shall not, in respect of a minor account: (a) deploy any recommendation, notification, autoplay, streak, or reward system that the supplier knows, or from its own testing has reason to know, increases compulsive or extended use by minors; (b) fail to remove content reported by the buyer as bullying, harassment, or targeted abuse of the child within seventy-two hours of a report; or (c) withhold from the buyer any internal or commissioned research indicating that the supplier’s products contribute to anxiety, depression, disordered eating, self-harm, or compulsive use among minors.

7.2 Liquidated damages. For each breach of clause 7.1, the supplier shall pay the buyer $10,000 per affected child. Payment is due to the household and shall not be directed to any fund, foundation, charity, or third party.

7.3 No proof of injury required. The buyer is not required to demonstrate a diagnosed condition, medical record, or specific injury to the child in order to claim under clause 7.2. Breach of clause 7.1 is itself the trigger.

7.4 Genuine pre-estimate. The parties agree that $10,000 is a conservative pre-estimate of the buyer’s likely costs, including counselling, assessment, and lost caregiver time, and is not a penalty. Two years of weekly adolescent therapy in the United States commonly exceeds $15,600.

Built in 1941, the boat was just under eighty feet long. A dozen people were aboard. An ecologist. A doctor. A Russian and Japanese interpreter each. An electrician. A cook. An expert on inflatable boats. Two musicians. Two men from a Canadian film company. And the skipper.

Their supplies included a pair of inflatable zodiacs with outboard motors and fuel, a marine radio, a direction finder the ship's electrician had built himself out of parts, underwater speakers and hydrophones, a Moog synthesizer, a guitar, additional speakers rigged to the deck, provisions for a dozen people, cameras and film stock for a voyage of no fixed length.

In May, the boat ventured into the North Pacific Ocean battling heavy swells, pointed toward its destination. Not a place. No, they were looking for moving targets.

Crew members sat up in the rigging with binoculars watching an empty horizon in shifts. The electrician wired one of the speakers into the galley while the remaining crew took turns at the table hour after hour, day after day, listening and hoping to hear Russian or Japanese words coming back.

They drifted to save diesel. Then the CB radio failed. For days they could hear others, but the transmitter was now broken and no one could hear them. Nobody in Vancouver knew where they were. Nobody knew whether they were alive.

Food ran low. Water ran low.

It went like this for a full month until the evening of June 26 when they heard Russian on the galley speaker. The interpreter caught the words and coordinates. The electrician took a bearing. They turned the vessel around and headed full throttle for waters off the coast of California.

But still, it was not their destination either. In the summer of 1975, the Phyllis Cormack was in fact searching for the gap. That space between justice, compassion and the knowledge that too often we humans blindly cause harm.

This is an old problem. Among the oldest.

The gap does not close on its own. So they raged south. At midnight the skipper handed the wheel to one of the musicians with instructions to hold the vessel on its course, and then he went to bed. The moon was straight ahead, laying a yellow road across the water. The musician steered up the moonbeam instead of following the compass. But the moon moves and at four in the morning the skipper returned to find his boat ninety degrees off course.

The Russian voices could still be heard on the radio, but they went quiet around ten that morning. They had lost the signal. At noon a rainbow came up off the starboard bow. The musician, unrepentant, wandered back into the wheelhouse, took the helm from one of the two film company men, and steered for the rainbow, toward Mendocino Ridge, one hundred and eighty nautical miles from San Francisco.

Half an hour later there were ships on the horizon.

The largest was seven hundred feet long, the factory ship. The crew smelled it before they were close enough to read the ship’s name. Cranes on the main deck were tearing strips of blubber off carcasses, harpoon boats were queued behind the factory ship, waiting to unload more. Just above the waterline a six-inch pipe was pumping a steady red column of blood into the sea.

The Russian crews were perplexed. Deckhands smoking through broken teeth waved and grinned at the small boat flying a picture of the earth. Officers watched from the bridge without expression.

Then a harpoon boat left the factory ship. Its cannon pointed from the bow. A six-foot steel harpoon with an explosive charge on the tip attached to rope running back to the winch. The Phyllis Cormack followed as it began chasing a pod. They launched the zodiacs and raced after the harpoon boat. What happened over the next few minutes is best told by one of the men in the second zodiac:

We picked out a departing harpoon boat, the Vlastny, and followed it. It was soon pursuing a pod of sperm whales. Hunter leapt into a Zodiac with Watson, Korotva took Fred Easton, and I went with Patrick Moore. Hunter and Watson tried to position themselves between the harpoon boat and the frantic whales, but Watson's outboard sputtered to a stop and they were thrown aside by the bow of the killer boat. Korotva pulled up, traded passengers with Watson, and sped off with Hunter. They positioned themselves directly in front of the massive cannon, shielding the whales. When they dropped into a trough, however, the cannon fired and the harpoon flew over their heads and exploded in the side of a whale. "The harpoon cable slashed down beside us," recalls Hunter, "nearly ripping us in two." Easton turned to me with thumbs up. He had captured the entire episode on film.

— Rex Weyler, Waves of Compassion, Utne Reader.

The crew gathered themselves and escaped the blood-soaked waters, then carried the film south to San Francisco. With the footage processed, they raced to send it over wire services. The images were transmitted to London, New York, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Vancouver. Whales hanging from floating slaughterhouses, raw materials for margarine, soap, face cream, lipstick, detergent, candles, perfume. Inputs to consumer supply chains that had never been graphically seen before by the public, and never fully explained.

The next morning, the images reached the front page of newspapers all around the world. They called it a “mind bomb”. When it exploded, the crew of the Phyllis Cormack introduced the world to a new weapon against injustice and corruption. The idea that cruelty could safely hide in the open ocean, or anywhere, was gone forever.

Image 1: © Rex Weyler

Images 2–5: © Greenpeace / Rex Weyler

Their new privacy terms run almost 4,600 words: more than four times the length of this article.

So much is wrong with signing terms and conditions like this. At the top of the list is what Samsung has in mind for children and their families.

First, the agreement requires anyone under eighteen to review the terms with a parent. Anyone under thirteen is “prohibited” from using Samsung services unless a guardian creates a Child Account. Good ideas, until you realize that virtually no one reads the document and just 1% of kids have Child Accounts.

The real reason Samsung wrote these terms comes next: A parent who lets a minor use Samsung services assumes any liability resulting from the use of those services.

Notice they say “services,” not TV or device. Because now you are agreeing to terms that apply to everything Samsung makes that connects to your kid: the Samsung account, Members, Cloud, Pass, Health, SmartThings, Bixby, Find My Mobile, Call & Text on Other Devices, Digital Key, Samsung Browser, Galaxy Store, Wallet, Rewards, Care+, PENUP, Samsung News, Gaming Hub, TV Plus.

Meanwhile, Samsung designs the data collection systems. Samsung sets the retention periods for holding your kids’ data. Samsung selects the advertising partners. And Samsung keeps shipping new AI features that use your kids to train artificial intelligence models. They are allowed to. Because you just agreed to it.

Click accept

Do you think they knew I wanted to watch the baseball game, not read their 4,600-word contract that governs my data? Do they really think kids read these documents and agree not to circumvent them, as the Samsung kids section explicitly asks of people under the age of thirteen?

Technology companies that track kids and monetize them face big legal problems, and they are scrambling to write terms and conditions that protect them from lawsuits. But it is not just liability attached to privacy invasions that scare technology companies and their lawyers.

Harming kids

In March, a New Mexico jury found that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. After a nearly seven-week trial, jurors agreed the company made false or misleading statements and engaged in “unconscionable” trade practices that took unfair advantage of the vulnerabilities and inexperience of children. By August, a judge had ordered Meta to pay $942 million in total.

This month a federal trial opened in Oakland, where four states, California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, argue that Meta deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children and hid the harm. It is the first of the claims brought by nearly thirty states. Legal analysts estimate Meta’s exposure could reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

A Los Angeles jury awarded $6 million over the effects of the platforms on one young woman. TikTok, Snap and YouTube have been sued by the families of teenagers who died by suicide. In 2024, four Canadian school boards sued Meta, Snap and ByteDance for a combined $4.5 billion, claiming social media was designed for compulsive use and that the cost of the damage was transferred onto the public education system.

Teenage creators

While the platforms scramble to triage their legal problems, young people keep growing as content creators, powering the economics of Samsung, Meta, TikTok and the rest.

In the late 2000s, retouching a photograph cost $125 to $150 an hour at a commercial studio. An hour of network television cost one and a half to two million dollars to produce. Today, teenagers produce and broadcast content across the globe, all by themselves. Kane Parsons was sixteen, working in his bedroom with free software, when his Backrooms videos reached 197 million views. Charli D’Amelio started at fifteen, filming dances on her phone, and reached 100 million followers within eighteen months. Marques Brownlee was fifteen and owned no camera, so he recorded through his laptop webcam. He now has 20.9 million subscribers and 5.37 billion views.

What used to cost a studio two million dollars an hour now costs a teenager nothing.

The means of production

Kids use technology to make things that once required corporate studios and broadcast networks. Young people essentially own the means of production for content. And yet, while the platforms profit from the work of kids, the same corporations insist on writing terms that no one reads or understands.

This is short-sighted.

If a child can make the content then the same kid, and their families, can use technology to write their own legally binding terms and conditions. Hiding from the harm makes the problem worse. Passing liability to parents helps no one. Doing it with slight of hand, while I try to watch a baseball game, only shows how desperate technology companies are for a new and better way to sign contracts with children.

At Supplierism, we do not hide the fact that our “go-to-market” plan is based on families creating legally binding terms and conditions for their children. The first day that a child has access to a connected device is the day they need and deserve binding terms that protect them from surveillance and harm.

At the very same time, a new product was promising to change everything: the personal computer. These machines started out the size of furniture, heavy and beige. A roster of computer brands was launched. Most of them have since faded into Gen X nostalgia: Commodore, Tandy, Atari, Wang, Kaypro. Apple was there too. A Super Bowl ad that tapped into the decade’s Orwellian mood introduced us to something called the Macintosh.

But by far the biggest supplier was IBM. In 1984 it controlled 63% of the market.

That same year, a nineteen-year-old at the University of Texas was tinkering with his personal computer. He was trying to make it faster and more powerful. While taking his computer apart and upgrading it, he noticed that a three-thousand-dollar IBM PC contained just six hundred dollars in parts. The other twenty-four hundred dollars was the extra costs of an inefficient supply chain. IBM was spending piles of money manufacturing and warehousing inventory based on computer specs they guessed their customers wanted.

The kid in Texas had an idea. Instead of building a computer and hunting for a buyer, what if he found the buyer first, took their order and their payment, and only then assembled the exact machine the buyer had specified.

Later that year, word had spread that you could buy a cheaper, better computer. Soon, he had customers calling every day. He hired someone to answer calls and take the orders. Then he hired a few more people. There was no store, no dealer, no salesperson in between.

When the phone rang, the representative walked the buyer through their choices: how much memory, how big a drive, which processor, which monitor. The rep keyed in the configuration, quoted a price for that exact build, and took payment on the spot. Only then did the computer get built and shipped to the buyer’s door.

The business eventually moved online. The phone rep became a web page. The interface got easier, but the process never changed. The buyer described the product specs, paid up front, and then the product was built to order.

This basic innovation was transformational. From his dorm room at the University of Texas, a nineteen-year-old with no manufacturing plant or facilities took on IBM, the largest technology company on earth, and clobbered them. The kid’s name was Michael Dell. His company today employs over 100,000 people with revenues of over $100 billion a year.

Supply chains that are accountable to the buyer

Dell is not just a classic business-school case study. It is also a moment that upended old economic assumptions. While 1980s Cold War debates raged, Dell proved that ownership of property, machines and factories is not the only source of power in the economy. In the model he used to beat IBM, empowerment came from the buyer. Specifically:

1. He gave the buyer the ability to write the specifications for the product.

2. He offered so much value that the buyer was willing to sign a contract with payment terms.

No factories needed.

The wrong debate

Dell helped shine a light on the fact that buyers can set their own specifications. When they do, supply chains become more accountable and less prone to inefficiency (and corruption).

Today, most supply chains are controlled by large corporations, governments, or some combination of both. They do it by seizing chokepoints for energy, food, technology, finance, housing and medicine, among others. This economic tactic is a proven way to accumulate wealth and power, and it too often leads to higher prices for consumers, poorer product quality and more corruption.

Since the Cold War, we have learned that socialism and capitalism are equally susceptible to these self-serving chokepoints. Neither system has a clean record and neither has proven to be universally good at solving major social and economic problems without borrowing heavily from the other. In reality, nobody actually lives in a textbook version of either capitalism or socialism. But we all live in a single global economy that shares the same accountability crisis. Governments and corporations get rich off our money, while failing to solve the problems we care about most. So when we argue about which political system is better, we are mostly arguing about cartoons, pure ideologies that exist nowhere.

Meanwhile the most important question goes unasked in every country and in every political system:

Who are your suppliers accountable to?

• An unelected government official (too often taking bribes or being coerced).

• An elected official (doing the bidding of their donors).

• A corporation (seeking maximum profit without regard to your future).

• Or you.

One footnote: Michael Dell became pretty classically “super rich.” Like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others, he started young and built something hundreds of millions chose to use. Part of the Supplierism journey is working out a puzzle that the socialism vs capitalism debate misses: how do we create incentives so that brilliant young people keep building life-changing things, while limiting their ability to become obscenely rich, the kind of rich that breaks democracies? We actually have a sensible proposal, and it may surprise you. (More on that in a later post.)

Next week: a dive into how and why teenagers now control the ‘means of production’.

Here is how Google defines it:

Supplierism is an emerging economic framework and consumer advocacy movement focused on giving ordinary buyers the same procurement-grade negotiating power that large corporations and institutions use.

The concept addresses the idea that major corporations quietly shift hidden societal and environmental costs—such as climate liabilities, data breaches, and pay inequities—onto consumer balance sheets. Instead of traditional regulation or passive consumer boycotts, supplierism provides tools for everyday buyers to write, dictate, and collectively enforce their own transactional terms on major companies.

What are we building?

We are building a free app that turns your interests and concerns into terms and conditions that your suppliers can agree to.

The goals are:

1. Get 100,000 people to create their own terms and conditions using the free terms generator.

2. Launch the negotiator feature with one million users.

3. Build the payment system that works like Apple Pay, but includes your legal terms & conditions with every purchase.

4. And finally, create the auditor and enforcement system so that your suppliers do what they agreed to do.

Big steps forward

At Supplierism.com, you can already create your own terms and conditions for free. That part is done. Will it get better? Much. But the tool works and anyone can use it.

We also started an education campaign. Discussion guides, activities, case studies, and assignment templates are available for elementary, high school, and post-secondary classrooms.

We are now conducting research to support how the app will read your suppliers’ disclosures. This is how the app decides whether a supplier meets your terms or doesn’t. We have built a program to test whether companies can easily publish machine-readable data for consumer accountability. The findings are very promising.

Using AI to solve human problems

My friend Keith likes to joke that I am a scientist because, technically speaking, I earned a graduate degree in science at the University of Bath, where I studied the relationship between Responsibility and Business Practice. Keith and I also ran a nonprofit together in Montreal.

We both know that I am no scientist, hence his joke. And I am certainly not a computer programmer.

Despite this, AI makes it possible for me to write real, working software that targets big problems. All of my coding is AI-generated. And everything built so far at Supplierism has cost zero dollars to make.

Supplierism and AI

There is a second reason AI matters here, and it has nothing to do with how the software gets written.

It’s about our relationship with AI. The vast majority of people distrust it. In poll after poll, people believe AI will do more harm to humanity than good. That fear is real, and so are the risks.

We believe that legally enforceable terms and conditions change your relationship with AI. They are a set of text instructions to be followed. Give an AI model or agent those instructions and the questions it can ask change completely.

Is this human-made or AI-made?

Is this truthful or not?

Fair or unfair?

Safe or unsafe?

Just or unjust?

Your terms spell out what those words mean in the place they actually matter: where your money changes hands with your suppliers.

Meanwhile, AI has started to do transactions. It books flight, fills the cart, renews subscriptions, compares quotes. Every one of those actions is a purchase decision made on your behalf, by something that has no idea what you care about.

Without knowing your terms and conditions, AI optimizes for the only things it can see, like price, speed, availability. Once it reads your terms and conditions, and knows the type of future you want, then it can optimize for your human interests in addition to price, speed, and availability.

Progress

With the above in mind, I recently wrote a computer program that visits corporate websites and looks for specific files. It’s the same thing your browser does when you visit a webpage. It asks a server for an address and gets an answer back. Except my computer program does it for a list of companies and records what came back.

The program keeps everything. Every page it fetches is saved, with a fingerprint that proves it hasn’t been altered since. So when a company disputes a result, the answer isn’t an argument. It’s the actual bytes their server sent, on that date.

It’s allowed to say “I don’t know.” Every check comes back as yes, no, or couldn’t tell. If a server is down, or refuses the request, or answers in a way that can’t be interpreted, that is recorded as an unknown rather than counted as a failure. Percentages are calculated only over the checks that produced a real answer, and the unknowns are reported alongside.

What we found

The program was pointed at the websites of 146 regulated financial service companies.

Of the 146, 126 could be assessed using my Supplierism crawler. Of those 126:

– 98.2% have a privacy policy findable in one click.

– Zero publish a machine-readable disclosure endpoint.

The second bullet is important. These companies publish disclosures for people to read, because the law requires it. But their data is not yet published as machine-readable.

So, can corporations produce disclosures to match your terms and conditions for the things you care about? Yes, most already do. It’s just written for a human to read, not computer software.

Could a simple program read corporate disclosures, if they were published in a readable format?

YES

That’s what we proved this week.

The gap isn’t technical. It is actually very simple to implement a system that allows an app to read the disclosures of your suppliers. This is big deal for Supplierism. The files in question are a few lines of plain text. Any corporation or institution with a website can post machine readable data about their disclosures in minutes and at no cost to them.

What’s missing is a reason to. No regulator has asked for it and no competitor is doing it.

And, until now, nobody was poking around to see if your terms and conditions could be connected to your suppliers disclosures. And guess what? They can.

Next week, we return to a more regular post.

The stone for the White House came from Aquia Creek in Virginia. The US government bought the quarry in advance of construction. Enslaved men cut the stone and packed it in seashells for transport on barges upriver. Brick kilns were built beside the construction site. Irish immigrants dug and hauled materials. Axemen felled the floor and roof timbers in the forests of Maryland and Virginia. Masons dressed and laid the stone. The sawing, the brickmaking and most of the heavy labour was done by African American slaves.

The commissioners hired enslaved workers from the men who owned them, at twenty-one pounds a year, paid to the owner. The payrolls survive by first name only. Tom. Peter. Ben. Harry. Daniel. Four of those five were owned by James Hoban, the architect.

The total cost for the White House construction came to $232,372 across the eight years, all of it paid by Americans.

Fort York

A short walk from where I am writing this is Fort York. On April 27th, 1813, around seventeen hundred American troops came ashore west of the garrison. York was, at the time, the capital of Upper Canada. It would not be called Toronto for another twenty-one years.

The British commander, Roger Hale Sheaffe, read the situation and pulled his regulars out of Fort York. He left fuses burning in the grand magazine behind him, dug into the bluff at the water’s edge. It held some three hundred barrels of gunpowder along with every cartridge, round shot and shell the garrison had in reserve. The bluff channelled the blast outward, toward the Americans coming up from the Western Battery. Stone, beams and iron came down across five hundred yards. More than two hundred Americans were killed or wounded in a few seconds. Among them was Brigadier General Zebulon Pike.

Pike’s death is generally what historians point to as the moment the occupation escalated to another level of violence against Canada.

Over the days that followed, American troops burned the Parliament Buildings and Government House, a few kilometres east of the fort, near what is now Front and Parliament (a block from where I live today). They looted homes and the church, and destroyed the printing office. The Americans then carried off the ceremonial mace of the Legislative Assembly, which stayed in the United States until Franklin Roosevelt sent it back to Canada as a gesture of goodwill in 1934.

White House Ablaze

Sixteen months after the invasion of York, on August 24th, 1814, British troops set the White House in Washington on fire. York was the grievance they named.

In burning the White House, the British drew a distinction they were rather proud of: they destroyed public buildings and largely spared private ones, which they considered the more civilized way to do this sort of thing.

They were not all British regulars. Among them was the Second Corps of Colonial Marines, a unit raised in the spring of 1814 from American slaves who had escaped to British lines. They fought at Bladensburg on the way in, and companies of them are understood to have gone on into Washington.

A house built by enslaved Americans was burned, in part, by Americans who had freed themselves by reaching the other side.

Only the exterior walls of the White House survived.

Built again. And again.

Hoban was brought back to rebuild and restore the White House. Enslaved labour was hired again for the second build, on precisely the same terms as the first.

It cost $334,334.

James Monroe moved in on September 17th, 1817. Americans paid for every dollar.

In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt pushed the offices out into a new West Wing and made “the White House” the official name of the place. Between 1948 and 1952, Harry Truman had the entire interior torn out down to the exterior walls and a steel frame dropped in, because the building was failing. The leg of his daughter’s piano had gone through a floor, as proof.

The East Wing itself was a Roosevelt addition from 1942, put up partly to disguise the construction of the bunker underneath it.

Every previous version of the White House was paid for by an act of Congress.

Until Now

The East Wing came down in October 2025, to make room for a ninety-thousand-square-foot ballroom.

The project is now expected to cost over $400 million. The White House released a list of thirty-seven donors funding it. Twenty-one are corporations. You will recognize most of them:

The companies funding President Trump's ballroom are almost certainly among your suppliers. (Please let me know if I’m wrong.)

If you carry a phone, it likely holds Micron memory and runs Apple or Google software. If you buy online, there is a good chance it went through Amazon. If you work in an office then you are probably using Microsoft products. If you watch anything in Britain or Ireland, then keep in mind that Comcast owns Sky. And, if you have searched for anything online, Google’s revenue from the advertiser who won that auction is downstream of you.

Corporate bank accounts are filled by their customers’ money. Our money. It gets transferred from our bank accounts to their accounts and, in this case, from there to President Trump’s White House bank account.

Follow your money far enough, and it ends up in that ballroom.

As last week’s post showed, the money we hand our suppliers runs to trillions a year, and quadrillions over a lifetime of buying.

Let’s trace how much of our money went from Google into the White House ballroom.

Google’s $22 million wasn’t even a simple donation. It was YouTube’s payment, earmarked for ballroom construction, made to settle the sitting president’s personal lawsuit over his suspended account. Customer money settled the litigation and built the ballroom in a single transaction.

Set $22 million against roughly $390 billion in annual revenue and it comes to 0.0056 percent. Set that against what Google earns from a typical Canadian or British adult in a year, and your personal contribution to the ballroom comes to a cent or two each, about $1.2 million of Canadian and British customer money in total.

But this is not about $1.2 million. It is about the blind permission we give our suppliers to take our money and spend it any way they wish, even when it offends us or contradicts our interests.

It is our fundamental interest that suppliers like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft create value without sending us the second bill: the one that arrives years later as higher taxes, more conflict, a hotter planet and a childhood none of us chose for our kids.

It is therefore in our interest that our money be spent on creating valuable products and services, not on unpriced gifts to the government that regulates them. And yet Public Citizen found that more than half of the known corporate ballroom donors won new or expanded federal contracts worth over $50 billion in the six months that followed.

In 1813, the commander at Fort York answered with gunpowder. In 2026 the fuse is economic leverage, written as terms that force our suppliers to choose between their customers' money and political influence.

Until we set terms with our suppliers, our money will keep paying for more than a ballroom.

A quadrillion is a thousand trillions. Stacked in hundred-dollar bills, it would reach the moon two and a half times. The citizens of the ten countries shown below will spend well over one quadrillion dollars during their lifetimes.

How does that break down per person?

Over an adult lifetime, Canadians will spend an average of nearly $2.4 million on regular stuff. Americans, about $3 million each. Britons and continental Europeans, around $2 million each.

Not invested. Not saved. Money earned, then spent on ordinary things. On life. All of it handed over, day after day, to suppliers at the point of purchase. Here is where the money goes:

In general, every dollar is spent without any terms or conditions set by the buyer. That’s trillions a year of money handed to suppliers without the benefit of negotiations.

So what?

Could people get more value from the millions we each spend in a lifetime if we set terms and conditions with our suppliers?

We know the answer because corporations have been measuring it for decades. Bain studied more than a thousand large-scale procurement projects and found that structured buying adds 8 to 12 percent of value. Deloitte says the average company loses about 9 percent of contract value to poorly managed terms. McKinsey found that companies collaborating closely with suppliers grow faster and can reduce costs by 5 to 10 percent.

For professional buyers, contractual terms and conditions are an essential system for creating value. In business, you would be considered incompetent if you didn’t use them.

Professional buyers have a name for purchases made without terms and conditions. They call it maverick spending. Hackett Group found that maverick spending destroys up to 16 percent of the savings that organized procurement already won.

Serious buyers never purchase anything without making their suppliers sign agreements and guarantees before they hand over their money. There is always an enforcement mechanism that makes sure the contingent liabilities associated with a purchase sit with the supplier, and not with the buyer. (If you want to know why the world turns on the power of contingent liabilities, then read this).

As disorganized buyers, you and I lose money and raise our own costs when we don't copy what organized buyers do — when we don't set terms and conditions with our suppliers.

The reality of modern economics is that we all pay two bills for the things we purchase. The first is the price we pay at checkout. The second arrives years later, disguised as inflation, higher taxes, higher healthcare costs, and increased insurance premiums. These are the avoidable costs caused by climate damage, corruption, greed and incompetence. The second bill is directly related to the performance of your suppliers who sell you a lifetime of energy, transportation, food, technology, etc.

A supplier who leaves you with these hidden costs has low productivity. They hand you a second invisible invoice that takes your money, without asking.

Organized buyers already know this math. But we, regular people, are not very good at the part of capitalism that requires negotiations and contracts. This fact might be the single most important reason why the world has so many problems — and so many opportunities for positive change.

Here’s what I mean in numbers:

A sustained 1% improvement in supplier productivity is worth $25,000 to the average Western citizen the day it happens, and up to $620,000 over a compounding lifetime. Let’s be clear. That’s $620,000 that you and I are losing over a lifetime, and that’s another $620,000 for each of your children, and everyone living on your street, and so on.

Applied to the $1.37 quadrillion spent across just the ten countries in the chart above, that same sustained 1% improvement is worth $340 trillion.

That’s $5.67 trillion a year invested in making life safer, fairer, cleaner, freer — all without changing a single law, raising any new taxes, or asking anyone to change their politics or religion. All of it from copying a system in capitalism that already works.

One last note: the math applies to developing countries too. For example, India's billion-plus adults will spend about $570 trillion over their lifetimes (more than the UK, France and Germany combined), on virtually the same things as people living in the West (energy, transportation, food, technology, etc.). And like us, the majority of adults are already connected to their suppliers via a smartphone — the key technical catalyst for creating contracts with our suppliers.

This is the first of a recurring Supplierism series that tells some of these stories, always with an eye toward harnessing the best of what our suppliers can do.

Rubber

Before 1839, rubber was a useful material with a fatal flaw: it could not survive a change in temperature. Amazonian and Mesoamerican peoples had been bouncing rubber in ball games for three thousand years. In 1770, the scientist Joseph Priestley observed that it was excellent for wiping away pencil marks, hence the English name: rubber, the thing you rub with. In 1823, Charles Macintosh sealed raincoats with it, and by the early 1830s Boston had gone briefly mad for Brazilian galoshes. Then every buyer made the same discovery in the first hot week of summer, when the coats sagged into glue and the shoes melted on the porch. By the mid-1830s, America's first rubber companies had collapsed under the stench of their own inventory.

But then, in 1839, an obsessive American inventor named Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanization, the process that stopped rubber from melting in summer and cracking in winter. It made rubber useful at last, which made it indispensable. Gaskets, hoses, belts, boots, telegraph insulation, the bicycle craze, and then finally the automobile. Goodyear patented the process in 1844 but died in debt in 1860.

The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company was founded in Akron, Ohio in 1898, thirty-eight years after the inventor's death, by a business man named Frank Seiberling. Seiberling had no connection to the Goodyear family. The name was a tribute, chosen because it already meant rubber in the public mind. The company started with bicycle and carriage tires and horseshoe pads. But its growth was powered by the mass production of automobiles.

Rubber Trees

Rubber comes from trees that bleed latex. Only one rubber tree bleeds latex consistently good enough for tires: Hevea brasiliensis. And it grew naturally in exactly one place on earth, the Amazon basin.

Manaus sits a thousand miles up the Amazon, close to dead centre of the South American continent, surrounded in every direction by the largest rainforest on earth. In 1900 there was no road in and no road out; there still barely is. Everything arrived by water. The ships steamed in from the Atlantic for a week, deep-draft ocean liners sliding past the jungle to dock at a floating wharf, engineered to rise and fall forty feet with the river. Passengers stepped off a transatlantic vessel into equatorial heat, walked up from the water, and found electric streetlights, a tram network, and a pink-domed opera house. It is the kind of scene adventure films have been imagining ever since: the impossible European city in the jungle, the steamer arriving from another world. Manaus doesn't resemble an Indiana Jones set. Indiana Jones sets resemble Manaus.

Every pound of Amazon rubber passed through the merchants and export houses of Manaus and Belém on its way to the factories of Europe and America. The middlemen priced it like the monopoly it was. The legends of the era’s excess are famous. Rubber barons lighting cigars with banknotes, watering horses on French champagne, sending the laundry to Portugal because the Rio Negro was beneath their linen. Meanwhile, upriver, Indigenous workers were flogged, murdered and held by debt to the trading houses that supplied their tools and food at prices no season’s work could clear.

As the automobile changed the world, Manaus became one of the richest places on the planet, and every early tire on every early car began as latex from an Amazonian tree, bought at whatever price the market demanded, because there was nowhere else to shop.

The Rubber Heist

In June of 1876, a failed plantation owner named Henry Wickham walked off a chartered steamship in Liverpool carrying the future of the industrial world in his luggage. Seventy thousand rubber seeds. Three quarters of a ton of them, brought out through the customs house at Belém, Brazil as a delicate botanical collection destined for Her Majesty’s own gardens, too fragile, he implied, to survive delay. The officials waved it through.

Rubber was Brazil’s fortune, and Brazil knew it. But the monopoly was guarded by geography rather than guns. Stealing it had been tried. A British collector came home in 1873 with two thousand seeds, of which twelve germinated, but the seedlings shipped to Calcutta died. The seeds typically spoiled within days of leaving the branch, and the Amazon was a thousand miles of river from anywhere. The rubber monopoly was assumed to be theft-proof. Wickham understood precisely how precarious his plan was. He gathered his seeds near Santarém, packed them to keep them alive, chartered a ship, and sailed.

He was not acting for himself. Wickham was hired by the Royal Botanic Gardens, the botanical arm of the British Empire, with a hub in London and satellite gardens in Calcutta, Ceylon and Singapore. Wickham was paid roughly ten pounds per thousand seeds, on the instruction of Clements Markham of the India Office, who had run this type of operation once before. Twenty years earlier Markham had stolen the cinchona tree out of the Andes, the tree that makes quinine, and broken South America’s monopoly on the only drug that made malarial colonies survivable.

Most of Wickham’s stolen haul perished on the voyage. Of seventy thousand seeds, the gardeners in London coaxed roughly two thousand seedlings to life and shipped them east to Ceylon, and from there to Singapore and Malaya. And then, for twenty years, nothing happened. The trees grew. But the planters mostly ignored them, because nobody knew how to tap a rubber tree without killing it.

In the Amazon, wild rubber trees grew scattered, one tree to an acre or two. The latex tappers walked long circuits through the forest, cutting deep gouges into the trunk with an axe or a machete, sometimes ringing the tree entirely, sometimes felling it to bleed it out in a single harvest. The cuts went through the bark and into the wood, so the tree scarred, sickened, and died, never lasting more than a few seasons. When a stand of rubber trees was exhausted, the tappers pushed further upriver to virgin trees.

The new experimental plantations in Asia inverted every one of those conditions. The land was cleared, planted with rubber tree seedlings, two hundred stems to the acre; and then they waited at least seven years for the trees to mature. In the Amazon, a dead tree cost nothing. Here, every trunk had been bought and waited for, and there was no forest to move to when it died. So the new plantations had crops but no way to harvest the latex.

The man who solved the problem was Henry Ridley, director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens, who worked out a shallow herringbone cut that opened the latex vessels without wounding the tree, so the same trunk could be bled every other day for thirty years. It is still how it is done.

Then the timing turned. Coffee rust had just destroyed Ceylon’s coffee crop and left its planters ruined and desperate. The bicycle craze arrived, and behind it the automobile, and the price of rubber went vertical. So the broken coffee men planted Wickham’s trees with Ridley’s cut, and from 1897 the plantations spread across Ceylon and Malaya.

It took thirty-seven years for that crate of rubber seeds in Liverpool to bankrupt Manaus. The collapse was total. In 1900 the Amazon produced ninety-five percent of the world’s rubber. By 1913 the Asian plantations, every tree of them descended from Wickham’s crates, out-produced the Amazon. By 1916 Goodyear owned twenty thousand acres of rubber trees in Sumatra. The buyer that once paid a monopoly’s price now grew its own supply on the fruit of the theft that ended the monopoly. By 1928 Brazil's global share of the rubber industry was two percent. The price broke. The barons left. The trams stopped. The opera house sat empty as the jungle grew back around it.

Fordlandia

By the 1920s the tables had turned completely. Now Britain held the supply of rubber. When London moved to restrict rubber exports and lift prices, the world’s largest rubber buyer decided to fight back. Henry Ford’s cars rolled on rubber, and America was consuming three quarters of the world’s output. Tired of paying a foreign cartel, Ford bought 2.5 million acres of Amazon rainforest, a parcel roughly the size of Connecticut, and set out to grow his own.

What he built was Fordlandia: an American town in the jungle, with Michigan-style bungalows, fire hydrants, a golf course, a modern hospital, electric light, running water, and mandatory square dancing, which Ford considered morally improving. It was foolhardy and arrogant: Ford hired no botanists and no tropical agronomists, staffing the plantation with Michigan managers who had never grown rubber. The land itself had been chosen badly, hilly and sandy, sold to him through intermediaries who took their cut. Workers were paid double the local wage and in exchange were expected to live as Michiganders: punch clocks in the rainforest, ID badges, whistle shifts alien to locals who had always tapped trees in the cool of dawn, alcohol banned outright, and American food in the cafeteria.

In December 1930, a menu of oatmeal and canned peaches set off a riot; workers smashed the time clocks, wrecked the mess hall, and pushed trucks into the river while the managers fled to boats offshore. The Brazilian army was called in to restore order. Upstream, beyond Ford’s writ, an island of bars and brothels flourished.

But what actually defeated Ford was a tree fungus. South American leaf blight lives in the Amazon. Rubber trees survive it by growing far apart. Ford’s engineers planted trees in tight, efficient rows, and when the young canopies finally touched, the blight moved through the plantation like fire through a woodpile.

Meanwhile, the trees stolen from Brazil and farmed in Asia were now safe from the Amazonian fungus.

Ford closed the Brazil operations. He had spent about $20 million, over $200 million in today’s money, without ever visiting the place, and never put a Fordlandia tire on a production car. In 1945, his grandson sold everything back to Brazil for $244,200, about a penny on the dollar.

Rubber and War

In 1942, Japan seized Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies, and with them some nine tenths of the world’s natural rubber, the same plantations Wickham’s seeds had built.

The war consumed massive quantities of rubber. About half a ton in a tank, twenty tons in a battleship, and tires under every truck, jeep, and bomber. America had less than a year’s stockpile. A presidential survey committee led by Bernard Baruch concluded that of all scarce war materials, rubber was “the greatest threat to the safety of our nation.”

Most people have forgotten what came next, or simply get it wrong. Gasoline rationing during World War II, the great shared sacrifice of the home front, was imposed in large part not to save gasoline. It was imposed to save tires. The national Victory Speed limit of 35 miles an hour existed because tread wears faster at speed, and the American government had done the arithmetic on every tire in the country.

Motivated by an existential crisis, the government mobilized to find a solution to the rubber shortage.

The recipe for synthetic rubber, called Buna-S, actually came from the Germans. Buna-S is butadiene and styrene, polymerized — a rubber made from petroleum and coal chemistry instead of tree sap. Standard Oil owned the American patent rights for Buna-S through a prewar agreement with the German chemical cartel IG Farben. Barely three months after Pearl Harbor, Standard Oil was hauled before Harry Truman's Senate committee. Under that pressure, and a simultaneous antitrust case, Standard Oil was forced to release the patents for the war effort.

The government then ordered the rubber rivals, Goodyear, Firestone, Goodrich, US Rubber, to pool their resources inside dozens of government-built plants. The cost of the synthetic rubber project was roughly $700 million, billions in today’s money.

In 1941, the United States was facing a rubber shortage that could have cost the Allies the war. By 1944 it produced nearly 800,000 tons of synthetic rubber and by the war’s end almost nine of every ten pounds of rubber in American use were synthetic. A synthetic rubber industry that had not existed when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, rolled the Allied armies into Berlin in 1945.

It was one of the great procurement feats in history.

A government sponsored botanical espionage and waited decades for seedlings to grow into leverage. An automaker bought a Connecticut-sized piece of a foreign country and built a town with a golf course in it. A wartime nation on the brink invented a substitute industry from scratch in three years.

And we can’t stop forest fires? Can't stop the ocean from filling with plastic? Can't build a house a working family can afford? Can't keep a supply chain free of forced labour?

History tells a different story. If your supplier is sufficiently motivated, there is almost nothing it cannot — or will not — do.

Note: this post is a bit longer than most. Next week’s will be shorter.

First, our lives are shaped by our suppliers. Food, clothes, music and media, travel, the smartphone in your hand or the computer in front of you. It is impossible to imagine life without the things made by our suppliers. At the same time, nearly every large-scale problem in the world, from political corruption to climate change to AI undermining humanity, runs through the choices our suppliers make with our money.

Second, to secure a safe and prosperous future, people must influence the behaviour of their suppliers through contracts that reward good performance and punish bad results.

Supplierism is not a new system of government, not a new economic theory, not a philosophy of life. It invents nothing. Every mechanism it relies on already exists, is already legal, and already works. Supplierism is a new word for something very old.

So, let’s start at the beginning.

Writing was not invented for poetry or prayer. It was invented for keeping track of goods. The oldest documents humanity produced are procurement records pressed into Mesopotamian clay. The earliest name we can still read does not belong to a king or a prophet but, most scholars think, to Kushim, a procurement administrator in the city of Uruk around 3100 BC. His name survives because it appears on a receipt for barley: 29,086 measures, received over 37 months. The first thing civilization chose to record was the delivery of products from a supplier to a buyer.

By 2600 BC the sales contract had arrived. A tablet from the city of Shuruppak, now in the Louvre, records the sale of property, with witnesses named at the bottom to vouch that the deal was honest. Terms, parties, witnesses. The form was set before the pyramids were finished.

Around 1750 BC, we get the first record of a buyer asserting their rights against a supplier. In the Mesopotamian city of Ur, a man named Nanni paid a copper merchant in advance. By Nanni's account, the merchant explicitly promised good quality copper ingots. Nanni’s messenger crossed hostile territory to collect the copper. What he got instead was inferior product and a shrug.

“If you want to take them, take them,” said the copper merchant. “If you do not want to take them, go away!”

So Nanni pressed his fury into a clay tablet. It is the oldest written customer complaint on record, and today sits in the British Museum. It reads with the same frustration you and I have likely felt recently, buying something defective:

“What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt?”

Having vented, Nanni’s tablet then dictates his terms and conditions.

“I will not accept here any copper from you that is not fine quality. I shall select and take the ingots individually in my own yard. And I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt.”

A remedy, a quality clause, an inspection clause, a consequence. Alone, with no state behind him and no leverage but his own money, Nanni wrote a procurement contract in the form of a complaint.

Everything since has been layers on that foundation.

Rome added the competitive tender and the performance bond: contracts auctioned by the censors, five-year terms, guarantees posted by the winner. The Royal Navy added the inspector, appointing surveyors in the 1660s to check what its contractors delivered, and splitting supply among rival firms so no one held a monopoly. Lincoln added the fraud penalty. After contractors sold the Union Army diseased horses, faulty rifles, and gunpowder cut with sawdust, he signed the False Claims Act in 1863, which let ordinary citizens sue cheating suppliers and keep a share of the recovery.

In 1887 the first book on the procurement discipline appeared. By 1915 the purchasing agents of America had a national association, and soon a profession: credentials, journals, conferences, careers. In 1952, the Uniform Commercial Code gathered the rules of buying and selling into a single rulebook. In the 1980s, Toyota taught the world to develop suppliers rather than merely squeeze them. Later in the century, large buyers added the first ethics clauses with terms about the seller’s social, environmental and governance conduct, enforced by audit and cascaded down the supply chain. By the end of the 20th century, the procurement department of a large corporation was the most sophisticated buyer the world had ever produced.

Next, the corporation did something that changed the world again.

It took its mastery of procurement contracts and aimed it at its own customers. It printed its own terms on the back of the ticket, inside the policy, in the fine print. Liabilities were limited, then quietly passed on to the buyer (you and me).

By 2000, the computer click had replaced the signature. The corporation simply used its size and its head start in technology to create advantages at the moment of sale. None of its techniques were new. It’s just buyers, sellers, and contracts — as old as haggling for copper ingots in Mesopotamia.

But this life-shaping relationship is a pendulum, and the gravity that moves it is the buyer's money. That is the natural order of economic life. The buyer holds the greater force. In the 21st century, corporations used technology, tricks, and lobbying to pin the pendulum on their side, making the buyer's agreement to the seller's terms feel like the only option. That is now changing, because the same technology that pinned the pendulum can level it. Buyers in a global economy can finally write terms of their own, at the same scale as the corporations they face in everyday purchasing.

Which makes me think: if Nanni lived in 2026 and was buying his daughter a smartphone or a tablet, he would reach for Supplierism's free tools to write the purchasing contract pasted below. Soon, terms like his will be created and executed with the supplier instantly, through the buyer's own purchasing app. His original document took a scribe, a stylus, and wet clay.

If you don’t want to read Nanni’s entire supplier contract, here is the summary of his terms, in Nanni’s own register:

Supplier — take only what you need. Leave my child be. Do not feed my words to your machine. Tell me the whole truth or none. Break faith and my silver is gone, and a thousand households hold the same tablet. You need my silver more than I need your wares.

— Nanni

But the East India Company was too big to fail, so the British Parliament arranged a bailout. The instrument was the Tea Act of May 1773. It let the company ship and sell tea directly to America without the duties it normally would have paid in England. One small tax was kept in place, to be paid by tea buyers in the thirteen colonies.

Here is a detail that folklore overlooks. The Act made tea cheaper in America. Much cheaper, roughly half the old price. Lord North, the prime minister, considered the plan foolproof. No consumer in history, he reasoned, had ever rioted against a price cut.

The colonists read the deal differently. They saw a distant government handing a favoured monopoly direct access to their market while attaching a small tax whose only purpose was to establish that American consent was not required. The low price was not a gift. It was bait. Accept the cheap tea, and you accepted that the terms of your economic life would be written in a room where you held no seat.

So they refused delivery. New York and Philadelphia turned the ships around. Charleston let the tea rot on the docks. In Boston, after the governor refused to send the ships home, colonists boarded them and dumped 92,000 pounds of tea into the harbour.

Parliament answered with the Coercive Acts, and the road to July 4, 1776 was set.

What was the true cost of tea in America?

Americans in the early 1770s drank around two thirds of a pound of tea per person per year, at roughly three shillings a pound. The disputed tax came to two pennies per person per year.

Pause on that. The most famous consumer revolt in history was staged against a price cut. Why? Because Americans in 1773 understood something crucial: the listed price of an unnegotiated product is not its full and true cost.

The terms of the deal matter more.

What the colonists did next was negotiate on behalf of their future selves. The tea in front of them was cheap, but the precedent it set was expensive. They decided their collective future outweighed the discount and refused the deal.

That skill, negotiating your future interests at the moment of purchase, has been unlearned by modern consumers. Today, American citizens celebrate the glorious imagery of their forefathers’ rebellion. But in practice most people now live under what the founders fought to end: a system of terms written by their corporate suppliers under the guise of cheap products.

Cheap products, everywhere

The rebellion severed the deal with Britain, but it did not extinguish the problem. Global corporations like the East India Company continued writing one-sided terms without buyer input. In fact, global corporations have since perfected their ability to write terms that pass on hidden costs to their buyers.

Sugar was the biggest global commodity in 1776. Its price was kept low by slavery, the largest hidden cost in history. The freedom-seeking Americans who took sugar with their tea financed slavery, even those who advocated against it.

Today, energy is the largest example. Gasoline and grid power are spectacularly cheap for what they do, but the cost of carbon remains unpriced, and the deferred bill is now arriving in the form of rising insurance premiums for fires and floods and rising taxes for disaster recovery. The International Monetary Fund puts the cost at nearly $7 trillion a year in unpriced damage from fossil fuel products.

Free social media is the purest case of terms that pass on hidden costs to their buyers. The discount went to zero, while the terms took your data, your attention, and permission to run experiments on your children's minds. Lord North would have wept at the elegance of it.

Ultra-cheap calories run the same scheme. Processed foods are engineered to be irresistible and cheap per portion. The deferred bill is part of the reason America's health care now costs $5.3 trillion a year.

In every case, the supplier negotiated for its own future interests and Americans did not. None of us did.

The Declaration of Independence: a master agreement

Two and a half years after the tea went into the harbour, the same Americans who had refused the deal sat down to write a master agreement. They gave it a name: the Declaration of Independence. It is not a poem about liberty. At its core, the Declaration of Independence is a terms-and-conditions document, and it follows the anatomy of one almost clause for clause. It opens by establishing that governments derive "their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed," and when a government becomes destructive of these ends, the people may alter or abolish it. It proceeds by itemizing twenty-seven breaches by the King, and even documents the notice given: "Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury." And it closes with the remedy every contract reserves for material breach: Termination.

The theme that dominates July 4th is that America was founded on the hope of freedom and the pursuit of happiness. But its foundation is a universal principle of equality, based on a self-evident truth.

Freedom cannot exist without the right to negotiate for your future interests.

In 1776, Americans made it clear that a discount on tea is not a deal if its hidden terms undermine the future of citizenship.

That idea never expired. Modern commerce, and the politics it funds, runs on terms most people on earth never wrote and cannot see. None of this is new. The marriage of corporate supplier terms and global politics is as old as the bailout of the East India Company in 1773. The Declaration of Independence, and the founding of America itself, came out of a fight against hidden costs buried in the terms of a bad deal. That fight was never finished.

Ensuring that hidden costs are negotiated out of your life — and the economy — is the mission of Supplierism. Unpriced environmental damage, extracted data and engineered attention, political corruption, exploited supply-chain labour, AI’s displacement of work, the mental health of children. These are just some of the hidden costs attached to things we purchase every day.

Healthy citizenship requires that we manage our suppliers with enforceable agreements. That is why Supplierism is making the tools for writing terms and conditions available to everyone, for free.

No rebellion required.

Next week: Why Supplierism invents nothing. Every mechanism it relies on already exists, is already legal, and already works. The only new thing is who gets to use it.

What is FIFA?

FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, is the Zurich-based global governing body of football, founded in 1904, that organizes the men’s and women’s World Cups and collects the broadcasting and sponsorship revenue they generate.

The 2023-2026 World Cup cycle is now projected to generate $13 billion for FIFA, up roughly 72 percent on the previous cycle that ended with Qatar 2022. FIFA keeps the broadcasting, sponsorship, and ticket revenue, while the host cities and governments largely absorb the costs of security, transport, and stadiums. In Canada that means about C$1.066 billion in public support, roughly C$82 million for each of the thirteen matches the country is staging.

About $3.2 billion is paid to FIFA directly through ticket sales. The other $9.8 billion reaches FIFA indirectly through broadcasters and through sponsors like Adidas, Coca-Cola, Hyundai-Kia, Visa, Aramco, Lenovo, and Qatar Airways, who front the money and then recoup it from you in the price of a Coke, a Visa swipe, a car, a streaming subscription.

Breaking laws and funding Putin’s war

FIFA has become a byword for institutional corruption, built like a global syndicate: six confederations, a 37-member Council as the commission, and a president who keeps power by controlling the money that flows down to the 211 federations and the loyalty that flows back up as votes. It answers inward, to the federations it bankrolls, and never to the fans and host cities whose money funds the whole operation. When U.S. prosecutors charged FIFA officials in 2015 they used laws written for the mafia. That RICO case described more than $150 million in bribes and kickbacks, charged as racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering.

The conclusion was that the body entrusted with the world’s most beloved game is run, in significant part, as a racket. Most of the money comes from you and me, vacuumed up, washed clean, and then repurposed for whatever scheme FIFA’s partners choose.

Russia is the most disturbing. The 2018 World Cup was a soft-power triumph for Putin, who had already annexed Crimea in 2014 and used the prestige and revenue of FIFA’s World Cup to entrench his regime, before launching the largest land war in Europe since 1945.

Western sponsors, and the brands you and I buy, effectively bankrolled the war in Ukraine. The money trail runs disturbingly straight. You can read more about that here: How your money funded Putin.

The dilemma has a name

There’s a name for loving a product and distrusting it at the same time. Wharton School researchers (Bhattacharjee, Berman, and Reed) call it moral decoupling. Separating judgment of the product’s performance from judgment of its morality allows buyers to admire one while condemning the other, without pretending the bad thing was fine. It’s different from making excuses, and it’s easier to live with, precisely because you never have to lie to yourself about the wrongdoing.

That’s how many of us experience FIFA. The game is great. Its managers are overpaid, prone to corruption, with a habit of consuming public resources that could otherwise be used for education, health care, or lower taxes. So we hold our noses.

FIFA is a glaring example of moral decoupling. Regular people all around the world finance terrible results as buyers of everyday products. These results betray not just our values, but our economic interests too.

Lately, I have been experimenting with various AI platforms to see what they have to say about humans spending their hard-earned money to fund poor results from their suppliers. One basic conclusion stands out.

Money is power. Giving yours away to your suppliers without also asking for guarantees undermines your future interests.

Moral decoupling is a consumer survival tactic that is understandable and regrettable at the same time. It lets us enjoy the product with our eyes open about rotten owners and managers, like FIFA. But it also delays what AI is predicting: that citizens will soon realize moral decoupling betrays not just our values, but our economic interests too.

Supplierism is designed to make sure we don't surrender our money to suppliers before they have agreed to reasonable terms and conditions. People drawn to the idea of Supplierism are sometimes skeptical of how it can be executed at scale. There is a sense that regular people are limited in what they can do. But for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, creating and enforcing legal contracts with our suppliers is not complicated at all. Standard terms can be drafted once and offered to millions, agreement can be tracked automatically, and buyers can be aggregated into a bloc no single supplier can ignore. The idea of requiring our suppliers to sign contracts is so simple that moral decoupling starts to look like what it always was, a workaround for people who thought they had no other choice. I picture the AI scratching its digital head: Giving money away without first agreeing how it can be used? Financing the outcomes you spend your life trying to avoid? The math doesn't work.

Supplierism is a plan to end moral decoupling for good, so you can love the game and trust the people who run it.

See what we’re building here.

But the story doesn’t begin with corporate scandal. It started over a hundred and fifty years ago, with a kid, a wagon, and something to sell.

The Baker

Around 1868, George Weston's family moved from Oswego, New York to Toronto. George was four at the time, the youngest of seven children. He got a thin education, and at twelve went to work in a bakery for a dollar seventy-five a week. He learned the trade with his hands. By seventeen he had saved enough to buy two bread routes from his boss for roughly two hundred dollars. For a labourer's son that was not pocket change.

In 1884 he bought the bakery itself. He liked to tell the story of the first day. Two hundred and fifty loaves, baked by him, loaded onto his own wagon, delivered to every customer by his own hand. George met his wife, Emma Maud, on one of those routes. He called his product Real Home-Made Bread, and within a generation he was the largest baker in the country.

In the 1890s the bakers of Toronto had come up with a scheme. Their association agreed to hold the price of a loaf of bread at twelve cents, so that nobody undercut anybody else. A price-fixing pact. Canada had already passed the world’s first antitrust law in 1889. But it was a near-dead letter with a single failed prosecution in its first decade. Price-fixing was technically a crime but effectively unpoliced.

George Weston broke the pact. He walked out of the association and cut his prices below the agreed number. Prices across the city fell, which mattered most to working families for whom bread was a staple. A couple of pennies off a twelve-cent loaf was real money saved every single day.

George Weston was a hard-driving entrepreneur. He cut prices to win, paid his workers poorly, and had a fine sense of exactly what a customer would tolerate. And yet there was decency in what he made. He baked a loaf cheap enough for families who could not afford to bake their own, in a bakery clean enough that the newspapers praised it at a time when most food was made in filth. Cheaper, safer bread for people who counted every penny. That is not nothing.

The Dog

Smoke, the dog, came into my life in 1980, when I was eleven. I think my father recruited him to explain the hard parts of divorce to me and my brothers, the parts he couldn't manage to explain himself. Smoke became the emissary into a new life. Not with words, of course, but in the way only a dog can turn a summer day that could have been lonely and grim into something sunny and fun. He was a master at exactly that. Warm and elegant, loyal and stately, he ushered me through that change and smoothed over rough patches that are barely memories now, thanks in part to him.

But he was also just a dog. He drank out of the toilet bowl. He chewed my socks into wet ribbons. He soiled the carpet when it suited him, and he stole my dinner whenever I left it within reach. I didn’t take any of it personally. I never once asked him to be polite or ethical. I tried to train him to be good. In the end, he was half-trained and beloved. A thief? Yes. That was his nature.

The Corporation and the Cheque for $47.11

George Weston died in 1924. In 1928 his son Garfield took the bakery George had built, incorporated it as George Weston Limited, and listed it on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Not a baker anymore. A security. A thing you could own a piece of without ever tasting the bread. From then on the company answered to different stakeholders. Not just regular people at the door, but shareholders on the exchange, who wanted growth and cared less about how the loaf tasted, so long as it made money.

And grow it did. Garfield was a brilliant, restless acquirer. Across the thirties, forties and fifties he bought biscuit makers, paper mills and fish canneries, anything that turned a margin. In 1953 he took control of Loblaw, and the bakery that once delivered bread now owned the shelves it was sold on.

Garfield’s son Galen Weston Sr. took over in the 1970s. By the end of the decade, George Weston Limited was a multi-billion-dollar holding company. The wagon was a logo. The baker was a portrait on a wall.

Somewhere around 2001, George Weston Limited and Loblaw began coordinating the price of bread, nudging it upward in lockstep with competitors. It was almost precisely the pact the original George Weston had rejected in the 1890s. The man broke a price-fixing cartel. The corporation bearing his name perfected one.

How did this come to be, under the watchful eye of leadership that can fairly be called sensible and conservative?

According to the company, it discovered its own price-fixing in March 2015, immediately reported it to the Competition Bureau, and cooperated in exchange for immunity from prosecution. By 2017 Galen Weston Sr. had retired and handed the parent company to his son. When the media broke the story that December, Galen Jr. answered for the company. He called the scheme "a difficult matter" and "clearly something that never should have happened."

Seven years later, when the $500 million settlement landed, he said it again: “This behaviour should never have happened.”

Last month, my settlement cheque arrived.

With three kids at home, I figure I bought over five hundred loaves of bread between 2006 and 2015, overcharged by at least $350. Add a modest interest charge and they owe me about $700. Charge the company the rate it puts on its own credit card, around 19%, and George Weston Limited should pay me closer to $4,000.

The cheque was for $47.11.

For nearly a decade and a half, George Weston Ltd and Loblaw helped overcharge customers an estimated $5 billion for bread. They held the money for years, handed back about a tenth of it, and paid no criminal penalty. That isn't a deterrent. It's a cheap loan, taken without asking, repaid late and in part. Meanwhile, throughout those years, the executives running the company drew their salaries and bonuses, like any other profitable year.

Does your dog bite?

“This behaviour should never have happened,” said Galen Weston Jr.

Only half-trained, George Weston Ltd was like a dog that can't be left alone with your dinner. It never stopped sniffing around for easy profit. Galen Jr.'s words frame price-fixing as a stray impulse, something to report and apologize for, the way you might if your dog slipped its leash.

I think there's a lot to learn from this: corporations can't be trusted to make ethical decisions any more than Smoke could be trusted with my pizza. They need training.

In capitalism, our corporate suppliers are constantly seeking profit. It's their nature. When we train them to be good, they learn that harm is a cost they can't pass on to us. When we don't, they will overcharge us for bread the moment they think they can get away with it.

A few years after Smoke died, I was jogging in a secluded ravine, aged nineteen. A hundred-pound Bouvier attacked me and sent me to the hospital covered in blood from head to toe. I still have the scars. Bad owner? For sure. But I can honestly say it was a pretty dangerous dog too. Not evil, just a dog that nobody had trained, doing what an untrained dog can do.

Some of your suppliers are surely helping to make your life more meaningful, interesting, even beautiful. Some are likely smoothing over the rough patches, the way Smoke did. And some remind me of that Bouvier, attacking our way of life and our safety.

The main point is this: make sure your money trains the ones you like to be good, and disqualifies the ones that behave badly. Price-fixing, carbon emissions, corruption, exploited labour, poor safety, jobs automated away by AI. These are all things we can fix when suppliers are forced to own the costs they create.

How?

Imagine if every one of my bread purchases came with a contract that said:

Instead they paid me $47.11, over ten years after the crime was committed.

Setting your terms now, before you buy products and services, changes the game. We're building a free app to do exactly that.

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