« According to the U.S. government, we are experiencing the longest period of growth in a generation. Every week, Wall Street breaks a new record in a market that is arguably the most exuberant of the century. The unemployment rate is the lowest in 25 years. Corporate profits are at record highs. In the United States, everything is going well in the best of worlds. This probably explains why one in four American children lives in poverty, why a record number of Americans declared bankruptcy in 1996, why real income has stagnated for nearly two decades, and why the number of employees who are afraid of being laid off has doubled since 1991, according to a recent survey commissioned by the Federal Reserve. The fact is that 40% of the country's wealth now belongs to 1% of the population. This minority of super-rich has used its resources to subsidize Democrats and Republicans, who have done so well: tax cuts, billions of dollars in business aid and carte blanche to lay off millions of Americans. Meanwhile, the majority of you live on three blocked MasterCards. Your workday is so long that, with luck, you can see your children half an hour before they go to bed. Your social coverage is reduced to bogus insurance from an HMO. Your children's school is a disaster, as the local authorities are ruining their desire to convince businesses to stay put by giving them their taxes (in any case, they will leave one day, but only after they have bled the area blank). I have written this book for all American citizens whose daily experience leads us to suspect that all these beautiful speeches about the "great economic miracle" are the most formidable propaganda operation they are victims of since Reagan tried to make ketchup look like a fresh vegetable. Do they really think we're morons? Apparently, yes. If I wrote this book, it's mainly to show that I'm not quite as stupid (if you want to turn a blind eye to the little grammar problems that appear here and there in my text). At the time I was writing this book, not a week went by without a large company announcing mass layoffs. And then there was a crank back, and a vague anti-capitalist mood began to spread across the country (remember the patibular P-DG photos published in Newsweek with the caption "Killer Bosses?"). Business heavyweights quickly rallied. They dropped the official announcements of massive degreasing and began to gently, wear out or in small doses, so as not to make waves. I still counted the waves. If you want to know some of the companies that fired employees in 1996 after the publication of my book in the United States, these are: Monsanto, Texas Instruments, Tele-Communications International, Inc., NEC, AOL, Sunbeam, Westinghouse, OshKosh B'Gosh, Goodyear, Samso-nite, Polaroid, US Robotics, Teledyne Water Pik, Texaco, Best Products, Motorola, Office Depot, Union Pacific, Kiwi International Airlines , TRW, Turner Broadcasting, Bank of America, Georgia Pacific, First Boston, Frankenmuth Brewery, Digital Equipment, Honeywell, RJR Nabisco, Aetna, NationBank Corp., Chase Manhattan Bank, Hewlett Packard, Fruit of Tea Loom, General Electric, Alcoa, Hasbro, US West, Raytheon, Prudential Insurance, Campbell Soup, Southern Pacific, Bradlees, Electric Boat, Whirlpool, NordicTrack, Kmart, Lockheed Martin, Apple Computer, Sizzler, Wells Fargo, McDonnell You may not have heard of these layoffs. If they passed like a letter in the mail, it is because the press has virtually ignored them. The media has turned their cuti, and there are no longer any articles and reports on the "end of layoffs", the "economic prosperity" and the happiness in which we all bathe. Apart from the millions of unemployed who are no longer even accounted for because they have exhausted their social assistance entitlements and the millions of employees who are forced to combine two jobs in order to pay their bills. And apart from the fact that the number of layoffs actually increased by 8% in 1996. Although his diagnosis is based on the situation of the mid-1990s, the morals of this book, I hope, are not limited by variations in annual economic indicators. It moves wickedly on the side of big capital, and if it moves, it's certainly not to make your life easier or happier. You must believe that millions of you already know, given the success of the cardboard edition. As I write, she is in her eighth draw. The book remained one month on the New York Times bestseller list and five months on the Times' best-selling list. He was number one in San Francisco and Detroit, number two in Boston and number four in Washington. He even made a splash in Britain. In my opinion, opinion is much more advanced than the media and politicians on all these issues. I've u p d a t ed a number of data for the American Pocket Edition, and added some additional untimely rants, but most of the facts match the material used in 1996. Business leaders pass, the numbers vary with the seasons, but the substance of their meaning, as well as that of my comments, has not changed. As long as we live in a democracy, my hope will be based on a fundamental truth: the CEO of Exxon has the same number of votes as you and I, namely one. But there are many more of us than he is. Michael Moore August 1997 »

« When I learned in late 1999 that Michelin had decided to lay off 7,500 employees just after announcing record profits for this year, I thought it was a joke. I thought, not in France, and not like that. The French wouldn't let it. Of course, we Americans have been suffering the effects of this thirst for gain for two decades, but France, anyway... France was something else. It was a country that put the well-being of its citizens before the obsession with profit. It was a country that recognized the value of work and had an implicit social contract: if you work hard and your business prospers, you too can prosper. It was a country where unions were powerful and companies did not dare to abuse workers too much. In short, France was the kind of country where we used to live. But all this is over, and this France no longer exists. Michelin's decision to punish its employees for their contribution to the prosperity of their company, one of the richest in the world, can be interpreted as a major turning point: it marks the day when France decided to ignore its tradition of fairness and decency and declare war on its own people. You may not know how much this news has affected me. When I found out, I wanted to climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower and shout out: "French, French, for God's sake, come to your senses! Don't let France become the United States! Save your soul! Raise your nose with your glasses of burgundy and your scandalously rich desserts that you manage to devour without becoming obese (a real mystery for us Americans) and revolt against this madness! Today is the time to act, otherwise you will quickly find yourself glued to the TV, hypnotized by reruns of stupid shows and completely addicted to the base-lease! Fortunately, I didn't have to climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower. A brilliant French film producer and distributor, Jean Labadie, called me one day to tell me that he had bought the rights to my film The Big One and that he intended to distribute it all over France. The Big One is a documentary about my promotional tour across the United States of the book you have before you. It showed that all the propaganda about the American economic boom was largely bogus. From city to city, what I discovered was that the rich had become even richer while 90% of Americans drank as much as they could. And, besides, my movie wanted to be funny. I asked Jean why he thought the French public might want to go to a movie theater to see a film about the American economy. "It's not a film about America," he told me, "it's a film about us." And he explained to me that it was not only Michelin, but also other French companies that pressed their employees like lemons to get rich quickly and got rid of them as soon as they found a way to produce at a lower cost. According to him, the French were getting more and more fed up, and my film would be very well received. At Jean's invitation, I came to Paris at the end of November with my wife for the launch of the film. After barely an hour of interviews, I realized that my documentary hardly needed my help. All the viewers of The Big One I met were very much interested in its guerrilla operation side against the great American capital. The discussions I have had with the critics and the French press are among the most lively I have ever had about my work. My wife Kathleen Glynn, the film's producer, couldn't believe it. Of course, in the United States, the film didn't go badly (it had won many awards and made the best recipes of the year in the documentary category), but nothing prepared us for the reception it was going to receive in France. The first week of its broadcast, the queue at the entrance of the cinema went to the corner of the street. If you wanted to buy an appetizer, you had to take it a week in advance. The audience was jubilant throughout the film and often people were cheering standing at the end of the screening. The owners of the halls had never seen anything like it. After all, it was never just a documentary... and an American documentary, with that! Why were people willing to spend much of their evening queuing up and banging a movie about a book shot on video and turned into a movie? And the audience kept pouring in. During the Christmas holidays, the queues lengthened and the film was screened in new cinemas. In January, The Big One was broadcast in twenty-two cities in France. By March, it had surpassed record levels in the United States, generating more than six million francs in revenue. As I said to my wife, "That's why you have to believe that the French really have the balls!" And all this was followed by a deluge of enthusiastic messages on my email. Thousands of French people from all walks of social backgrounds wrote to me and told me about their run-ins with their boss, their company, or insensitive civil servants. And all these letters asked me, "Does your book exist in French?" Well, thanks to this excellent publishing house that is Discovery, my book exists in French. I am proud and I feel honoured that it is published in France. My father was a worker in the automotive industry. I don't have university degrees. You will not often have the opportunity to hear the opinion of an American of my kind. So I'm very lucky to be able to communicate to you what I care about. The first time I came to France was when I was a teenager, in 1975, with a backpack. I remember how attracted I was by the level of awareness and passion for politics of the people I met. I went back several times, for the launch of my documentary Roger et Moi in 1990 and for the presentation in Cannes of my first fiction film, Canadian Bacon, in 1995. I am still reeling from the reception received by The Big One, and I am deeply grateful to the French public. And I'm very happy to present this book of political reflections and humor, hoping that you'll have a good laugh and that, after that, you'll put a nice mess. Don't let France look like the unjust and treacherous country that has become the United States, where thirty-five million citizens live in abject poverty and forty-five million are totally devoid of social coverage. The flags of our two countries contain the same colors. Do everything in your power to make the resemblance stop there. Michael Moore New York City, April 2000 »

« Towards the end of the second millennium, millions of Earthlings began to disappear. At first, we called it "fattening." We thought it was the rich's fault. What we didn't know was that these beings known as "CEO" were actually invaders from another planet. `...` Soon, everyone ended up being "fattened." I am one of the few survivors who can bear witness to the atrocious fate of our civilization... »