





An important (but not universal) contemporary feature of a corporation is limited liability. If a corporation fails, shareholders normally only stand to lose their investment and employees will lose their jobs, but neither will be further liable for debts that remain owing to the corporation's creditors.
Despite not being natural persons, corporations are recognized by the law to have rights and responsibilities like natural persons ("people"). Corporations can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state, and they can themselves be responsible for human rights violations. Corporations are conceptually immortal but they can "die" when they are "dissolved" either by statutory operation, order of court, or voluntary action on the part of shareholders. Insolvency may result in a form of corporate 'death', when creditors force the liquidation and dissolution of the corporation under court order, but it most often results in a restructuring of corporate holdings. Corporations can even be convicted of criminal offenses, such as fraud and manslaughter.
Although corporate law varies in different jurisdictions, there are four core characteristics of the business corporation:
In the United States, government chartering began to fall out of vogue in the mid-19th century. Corporate law at the time was focused on protection of the public interest, and not on the interests of corporate shareholders. Corporate charters were closely regulated by the states. Forming a corporation usually required an act of legislature. Investors generally had to be given an equal say in corporate governance, and corporations were required to comply with the purposes expressed in their charters. Many private firms in the 19th century avoided the corporate model for these reasons (Andrew Carnegie formed his steel operation as a limited partnership, and John D. Rockefeller set up Standard Oil as a trust). Eventually, state governments began to realize the greater corporate registration revenues available by providing more permissive corporate laws. New Jersey was the first state to adopt an "enabling" corporate law, with the goal of attracting more business to the state. Delaware followed, and soon became known as the most corporation-friendly state in the country after New Jersey raised taxes on the corporations, driving them out. New Jersey reduced these taxes after this mistake was realized, but by then it was too late; even today, most major public corporations in the United States are set up under Delaware law.
By the beginning of the 19th century, government policy on both sides of the Atlantic began to change, reflecting the growing popularity of the proposition that corporations were riding the economic wave of the future. In 1819, the U.S. Supreme Court granted corporations a plethora of rights they had not previously recognized or enjoyed. Corporate charters were deemed "inviolable", and not subject to arbitrary amendment or abolition by state governments. The Corporation as a whole was labeled an "artificial person," possessing both individuality and immortality.
At around the same time, British legislation was similarly freeing the corporation from historical restrictions. In 1844 the British Parliament passed the Joint Stock Companies Act, which allowed companies to incorporate without a royal charter or an Act of Parliament. Ten years later, limited liability, the key provision of modern corporate law, passed into English law: in response to increasing pressure from newly emerging capital interests, Parliament passed the Limited Liability Act of 1855, which established the principle that any corporation could enjoy limited legal liability on both contract and tort claims simply by registering as a "limited" company with the appropriate government agency.
This prompted the English periodical ''The Economist'' to write in 1855 that "never, perhaps, was a change so vehemently and generally demanded, of which the importance was so much overrated." The glaring inaccuracy of the second part of this judgment was recognized by the same magazine more than 75 years later, when it claimed that, "[t]he economic historian of the future . . . may be inclined to assign to the nameless inventor of the principle of limited liability, as applied to trading corporations, a place of honour with Watt and Stephenson, and other pioneers of the Industrial Revolution."
The 20th century saw a proliferation of enabling law across the world, which helped to drive economic booms in many countries before and after World War I. Starting in the 1980s, many countries with large state-owned corporations moved toward privatization, the selling of publicly owned services and enterprises to corporations. Deregulation (reducing the regulation of corporate activity) often accompanied privatization as part of a laissez-faire policy. Another major postwar shift was toward the development of conglomerates, in which large corporations purchased smaller corporations to expand their industrial base. Japanese firms developed a horizontal conglomeration model, the keiretsu, which was later duplicated in other countries as well.
The legal personality has two economic implications. First it grants creditors (as opposed to shareholders or employees) priority over the corporate assets upon liquidation. Second, corporate assets cannot be withdrawn by its shareholders, nor can the assets of the firm be taken by personal creditors of its shareholders. The second feature requires special legislation and a special legal framework, as it cannot be reproduced via standard contract law.
The regulations most favorable to incorporation include:
| !Regulation | !Description |
| Limited liability | |
| Perpetual lifetime | Another advantage is that the assets and structure of the corporation may continue beyond the lifetimes of its shareholders and bondholders. This allows stability and the accumulation of capital, which is thus available for investment in larger and longer-lasting projects than if the corporate assets were subject to [[dissolution (law) |
There are two broad classes of corporate governance forms in the world. In most of the world, control of the corporation is determined by a board of directors which is elected by the shareholders. In some jurisdictions, such as Germany, the control of the corporation is divided into two tiers with a supervisory board which elects a managing board. Germany is also unique in having a system known as co-determination in which half of the supervisory board consists of representatives of the employees. The CEO, president, treasurer, and other titled officers are usually chosen by the board to manage the affairs of the corporation.
In addition to the limited influence of shareholders, corporations can be controlled (in part) by creditors such as banks. In return for lending money to the corporation, creditors can demand a controlling interest analogous to that of a member, including one or more seats on the board of directors. In some jurisdictions, such as Germany and Japan, it is standard for banks to own shares in corporations whereas in other jurisdictions such as the United States, under the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, and the United Kingdom, under the Bank of England, banks are prohibited from owning shares in external corporations. However, since 1999 in the U. S., commercial banks have been allowed to enter into investment banking through separate subsidiaries thanks to the Financial Services Modernization Act or Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Since 1997, banks in the U. K. are supervised by the Financial Services Authority; its rules are non-restrictive allowing both foreign and domestic capital to operate all financial institutions, including insurance, commercial and financial banking.
Upon the Board's decision to dissolve a for-profit corporation, shareholders receive the leftovers, following creditors and others with interests in the corporation. However shareholders receive the benefit of limited liability, so they are liable only for the amount they contributed.
Generally, a corporation files articles of incorporation with the government, laying out the general nature of the corporation, the amount of stock it is authorized to issue, and the names and addresses of directors. Once the articles are approved, the corporation's directors meet to create bylaws that govern the internal functions of the corporation, such as meeting procedures and officer positions.
The law of the jurisdiction in which a corporation operates will regulate most of its internal activities, as well as its finances. If a corporation operates outside its home state, it is often required to register with other governments as a foreign corporation, and is almost always subject to laws of its host state pertaining to employment, crimes, contracts, civil actions, and the like.
In most countries, corporate names include a term or an abbreviation that denotes the corporate status of the entity (for example, "Incorporated" or "Inc." in the United States) or the limited liability of its members (for example, "Limited" or "Ltd."). These terms vary by jurisdiction and language. In some jurisdictions they are mandatory, and in others they are not. Their use puts everybody on constructive notice that they are dealing with an entity whose liability is limited, and does not reach back to the persons who own the entity: one can only collect from whatever assets the entity still controls when one obtains a judgment against it.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the use of the word "company" alone to denote corporate status, since the word "company" may refer to a partnership or some other form of collective ownership (in the United States it can be used by a sole proprietorship but this is not generally the case elsewhere).
The law differs among jurisdictions, and is in a state of flux. Some argue that shareholders should be ultimately responsible in such circumstances, forcing them to consider issues other than profit when investing, but a corporation may have millions of small shareholders who know nothing about its business activities. Moreover, traders — especially hedge funds — may turn over shares in corporations many times a day. The issue of corporate repeat offenders (see H. Glasbeek, "Wealth by Stealth: Corporate Crime, Corporate Law, and the Perversion of Democracy", ISBN 978-1896357416, Between the Lines Press: Toronto 2002) raises the question of the so-called "death penalty for corporations."
Most corporations are registered with the local jurisdiction as either a stock corporation or a non-stock corporation. Stock corporations sell stock to generate capital. A stock corporation is generally a for-profit corporation. A non-stock corporation does not have stockholders, but may have members who have voting rights in the corporation.
Some jurisdictions (Washington, D.C., for example) separate corporations into for-profit and non-profit, as opposed to dividing into stock and non-stock.
Several states also allow a variation of the corporation for use by professionals (i.e., those individuals typically considered as professionals who require a license from the state to conduct business). In some states, such as Georgia, these corporations are known as "professional corporations".
In modern economic systems, conventions of corporate governance commonly appear in a wide variety of business and non-profit activities. Though the laws governing these creatures of statute often differ, the courts often interpret provisions of the law that apply to profit-making enterprises in the same manner (or in a similar manner) when applying principles to non-profit organizations — as the underlying structures of these two types of entity often resemble each other.
Closely held corporations do have some advantages over publicly traded corporations. A small, closely held company can often make company-changing decisions much more rapidly than a publicly traded company. A publicly traded company is also at the mercy of the market, having capital flow in and out based not only on what the company is doing but the market and even what the competitors are doing. Publicly traded companies also have advantages over their closely held counterparts. Publicly traded companies often have more working capital and can delegate debt throughout all shareholders. This means that people invested in a publicly traded company will each take a much smaller hit to their own capital as opposed to those involved with a closely held corporation. Publicly traded companies though suffer from this exact advantage. A closely held corporation can often voluntarily take a hit to profit with little to no repercussions (as long as it is not a sustained loss). A publicly traded company though often comes under extreme scrutiny if profit and growth are not evident to stock holders, thus stock holders may sell, further damaging the company. Often this blow is enough to make a small public company fail.
Often communities benefit from a closely held company more so than from a public company. A closely held company is far more likely to stay in a single place that has treated them well, even if going through hard times. The shareholders can incur some of the damage the company may receive from a bad year or slow period in the company profits. Closely held companies often have a better relationship with workers. In larger, publicly traded companies, often when a year has gone badly the first area to feel the effects are the work force with lay offs or worker hours, wages or benefits being cut. Again, in a closely held business the shareholders can incur this profit damage rather than passing it to the workers.
The affairs of publicly traded and closely held corporations are similar in many respects. The main difference in most countries is that publicly traded corporations have the burden of complying with additional securities laws, which (especially in the U.S.) may require additional periodic disclosure (with more stringent requirements), stricter corporate governance standards, and additional procedural obligations in connection with major corporate transactions (for example, mergers) or events (for example, elections of directors).
A closely held corporation may be a subsidiary of another corporation (its parent company), which may itself be either a closely held or a public corporation. In some jurisdictions, the subsidiary of a listed public corporation is also defined as a public corporation (for example,, Australia).
===Mutual benefit corporations=== A mutual benefit nonprofit corporation is a corporation formed in the United States solely for the benefit of its members. An example of a mutual benefit nonprofit corporation is a golf club. Individuals pay to join the club, memberships may be bought and sold, and any property owned by the club is distributed to its members if the club dissolves. The club can decide, in its corporate bylaws, how many members to have, and who can be a member. Generally, while it is a nonprofit corporation, a mutual benefit corporation is not a charity. Because it is not a charity, a mutual benefit nonprofit corporation cannot obtain 501(c)(3) status. If there is a dispute as to how a mutual benefit nonprofit corporation is being operated, it is up to the members to resolve the dispute since the corporation exists to solely serve the needs of its membership and not the general public.
The typical "transnational" or "multinational" may fit into a web of overlapping shareholders and directorships, with multiple branches and lines in different regions, many such sub-groupings comprising corporations in their own right. Growth by expansion may favor national or regional branches; growth by acquisition or merger can result in a plethora of groupings scattered around and/or spanning the globe, with structures and names which do not always make clear the structures of shareholder ownership and interaction.
In the spread of corporations across multiple continents, the importance of corporate culture has grown as a unifying factor and a counterweight to local national sensibilities and cultural awareness.
The term is used to refer to business corporations. The predominant form is the ''kabushiki kaisha'' (株式会社), used by public corporations as well as smaller enterprises. ''Mochibun kaisha'' (持分会社), a form for smaller enterprises, are becoming increasingly common. Between 2002 and 2008, the existed to bridge the gap between for-profit companies and non-governmental and non-profit organizations.
In the private sector, corporations are referred to as companies, and are regulated by the Companies Act 2006 (or the Northern Ireland equivalent). The most common type of company is the private limited company ("Limited" or "Ltd."). Private limited companies can either be limited by shares or by guarantee. Other corporate forms include the public limited company ("PLC") and the private unlimited company, and companies limited by guarantee.
A special type of corporation is a corporation sole, which is an office held by an individual natural person (the incumbent), but which has a continuing legal entity separate from that person: an example is a Church of England bishopric
Only a company that has been formally incorporated according to the laws of a particular state is called ‘corporation’. A corporation was defined in the Dartmouth College case of 1819, in which Chief Justice Marshall of the United States Supreme Court stated that " A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of the law". A corporation is a legal entity, distinct and separate from the individuals who create and operate it. As legal entity the corporation can acquire, own, and dispose of property in its own name like buildings, land and equipment. It can also incur liabilities and enter into contracts like franchising and leasing. American corporations can be either profit-making companies or non-profit entities. Tax-exempt non-profit corporations are often called “501(c)3 corporation”, after the section of the Internal Revenue Code that addresses the tax exemption for many of them.
The federal government can only create corporate entities pursuant to relevant powers in the U.S. Constitution. For example, Congress has constitutional power to provide postal services, so it has power to operate the United States Postal Service. Although the federal government could theoretically preempt all state corporate law under the courts' current expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause, it has chosen not to do so. As a result, much of American corporate law continues to be a matter of state law under the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Thus, virtually all corporations in the U.S. are incorporated under the laws of a particular state.
All states have some kind of "general corporation law" (California, Delaware, Kansas, Nevada and Ohio actually use that exact name) which authorizes the formation of private corporations ''without'' having to obtain a charter for each one from the state legislature (as was formerly the case in the 19th century). Many states have separate, self-contained laws authorizing the formation and operation of certain specific types of corporations that are wholly independent of the state general corporation law. For example, in California, nonprofit corporations are incorporated under the Nonprofit Corporation Law, and in Illinois, insurers are incorporated under the Illinois Insurance Code.
Corporations are created by filing the requisite documents with a particular state government. The process is called “incorporation,” referring to the abstract concept of clothing the entity with a "veil" of artificial personhood (embodying, or “corporating” it, ‘corpus’ being the Latin word for ‘body’). Only certain corporations, including banks, are chartered. Others simply file their articles of incorporation with the state government as part of a registration process.
Once incorporated, a corporation has artificial personhood everywhere it may operate, until such time as the corporation may be dissolved. A corporation that operates in one state while being incorporated in another is a “foreign corporation.” This label also applies to corporations incorporated outside of the United States. Foreign corporations must usually register with the secretary of state’s office in each state to lawfully conduct business in that state.
A corporation is legally a citizen of the state (or other jurisdiction) in which it is incorporated (except when circumstances direct the corporation be classified as a citizen of the state in which it has its head office, or the state in which it does the majority of its business). Corporate business law differs dramatically from state to state. Many prospective corporations choose to incorporate in a state whose laws are most favorable to its business interests. Many large corporations are incorporated in Delaware, for example, without being physically located there because that state has very favorable corporate tax and disclosure laws.
Companies set up for privacy or asset protection often incorporate in Nevada, which does not require disclosure of share ownership. Many states, particularly smaller ones, have modeled their corporate statutes after the Model Business Corporation Act, one of many model sets of law prepared and published by the American Bar Association.
As juristic persons, corporations have certain rights that attach to natural persons. The vast majority of them attach to corporations under state law, especially the law of the state in which the company is incorporated – since the corporations very existence is predicated on the laws of that state. A few rights also attach by federal constitutional and statutory law, but they are few and far between compared to the rights of natural persons. For example, a corporation has the personal right to bring a lawsuit (as well as the capacity to be sued) and, like a natural person, a corporation can be libeled.
But a corporation has no constitutional right to freely exercise its religion because religious exercise is something that only "natural" persons can do. That is, only human beings, not business entities, have the necessary faculties of belief and spirituality that enable them to possess and exercise religious beliefs.
Harvard College (a component of Harvard University), formally the President and Fellows of Harvard College (also known as the Harvard Corporation), is the oldest corporation in the western hemisphere. Founded in 1636, the second of Harvard’s two governing boards was incorporated by the Great and General Court of Massachusetts in 1650. Significantly, Massachusetts itself was a corporate colony at that time – owned and operated by the Massachusetts Bay Company (until it lost its charter in 1684) - so Harvard College is a corporation created by a corporation.
Many nations have modeled their own corporate laws on American business law. Corporate law in Saudi Arabia, for example, follows the model of New York State corporate law. In addition to typical corporations in the United States, the federal government, in 1971 passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), which authorized the creation of 12 regional native corporations for Alaska Natives and over 200 village corporations that were entitled to a settlement of land and cash. In addition to the 12 regional corporations, the legislation permitted a 13th regional corporation without a land settlement for those Alaska Natives living out of the State of Alaska at the time of passage of ANCSA.
As Adam Smith pointed out in the Wealth of Nations, when ownership is separated from management (i.e. the actual production process required to obtain the capital), the latter will inevitably begin to neglect the interests of the former, creating dysfunction within the company. Some maintain that recent events in corporate America may serve to reinforce Smith's warnings about the dangers of legally protected collectivist hierarchies.
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Category:Business law Category:Corporations law Category:Legal entities Category:Types of business entity
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| name | Jennifer Lopez |
|---|---|
| background | solo_singer |
| birth name | Jennifer Lynn Lopez |
| alias | J.Lo |
| birth date | }} |
Lopez came to prominence within the music industry following the release of her debut studio album ''On the 6'' (1999), which spawned the number one hit single "If You Had My Love". Her second studio album, ''J.Lo'' (2001), was a commercial success, selling eight million copies worldwide. ''J to tha L–O!: The Remixes'' (2002) became her second consecutive album to debut at number one on the ''Billboard'' 200, while her third and fourth studio albums – ''This Is Me... Then'' (2002) and ''Rebirth'' (2005) – peaked at number two on the ''Billboard'' 200. In 2007 she released two albums, including her first full Spanish-language album, ''Como ama una Mujer'', and her fifth English studio album, ''Brave''. Lopez returned to music and released her seventh studio album, titled ''Love?'', on April 19, 2011. Its single, "On the Floor", has impacted charts worldwide. Her contributions to the music industry have garnered her numerous achievements, including two Grammy Award nominations; two Latin Grammy Award nominations; three American Music Awards, amongst six nominations; and the estimated sale of over 55 million records worldwide. ''Billboard'' ranked her as the 27th Artist of the 2000s decade. Lopez is currently a member of the judging panel of American reality television competition ''American Idol''.
She led ''People en Español''s list of "100 Most Influential Hispanics" in February 2007. She has parlayed her media fame into a fashion line and various perfumes with her celebrity endorsement. A fashion icon, several of her dresses have received considerable media attention, most notably the Jungle green Versace dress which she wore at the 43rd Grammy Awards in 2000—voted the fifth most iconic dress of all time. Outside of her work in the entertainment industry, Lopez advocates for human rights and vaccinations, and is a supporter of Children's Hospital Los Angeles. In 2011 she was named the most "Beautiful Person" by ''People'' magazine in its annual issue.
Lopez's second album, ''J.Lo'', was released on January 23, 2001 and debuted at number one on the ''Billboard'' 200. This album was more urban oriented than ''On the 6''. When Lopez film ''The Wedding Planner'', a film in which Lopez falls in love with the groom of the wedding she is planning, achieved number one shortly after, Lopez become the first actress-singer to have a film and an album at number one in the same week. The lead single, "Love Don't Cost a Thing", was her first number-one single in the United Kingdom and took her into the top five on the U.S. ''Billboard'' Hot 100. She followed it up with "Play" which gave her another top 20 hit on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100 and reached number three in the UK. Her next two singles were "I'm Real" and "Ain't It Funny" which were quickly rising up the charts. To capitalize on this, Lopez asked The Inc. Records (then known as Murder Inc.) to remix both songs, which featured rap artists Ja Rule (on both) and Cadillac Tah (on the "Ain't It Funny" remix). Both remixes reached number one on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100 for several weeks. She re-released ''J. Lo'' on her 32nd birthday with the remix of "I'm Real" as a bonus track. Also, "Si Ya Se Acabó" was released in Spain, due to the success "Que Ironia." In 2001, Lopez performed on tour on the ''Let's Get Loud "Live in Puerto Rico" Concert''.
Lopez released her third studio album, ''This Is Me... Then'', on November 26, 2002 which reached number two on the ''Billboard'' 200 and spawned four singles: "Jenny from the Block" (featuring Jadakiss and Styles P), which reached number three on the ''Billboard'' Hot 100; "All I Have" (featuring LL Cool J), which spent multiple weeks at number one; "I'm Glad"; and "Baby I Love U!". The album included a cover of Carly Simon's 1978 "You Belong to Me". The video for "I'm Glad" recreated scenes from the 1983 film ''Flashdance'', leading to a lawsuit over copyright infringement, which was later dismissed.
Lopez officially released her first full Spanish-language album, ''Como ama una Mujer'', in March 2007. Her husband, singer Marc Anthony, produced the album with Estefano, except for "Qué Hiciste", which Anthony co-produced with Julio Reyes. The album peaked at number ten on the ''Billboard'' 200, number one on the U.S. Top Latin Albums for four straight weeks and on the U.S. Latin Pop Albums for seven straight weeks. The album did well in Europe peaking at number three on the albums chart, mainly due to the big success in countries like Switzerland, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, Greece, Germany, Austria, and Portugal. On July 24, 2007 ''Billboard'' magazine reported that Lopez and husband Marc Anthony would "co-headline" a worldwide tour called "Juntos en Concierto" starting in New Jersey on September 29. Tickets went on sale August 10. The tour was a mix of her current music, older tunes and Spanish music. In a later press release, Lopez announced a detailed itinerary. The tour launched September 28, 2007 at the Mark G. Etess Arena and ended on November 7, 2007 at the American Airlines Arena in Miami, Florida. The lead single, "Qué Hiciste" (Spanish for "What Did You Do"), was officially released to radio stations in January 2007. Since then, it has peaked at 86 on the U.S. ''Billboard'' Hot 100 and number one on the Hot Latin Songs and the Hot Dance Club Play. It also went top ten on the European chart. The video for the song was the first Spanish-language video to peak at number one on MTV's ''Total Request Live'' daily countdown. The second single released is called "Me Haces Falta" and the third is "Por Arriesgarnos". Lopez won an American Music Award as the Favorite Latin Artist in 2007. With ''Como ama una Mujer'', Jennifer Lopez is one of the few performers to debut in the top 10 of the ''Billboard'' 200 with a Spanish album.
Lopez released her fifth English studio album (sixth studio album overall) ''Brave'' on October 9, 2007, six months after ''Como Ama una Mujer'' was released. She collaborated with producers Midi Mafia, J. R. Rotem, Lynn and Wade and Ryan Tedder, with Rotem working on some tracks with writing partner Evan "Kidd" Bogart. Earlier, on August 26, 2007, ABC premiered a promo for the fourth season of ''Desperate Housewives'', featuring a snippet of the song "Mile in These Shoes". "Do It Well" was released as the lead single and reached the top 20 in many countries. "Hold It, Don't Drop It" was released as the second single in certain European territories only. The third single was set to be the title track "Brave", and it was even posted on director Michael Haussman's official website that filming of the music video for the song had completed, however, the release of "Brave" as a single was eventually scrapped, most likely due to low album sales.
Lopez's manager, Benny Medina confirmed the news saying "Jennifer had a wonderful relationship with the Sony Music Group, and they have shared many successes together, but the time was right to make a change that best serves the direction of her career as an actress and recording artist, she is grateful and appreciative to everyone at Sony for all that they accomplished together." Lopez later released a statement to the media where she said that she had already completed her contractual obligations with Sony Music Entertainment and Epic Records and decided it was for the best to end the partnership on amicable terms. She added that she found a new "home" [record label] for the album 'Love?' and it will be coming out Summer 2010. Shortly after being spotted talking to Island Def Jam Music Group's chairman and CEO L.A. Reid, it was confirmed on March 19, 2010 that Lopez signed with Island Def Jam, and is working on new material for ''Love?'' with RedZone Entertainment (Kuk Harrell, The-Dream and Tricky Stewart). In January 2011, Lopez released a new lead single titled "On the Floor" featuring Pitbull, it achieved worldwide success on the charts, peaking at No. 3 on the ''Billboard Hot 100'', giving Lopez her first top ten on the chart since "All I Have" in 2003. The album ''Love?'' was released on May 3, 2011.
Lopez's first big break came in 1997, when she was chosen to play the title role in ''Selena'', a biopic of the Tejano pop singer Selena. Despite having previously worked with Nava on ''Mi Familia'', Lopez was subjected to an intense auditioning process before landing the role. She earned widespread praise for her performance, including a Golden Globe Award nomination for "Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy". Later that year, Lopez appeared in two major films. She starred in the horror film ''Anaconda'' alongside Ice Cube and Jon Voight, playing the role of Terri Flores, a director who is shooting a documentary while traveling through the Amazon River. Despite being a modest box office hit, the film was critically panned. Lopez then starred as the leading actress in the neo-noir film ''U Turn'', which is based on the book ''Stray Dogs'', starring alongside Sean Penn and Billy Bob Thornton.
In 1998, she had one of her most acclaimed roles, starring opposite George Clooney in ''Out of Sight'', Steven Soderbergh's adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel. Cast as a deputy federal marshal who falls for a charming criminal, Lopez won rave reviews for her tough performance and in the process she became the first Latina actress to earn over $1 million for a role. That same year, she provided the voice for Azteca on the computer-animated film ''Antz''. Lopez then starred opposite Vincent D'Onofrio, in the psychological thriller film ''The Cell''. She portrayed Catherine Deane, a child psychologist who uses virtual reality to enter into the minds of her patients to coax them out of their comas. The film was released in August 2000 and became a box office success opening at number one. The following year, Lopez took a break from acting in films, in order to work on her music career.
In 2001, Lopez starred alongside Matthew McConaughey in the romantic comedy ''The Wedding Planner''. The film debuted at number one, making her the first actress and singer in history to have a film and an album, ''J.Lo'', at number one in the same week. Her next roles were in the supernatural romance ''Angel Eyes'' (2001), and in the psychological revenge thriller ''Enough'' (2002). Both failed to find an audience, and were met with a negative response from critics. She appeared alongside Ralph Fiennes in the romantic comedy film ''Maid in Manhattan'' (2002). Her character, Marisa Ventura, is a struggling single mother who lives in the Bronx and makes her living cleaning rooms in a super-luxurious Manhattan hotel, and gets mistaken for a socialite by a princely politician. ''Maid in Manhattan'' was a box office hit, opening at number one. ''The New York Times'' compared the film's storyline to her 2002 song, "Jenny from the Block", commenting, "In her new single, ''Jenny From the Block,'' Jennifer Lopez declares that despite her enormous wealth and global fame, she has not lost touch with her roots."
Some of her other critically acclaimed films include ''An Unfinished Life'' and ''Shall We Dance?''. Two independent films produced by Lopez were well-received at film festivals: ''El Cantante'' at the Toronto International Film Festival, and ''Bordertown'' at the Brussels film festival. Her modestly successful film career includes ''Monster-in-Law'' (2005). ''Gigli'', however, would become a notorious box office bomb.
In 2006, Jennifer was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award along with Lauren Shuler Donner and Diane Warren.
In August 2007, Lopez collaborated on the feature film, ''El Cantante'', with her husband – singer-actor Marc Anthony. Ms. Lopez, who's also a producer of the film, "does enough acting for the two of them in her role as Puchi, Héctor’s wife" while creating a very interesting and edgy performance. The film is in English, with creative use of subtitles for songs with Spanish lyrics. In 2010, she appeared in the romantic comedy ''The Back-up Plan''.
Lopez is one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood and the highest-paid Latin actress in Hollywood history, though she's never had a film grossing over $100 million in the USA. She was on ''The Hollywood Reporter'''s list of the top ten actress salaries in 2002, 2003, and 2004. Lopez received $15 million for her role in ''Monster-in-Law''. Her top-grossing film domestically is ''Maid in Manhattan'' which grossed $94,011,225, and her most successful international film, ''Shall We Dance?'', grossed $112,238,000, at the international box office. Domestically, ''Shall We Dance?'' grossed $57,890,460 and a total of $170,128,460 worldwide. In 2007, Lopez made the ''Forbes'' magazine's list of "The 20 Richest Women In Entertainment," ranking ninth. Her wealth was estimated to be $110 million in 2007.
On January 27, 2010, it was announced that Lopez would guest-star on an episode of ''How I Met Your Mother'' as Anita Appleby, a no-nonsense author of self-help books that teach women how to mold men into "relationship machines" through the power of denial. After Robin informs Anita of Barney's womanizing ways, Anita sets out to "break" him.
Lopez's frequent use of animal fur in her clothing lines and personal wardrobe has brought the scorn of people concerned with animal rights. At the Los Angeles premiere of ''Monster-in-Law'', more than 100 protesters from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) held a demonstration to highlight their concerns.
On April 12, 2002, Lopez opened a Cuban restaurant in the South Lake district of Pasadena, California named Madre's.
Lopez ventured in the perfume industry with her debut "Glow by J.Lo". In October 2003, Lopez introduced a perfume called "Still", having revisited "Glow" the previous year by creating a limited edition spin-off, "Miami Glow by J.Lo", in homage to her adopted hometown of Miami, Florida. Lopez also marketed a "Glow" line of body lotions and bronzing products. For the Christmas season of 2005, she launched another fragrance, "Live by Jennifer Lopez". For 2006 Valentine's Day, "Miami Glow" was replaced by yet another "Glow" spin-off, "Love at First Glow by J.Lo". Her following fragrance, "Live Luxe", was released in August 2006, with "Glow After Dark" following in January 2007. The next fragrances by Jennifer Lopez were "Deseo", "Deseo Forever" for Asian market and first fragrance for men called "Deseo for men". In February 2009 Lopez released "Sunkissed Glow". The last perfume is "My Glow", available from October 2009. Lopez is a spokesperson for Lux shampoo in Japan, appearing in the product's television commercials.
Lopez owns the film and television production company Nuyorican Productions. It was co-founded with her manager Benny Medina, who was supposed to receive half the producing revenue from the company. Lopez split with Medina shortly after the company was founded, but they later restored their business relationship.
Lopez has been recognized by ''People en Español'' magazine as both the cover subject for the "50 Most Beautiful" issue in 2006 and the "100 Most Influential Hispanics" issue in February 2007.
On April 10, 2007, Lopez made an appearance as a mentor on ''American Idol''. Lopez also became the executive producer of the eight-episode reality show, ''DanceLife'', which ran on MTV and began on January 15, 2007. Lopez helped select the show's participants and made cameo appearances. She then served as executive producer of a mini-series broadcast on Univisión. Named after her CD ''Como Ama Una Mujer'', it ran in five episodes from October 30 to November 27, 2007, and starred Adriana Cruz.
Lopez signed a contract as star and executive producer of an unscripted reality series for TLC, a division of Discovery Communications Inc. The series was to show the launching of her new fragrance, and not focus on her family. The series never materialized.
On February 14, 2007, Lopez received the Artists for Amnesty International award "in recognition of her work as producer and star of ''Bordertown'', a film exposing the ongoing murders of hundreds of women in the border city of Juárez, Mexico". Nobel Peace Prize winner José Ramos-Horta presented the award to Lopez at the Berlin International Film Festival. She also received special recognition and thanks from Norma Andrade, co-founder of Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa A.C. ("May Our Daughters Return Home, Civil Association"), an organization consisting of mothers and families of the murdered women of Juárez.
Lopez has also been involved in promoting vaccination for whooping cough. Lopez is working with Sounds of Pertussis and March of Dimes to promote awareness about the disease and encourage vaccination of adults to prevent spread of disease to infants.
Lopez's first marriage was to Cuban-born Ojani Noa on February 22, 1997. Lopez met Noa while he worked as a waiter at a Miami restaurant. They divorced in January 1998. Lopez later employed Noa as the manager of her Pasadena restaurant Madre's in April 2002, but he was fired in October 2002. After Noa sued Lopez over the termination, they drew up a confidentiality agreement. In April 2006, Lopez sued to prevent Noa from publishing a book containing personal details about their marriage, contending it violated their confidentiality agreement. In August 2007, a court-appointed arbitrator issued a permanent injunction forbidding Ojani Noa from "criticizing, denigrating, casting in a negative light or otherwise disparaging" Lopez. She was awarded $545,000 in compensatory damages, which included nearly $300,000 in legal fees and almost $48,000 in arbitration costs. Noa was also ordered to hand over all copies of materials related to the book to Lopez or her attorney. In November 2009, Lopez sued Noa for breach of contract and invasion of privacy, citing a previous confidentiality agreement between the two, to prevent Noa from releasing his planned film, "How I Married Jennifer Lopez: The JLo and Ojani Noa Story", and alleged "previously unseen home video footage". On December 1, 2009, judge James Chalfant granted a temporary injunction against Noa and his agent, Ed Meyer, barring them from distributing the footage in any forum. Because the injunction is only temporary, Lopez's lawyer, Jay Lavely, said that he will return to court to make it permanent. Lavely stressed that "there wasn't anything even close" to a sex tape in Noa's possession: "It's private and personal, but it wasn't a sex tape. They are innocent and they have been misrepresented... to increase value and media attention". After the hearing, Noa told E! that he plans to fight the injunction: "It's not about the money, it's about my life".
Lopez next had a two-and-a-half-year relationship with hip-hop mogul Sean Combs. On December 27, 1999, Lopez and Combs were at Club New York, a midtown Manhattan nightclub, when gunfire erupted between Combs' entourage and another group. Lopez and Combs were being driven away from the scene when they were chased and stopped by the police. A gun was found in the front seat of their vehicle. Combs was charged with felony gun possession. Stress over Combs' trial and pursuit by the press multiplied their problems, and Lopez terminated her involvement with Combs one year later. During a related civil suit in 2008, the plaintiff's lawyer said Lopez had “nothing to contribute to the case”.
Her second marriage was to her former backup dancer, Cris Judd. She met Judd while filming the music video for her single "Love Don't Cost a Thing." The two were married on September 29, 2001, at a home in the L.A. suburbs. Their marriage effectively ended in June 2002, when Lopez began publicly dating Ben Affleck. They were divorced in January 2003.
Her relationship with Affleck was highly publicized, with the media dubbing the couple "Bennifer". Lopez announced her engagement to Affleck in November 2002, after Affleck gave her a six-carat pink diamond ring worth a reported $1.2 million. Lopez promised interviewers that Affleck was indeed "the one", and that they would soon have a family. The marriage, planned for September 14, 2003 in Santa Barbara, California, was called off just hours before the event. They announced the end of their engagement in January 2004. Their relationship was parodied on the ''South Park'' episode "Fat Butt and Pancake Head", which aired on April 16, 2003. In 2003, Lopez and Affleck acted together in the film ''Gigli'' and in the 2004 film ''Jersey Girl''. He also appeared in her "Jenny from the Block" video.
Less than two months after her break-up with Affleck, Lopez was seen with singer Marc Anthony, a long-time friend with whom she had worked in music videos. They had briefly dated in the late 1990s, before his first marriage and her second. Lopez and Anthony were recording a duet together in early 2004, for Lopez's then-upcoming film ''Shall We Dance?''. In October 2003, Anthony became separated, for the second time, from his first wife, former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres, with whom he has two children. Torres filed for divorce three months later. Lopez and Anthony married in a quiet home wedding on June 5, 2004, four days after his divorce from Torres was final.
Lopez's guests had been invited to an "afternoon party" at Lopez's house and had not been made aware that they were actually going to her wedding. The couple had planned not to publicize their marriage early on, allowing more privacy and time together in an otherwise intrusive environment. Days after the wedding, Anthony refused to comment on their marriage during interviews which were scheduled earlier to promote a new album "Amar Sin Mentiras" (To Love Without Lies). In February 2005, Lopez confirmed the marriage, and added that "everyone knows. It's not a secret". A few months later, Anthony's daughter, Ariana, appeared at the end of Lopez's music video "Get Right" as her little sister. Regarding his marriage and family life, Anthony maintains a private and sometimes defensive stance with the media, which has influenced Lopez to set some boundaries with interviewers.
On November 7, 2007, the last night of her "En Concierto" tour, Lopez confirmed she was expecting her first child with husband Marc. The announcement ended months of speculation over the pregnancy. Her father later confirmed on February 5, 2008, that she was expecting twins. Lopez gave birth on February 22, 2008 to fraternal twins, a girl and a boy, Emme Maribel Muñiz, and Maximilian "Max" David Muñiz. The twins were introduced in the March 11, 2008 issue of ''People'' magazine, for which the magazine paid $6 million. Lopez is also a practitioner of Krav Maga.
As of at least January 2008, Lopez lives with her family in Brookville, New York, on Long Island. Her mother, Guadalupe Lopez, moved into the gated home in June that year. On July 15, 2011, following seven years of marriage to Anthony, the couple's representative told ''US Weekly'' that their marriage was over and as painful as it would be for all those involved, the couple were separating.
Category:1969 births Category:Actors from New York City Category:American dance musicians Category:American dancers Category:American fashion businesspeople Category:American fashion designers Category:American female singers Category:American film actors Category:American people of Puerto Rican descent Category:American pop singers Category:American rhythm and blues singer-songwriters Category:American Roman Catholics Category:American musicians of Puerto Rican descent Category:American television actors Category:American television producers Category:City University of New York people Category:English-language singers Category:Hip hop singers Category:Hispanic and Latino American actors Category:Idol series judges Category:Krav Maga practitioners Category:Latin pop singers Category:Living people Category:Musicians from New York City Category:Notaries Category:People from the Bronx Category:Puerto Rican actors Category:Puerto Rican female singers Category:Spanish-language singers Category:Hispanic and Latino American women
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Hayek served in World War I, and said that his experience in the war and his desire to help avoid the mistakes that had led to the war (see below) led him to his career. He took his first position in 1927, the same year that Joseph Stalin consolidated his power in the Soviet Union by expelling Leon Trotsky from the Communist Party. Fascism was at the same time rising in Germany and Italy. Additionally, the Great Depression began in 1929, at the very start of Hayek's career.
In 1974 Hayek shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal for his "pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and [his] penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena." He also received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 from president George H. W. Bush.
Hayek lived in Austria, Great Britain, the United States and Germany, and became a British subject in 1938. He spent most of his academic life at the London School of Economics (LSE), the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg.
On his mother's side, Hayek was second-cousin to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. His mother often played with Wittgenstein's sisters, and had known Ludwig well. As a result of their family relationship, Hayek became one of the first to read Wittgenstein's ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'' when the book was published in its original German edition in 1921. Although Hayek only met Wittgenstein on a few occasions, Hayek said that Wittgenstein's philosophy and methods of analysis had a profound influence on his own life and thought. In later years, Hayek recalled a discussion of philosophy with Wittgenstein, when both were officers during WW1. After Wittgenstein's death, Hayek had intended to write a biography of Wittgenstein and worked on collecting family materials, and he later assisted biographers of Wittgenstein.
At his father's suggestion as a teenager, Hayek read the genetic and evolutionary works of Hugo de Vries and the philosophical works of Ludwig Feuerbach. In school Hayek was much taken by one instructor's lectures on Aristotle's ethics.
In 1917 he joined an artillery regiment in the Austro-Hungarian Army and fought on the Italian front. Much of Hayek's combat experience was spent as a spotter in an aeroplane. He survived the war without serious injury and was decorated for bravery.
Hayek then decided to pursue an academic career, determined to help avoid the mistakes that had led to World War I. Hayek said about his experience: "The decisive influence was really World War I. It's bound to draw your attention to the problems of political organization." He vowed to work for a better world.
During his years at the U. of Vienna Carl Menger's work on the explanatory strategy of social science and Friedrich von Wieser's commanding presence in the classroom left a lasting influence on Hayek. Upon the completion of his University exams, Hayek was hired by Ludwig von Mises on the recommendation of Wieser as a specialist for the Austrian government working on the legal and economic details of the Treaty of Saint Germain. Between 1923 and 1924 Hayek worked as a research assistant to Prof. Jeremiah Jenks of New York University, compiling macroeconomic data on the American economy and the operations of the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Initially sympathetic to Wieser's democratic socialism, Hayek's economic thinking shifted away from socialism and toward the classical liberalism of Carl Menger after reading Ludwig von Mises' book ''Socialism''. It was sometime after reading ''Socialism'' that Hayek began attending Ludwig von Mises' private seminars, joining several of his university friends—including Fritz Machlup, Alfred Schutz, Felix Kaufmann,and Gottfried Haberler—who were also participating in Hayek's own, more general private seminar. It was during this time that he also encountered and befriended noted political philosopher Eric Voegelin, with whom he retained a long-standing relationship.
With the help of Mises, in the late 1920s Hayek founded and served as director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, before joining the faculty of the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1931 at the behest of Lionel Robbins. Upon his arrival in London, Hayek was quickly recognized as one of the leading economic theorists in the world, and his development of the economics of processes in time and the coordination function of prices inspired the ground-breaking work of John Hicks, Abba Lerner, and many others in the development of modern microeconomics.
Seven years after the onset of the British Great Depression, which began in 1925, Hayek suggested that private investment in the public markets was a better road to wealth and economic coordination in Britain than government spending programs, as argued in a letter he co-signed with Lionel Robbins and others in an exchange of letters with John Maynard Keynes in ''The Times''. The global Great Depression formed a crucial backdrop against which Hayek formulated his positions, especially in opposition to the views of Keynes.
Economists who studied with Hayek at the LSE in the 1930s and 1940s include Arthur Lewis, Ronald Coase, John Kenneth Galbraith, Abba Lerner, Nicholas Kaldor, George Shackle, Thomas Balogh, Vera Smith, L. K. Jha, Arthur Seldon, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, and Oskar Lange. Hayek also taught or tutored all sorts of other L.S.E. students, including David Rockefeller.
Unwilling to return to Austria after the Anschluss brought it under the control of Nazi Germany in 1938, Hayek remained in Britain and became a British subject in 1938. He held this status for the remainder of his life, although he did not live in Great Britain after 1950. He lived in the United States from 1950 to 1962 and then mostly in Germany, although briefly in Austria as well.
The libertarian economist Walter Block has observed critically that while ''The Road to Serfdom'' is "a war cry against central planning," it appears to include a lukewarm support for a free market system and ''laissez-faire'' capitalism, with Hayek even going so far as to say that "probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all of the principle of laissez-faire capitalism". In the book, Hayek writes that the government has a role to play in the economy through the monetary system, work-hours regulation, and institutions for the flow of proper information. These are contentions associated with the point of view of ordoliberalism. Through analysis of this and many other of Hayek's works, Block asserts that: "in making the case against socialism, Hayek was led into making all sort of compromises with what otherwise appeared to be his own philosophical perspective—so much so, that if a system was erected on the basis of them, it would not differ too sharply from what this author explicitly opposed."
After editing a book on John Stuart Mill's letters he planned to publish two books on the liberal order, ''The Constitution of Liberty'' and "The Creative Powers of a Free Civilization" (eventually the title for the second chapter of ''The Constitution of Liberty''). He completed ''The Constitution of Liberty'' in May 1959, with publication in February 1960. Hayek was concerned "with that condition of men in which coercion of some by others is reduced as much as is possible in society". Hayek was disappointed that the book did not receive the same enthusiastic general reception as ''The Road to Serfdom'' had sixteen years before.
He became professor at the University of Salzburg from 1969 to 1977; he then returned to Freiburg, where he spent the rest of his days. When Hayek left Salzburg in 1977, he wrote that, "I made a mistake in moving to Salzburg". The economics department was small and the library facilities were inadequate.
This sparked an entire school of thought within economics, Free Banking, with banks not being banned from having fractional reserves as Rothbard advocated, but instead being free to experiment and discover the best method of conducting business. Economists including Richard Timberlake, George Selgin, Lawrence White, and Steven Horwitz are part of this school of thought.
In 1977 Hayek was critical of the Lib-Lab pact, in which the British Liberal Party agreed to keep the British Labour government in office. Writing to ''The Times'', Hayek said: "May one who has devoted a large part of his life to the study of the history and the principles of liberalism point out that a party that keeps a socialist government in power has lost all title to the name 'Liberal'. Certainly no liberal can in future vote 'Liberal'." Hayek was criticised by Liberal politicians Lord Gladwyn and Andrew Phillips, who both claimed that the purpose of the pact was to discourage socialist legislation. Lord Gladwyn pointed out that the German Free Democrats were in coalition with the German Social Democrats. Hayek was defended by Professor Antony Flew who stated that the German Social Democrats, unlike the British Labour Party, had since the late 1950s abandoned public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange and had instead embraced the social market economy. In 1978 Hayek came into conflict with the Liberal Party leader David Steel who claimed that liberty was only possible with "social justice and an equitable distribution of wealth and power, which in turn require a degree of active government intervention" and that the Conservative Party were more concerned with the connection between liberty and private enterprise than between liberty and democracy. Hayek claimed that a limited democracy might be better than other forms of limited government at protecting liberty but that an unlimited democracy was worse than other forms of unlimited government because "its government loses the power even to do what it thinks right if any group on which its majority depends thinks otherwise". Hayek stated that if the Conservative leader had said "that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom while the second is not: free choice can at least exist under a dictatorship that can limit itself but not under the government of an unlimited democracy which cannot".
There is no figure who had more of an influence, no person had more of an influence on the intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain than Friedrich Hayek. His books were translated and published by the underground and black market editions, read widely, and undoubtedly influenced the climate of opinion that ultimately brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
—Milton Friedman* (Hoover Institution)
The most interesting among the courageous dissenters of the 1980s were the classical liberals, disciples of F. A. Hayek, from whom they had learned about the crucial importance of economic freedom and about the often-ignored conceptual difference between liberalism and democracy.
—Andrzej Walicki* (History, Notre Dame)
Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar came to my office the other day to recount his country’s remarkable transformation. He described a nation of people who are harder-working, more virtuous — yes, more virtuous, because the market punishes immorality — and more hopeful about the future than they’ve ever been in their history. I asked Mr. Laar where his government got the idea for these reforms. Do you know what he replied? He said, "We read Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek."
—U.S. Representative Dick Armey
I was 25 years old and pursuing my doctorate in economics when I was allowed to spend six months of post-graduate studies in Naples, Italy. I read the Western economic textbooks and also the more general work of people like Hayek. By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market. In 1968, I was glad at the political liberalism of the Dubcek Prague Spring, but was very critical of the Third Way they pursued in economics.
—Vaclav Klaus (President of the Czech Republic)
Hayek's comments about Chile have drawn criticism from NYU historian Greg Grandin, who brings attention to a letter Hayek published in the ''London Times'' in which Hayek reported that he had 'not been able to find a single person in much-maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.' "of course," writes Grandin, "the thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet's regime weren't talking." Hayek recommended liberal economic reforms similar to Chile's for the Keynesian economy in the United Kingdom to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
In 1984, he was appointed as a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom on the advice of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for his "services to the study of economics". Hayek had hoped to receive a baronetcy, and after he was awarded the CH he sent a letter to his friends requesting that he be called the English version of Friedrich (Frederick) from now on. After his twenty-minute audience with the Queen, he was "absolutely besotted" with her according to his daughter-in-law, Esca Hayek. Hayek said a year later that he was "amazed by her. That ease and skill, as if she'd known me all my life". The audience with the Queen was followed by a dinner with family and friends at the Institute of Economic Affairs. When, later that evening, Hayek was dropped off at the Reform Club, he commented: "I've just had the happiest day of my life".
In 1991 President George H. W. Bush awarded Hayek the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the two highest civilian awards in the United States, for a "lifetime of looking beyond the horizon". Hayek died in 1992 in Freiburg, Germany, and was buried in the Hohenzollern Castle, south of Stuttgart, Germany.
In 1929 Lionel Robbins assumed the helm of the London School of Economics (LSE). Eager to promote alternatives to what he regarded as the narrow approach of the school of economic thought that then dominated the English-speaking academic world (centered at the University of Cambridge and deriving largely from the work of Alfred Marshall), Robbins invited Hayek to join the faculty at LSE, which he did in 1931. According to Nicholas Kaldor, Hayek's theory of the time-structure of capital and of the business cycle initially "fascinated the academic world" and appeared to offer a less "facile and superficial" understanding of macroeconomics than the Cambridge school's.
Also in 1931, Hayek critiqued Keynes's ''Treatise on Money'' (1930) in his "Reflections on the pure theory of Mr. J. M. Keynes" and published his lectures at the LSE in book form as ''Prices and Production''. Unemployment and idle resources are, for Keynes, due to a lack of effective demand; for Hayek, they stem from a previous, unsustainable episode of easy money and artificially low interest rates. Hayek's argument is based on Böhm-Bawerk's concept of the "average period of production."
Hayek continued his research on monetary and capital theory, revising his theories of the relations between credit cycles and capital structure in ''Profits, Interest and Investment'' (1939) and ''The Pure Theory of Capital'' (1941), but his reputation as an economic theorist had by then fallen so much that those works were largely ignored, except for scathing critiques by Nicholas Kaldor. Lionel Robbins himself, who had embraced the Austrian theory of the business cycle in ''The Great Depression'' (1934), later regretted having written that book and accepted many of the Keynesian counter-arguments.
Hayek then abandoned his announced project to produce a companion volumen to the ''Pure Theory of Capital'', which would have dealt with the "dynamics of capital." After 1941, he continued to publish works on political philosophy, the theory of law, and psychology, but not on economics. At the University of Chicago, Hayek was not part of the economics department and did not influence the rebirth of neoclassical theory which took place there (see Chicago school of economics). When, in 1974, he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with Gunnar Myrdal, the latter complained about being paired with an "ideologue." Milton Friedman declared himself "an enormous admirer of Hayek, but not for his economics. I think ''Prices and Production'' is a very flawed book. I think his [''Pure Theory of Capital''] is unreadable. On the other hand, ''The Road to Serfdom'' is one of the great books of our time."
Building on the earlier work of Ludwig von Mises and others, Hayek also argued that while in centrally planned economies an individual or a select group of individuals must determine the distribution of resources, these planners will never have enough information to carry out this allocation reliably. This argument, first proposed by Max Weber, says that the efficient exchange and use of resources can be maintained only through the price mechanism in free markets (see economic calculation problem). In ''The Use of Knowledge in Society'' (1945), Hayek argued that the price mechanism serves to share and synchronize local and personal knowledge, allowing society's members to achieve diverse, complicated ends through a principle of spontaneous self-organization. He used the term catallaxy to describe a "self-organizing system of voluntary co-operation."
Hayek's research into this argument was specifically cited by the Nobel Committee in its press release awarding Hayek the Nobel prize.
In Hayek's view, the central role of the state should be to maintain the rule of law, with as little arbitrary intervention as possible.
However, the complete picture is not black and white. Hayek did write that the state has a role to play in the economy, and specifically, in creating a "safety net." He wrote: "There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision."
Hayek attributed the birth of civilization to private property in his book ''The Fatal Conceit'' (1988). He explained that price signals are the only means of enabling each economic decision maker to communicate tacit knowledge or dispersed knowledge to each other, in order to solve the economic calculation problem.
Hayek disapproved strongly of the notion of 'social justice'. He compared the market to a game in which 'there is no point in calling the outcome just or unjust' and argued that 'social justice is an empty phrase with no determinable content'; likewise 'the results of the individual's efforts are necessarily unpredictable, and the question as to whether the resulting distribution of incomes is just has no meaning.' He regarded any attempt by government to redistribute income or capital as an unacceptable intrusion upon individual freedom: 'the principle of distributive justice, once introduced, would not be fulfilled until the whole of society was organized in accordance with it. This would produce a kind of society which in all essential respects would be the opposite of a free society.
With regard to a safety net, Hayek's statements are mixed. On the one hand, he was prepared to tolerate 'some provision for those threatened by the extremes of indigence or starvation, be it only in the interest of those who require protection against acts of desperation on the part of the needy.' On the other hand, as referenced above in the section on "The economic calculation problem", Hayek wrote that "there is no reason why...the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance."
In his philosophy of science, which has much in common with that of his good friend Karl Popper, Hayek was highly critical of what he termed ''scientism'': a false understanding of the methods of science that has been mistakenly forced upon the social sciences, but that is contrary to the practices of genuine science. Usually scientism involves combining the philosophers' ancient demand for demonstrative justification with the associationists' false view that all scientific explanations are simple two-variable linear relationships. Hayek points out that much of science involves the explanation of complex multi-variable and non-linear phenomena, and that the social science of economics and undesigned order compares favourably with such complex sciences as Darwinian biology. These ideas were developed in ''The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason'', 1952 and in some of Hayek's later essays in the philosophy of science such as "Degrees of Explanation" and "The Theory of Complex Phenomena".
In ''The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology'' (1952), Hayek independently developed a "Hebbian learning" model of learning and memory an idea which he first conceived in 1920, prior to his study of economics. Hayek's expansion of the "Hebbian synapse" construction into a global brain theory has received continued attention in neuroscience, cognitive science, computer science, behavioural science, and evolutionary psychology, by scientists such as Edelman, and Fuster.
Hayek is widely recognized for having introduced the time dimension to the equilibrium construction, and for his key role in helping inspire the fields of growth theory, information economics, and the theory of spontaneous order. The "informal" economics presented in Milton Friedman's massively influential popular work ''Free to Choose'' (1980), is explicitly Hayekian in its account of the price system as a system for transmitting and coordinating knowledge. This can be explained by the fact that Friedman taught Hayek's famous paper "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945) in his graduate seminars.
Harvard economist and former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers explains Hayek's place in modern economics this way : "What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the [un]hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy."
By 1947, Hayek was an organizer of the Mont Pelerin Society, a group of classical liberals who sought to oppose what they saw as socialism in various areas. He was also instrumental in the founding of the Institute of Economic Affairs, the free-market think tank that inspired Thatcherism.
Hayek had a long-standing and close friendship with philosopher of science Karl Popper, also from Vienna. In a letter to Hayek in 1944, Popper stated, "I think I have learnt more from you than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski." (See Hacohen, 2000). Popper dedicated his ''Conjectures and Refutations'' to Hayek. For his part, Hayek dedicated a collection of papers, ''Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics'', to Popper, and in 1982 said, "... ever since his ''Logik der Forschung'' first came out in 1934, I have been a complete adherent to his general theory of methodology." Popper also participated in the inaugural meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Their friendship and mutual admiration, however, do not change the fact that there are important differences between their ideas.
Hayek also played a central role in Milton Friedman's intellectual development: ”My interest in public policy and political philosophy was rather casual before I joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. Informal discussions with colleagues and friends stimulated a greater interest, which was reinforced by Friedrich Hayek’s powerful book The Road to Serfdom, by my attendance at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, and by discussions with Hayek after he joined the university faculty in 1950. In addition, Hayek attracted an exceptionally able group of students who were dedicated to a libertarian ideology. They started a student publication, The New Individualist Review, which was the outstanding libertarian journal of opinion for some years. I served as an adviser to the journal and published a number of articles in it...“
Hayek's greatest intellectual debt was to Carl Menger, who pioneered an approach to social explanation similar to that developed in Britain by Bernard Mandeville and the Scottish moral philosophers (cf. Scottish Enlightenment). He had a wide-reaching influence on contemporary economics, politics, philosophy, sociology, psychology and anthropology. For example, Hayek's discussion in ''The Road to Serfdom'' (1944) about truth, falsehood and the use of language influenced some later opponents of postmodernism.
Hayek's work on price theory has been central to the thinking of Jimmy Wales about how to manage the Wikipedia project.
Hayek wrote an essay titled "Why I Am Not a Conservative" (included as an appendix to ''The Constitution of Liberty''), in which he disparaged conservatism for its inability to adapt to changing human realities or to offer a positive political program, remarking that "Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves". Although he noted that modern day conservatism shares many opinions on economics with classic liberals, particularly a belief in the free market, he believed it's because conservatism wants to "stand still," whereas liberalism embraces the free market because it "wants to go somewhere." Hayek identified himself as a classical liberal, but noted that in the United States it had become almost impossible to use "liberal" in its original definition, and the term "libertarian" has been used instead. However, for his part Hayek found this term "singularly unattractive" and offered the term "Old Whig" (a phrase borrowed from Edmund Burke) instead. In his later life he said: "I am becoming a Burkean Whig." However, Whiggery as a political doctrine had little affinity for classical political economy, the tabernacle of the Manchester School and William Gladstone.
A common term in much of the world for what Hayek espoused is "neoliberalism". British scholar Samuel Brittan concluded in 2010 that, "Hayek's book [''The Constitution of Liberty''] is still probably the most comprehensive statement of the underlying ideas of the moderate free market philosophy espoused by neoliberals." Brittan adds that although Plant (2009) comes out in the end against Hayek's doctrines, Plant gives ''The Constitution of Liberty'' a "more thorough and fair-minded analysis than it has received even from its professed adherents."
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| name | Bugs Bunny |
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| latest | ''The Looney Tunes Show'' (2011) |
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Bugs Bunny is a fictional animated character who starred in the ''Looney Tunes'' and ''Merrie Melodies'' series of animated films produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions, which became Warner Bros. Cartoons in 1944. Bugs starred in 167 shorts during the Golden Age of American animation, and cameoed in many others, including few appearances in non-animated films. He is an anthropomorphic hare or rabbit.
According to ''Bugs Bunny: 50 Years and Only One Grey Hare'', he was born on July 27, 1940 in Brooklyn, New York in a warren under Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. In reality, he was created by many animators and staff, including Tex Avery, who directed ''A Wild Hare'', Bugs' debut role, and Robert McKimson, who created the definitive "Bugs Bunny" character design. According to Mel Blanc, the character's original voice actor, Bugs has a Flatbush accent. Bugs has had numerous catchphrases, the most prominent being a casual "Eh... What's up, doc?", usually said while chewing a carrot.
He is the most prominent of the Looney Tunes characters as his calm, flippant insouciance endeared him to American audiences during and after World War II. He is also a mascot of the Looney Tunes, as well as Warner Bros. in general.
thumb|left|550px|A depiction of Bugs Bunny's evolution through the years.A rabbit (named as "Happy Rabbit") with some of the personality of Bugs, though looking very different, first appears in the cartoon short ''Porky's Hare Hunt'', released on April 30, 1938. Co-directed by Ben "Bugs" Hardaway and an uncredited Cal Dalton (who was responsible for the initial design of Happy), this short has an almost identical plot to Tex Avery's 1937 cartoon ''Porky's Duck Hunt'', which had introduced Daffy Duck. Porky Pig is again cast as a hunter tracking a silly prey less interested in escape than in driving his pursuer insane. The latter short replaces the little black duck with a small white rabbit. Happy introduces himself with the odd expression "Jiggers, fellers", and Mel Blanc gave Happy a voice and laugh almost like that he would later use for Woody Woodpecker. This cartoon also first uses the famous Groucho Marx line, "Of course you realize, this means war!" This rabbit was so popular with its audience that the Schlesinger staff decided to use it again.
Happy appears again in 1939's ''Prest-O Change-O'', directed by Chuck Jones, where he is the pet rabbit of unseen character Sham-Fu the Magician. Two dogs, fleeing the local dogcatcher, enter his absent master's house. Happy harasses them, but is ultimately bested by the bigger of the two dogs.
His third appearance is in another 1939 cartoon, ''Hare-um Scare-um'', directed by Dalton and Hardaway. This short, the first where he is depicted as a gray bunny instead of a white one, is also notable for Happy's first singing role. Charlie Thorson, lead animator on the short, gave the character a name. He had written "Bugs' Bunny" on the model sheet that he drew for Hardaway, implying that he considered the rabbit model sheet to be Hardaway's property. In promotional material for the short, including a surviving 1939 presskit, the name on the model sheet was altered to become the rabbit's own name: "Bugs" Bunny (quotation marks only used at the very beginning). In his later years, Mel Blanc stated that a proposed name was "Happy Rabbit". Oddly, "Happy" was only used in reference to Bugs Hardaway. In the cartoon ''Hare-um Scare-um'', a newspaper headline reads, "Happy Hardaway".
In Chuck Jones' ''Elmer's Candid Camera'' Happy first meets Elmer Fudd. This rabbit looks more like the present-day Bugs, taller and with a similar face. This rabbit, however, speaks with a rural drawl. The early version of Elmer is also different from the present-day one, much fatter and taller, although Arthur Q. Bryan's voice is the same as it would be later. In Robert Clampett's 1940 ''Patient Porky'', a similar rabbit appears to trick the audience into thinking that 750 rabbits have been born.
Bugs's second appearance, in Jones' ''Elmer's Pet Rabbit'', introduces the audience to the name Bugs Bunny, which until then had only been used among the Termite Terrace employees. It was also the first short where he received billing under his now-famous name, but the card, "featuring Bugs Bunny", was just slapped on the end of the completed short's opening titles when ''A Wild Hare'' proved an unexpected success. The rabbit here is in look and voice identical to the one in Jones' earlier ''Elmer's Candid Camera''.
Bugs in his ''Wild Hare'' likeness appeared in five more shorts during 1941. ''Tortoise Beats Hare'', directed by Tex Avery, features the first appearance of Cecil Turtle; ''Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt'', is the first Bugs Bunny short directed by Friz Freleng; ''All This and Rabbit Stew'', directed by Avery, has Bugs tracked by a little African-American hunter (based heavily on racial stereotypes); ''The Heckling Hare'' was the final Bugs short Avery worked on before being fired (Avery and producer Schlesinger vehemently disagreed over the ending gag of The Heckling Hare, and Avery refused to compromise his creative principles) and leaving for MGM; and ''Wabbit Twouble'', the first Bugs short directed by Robert Clampett. ''Wabbit Twouble'' was also the first of five Bugs shorts to feature a chubbier remodel of Elmer Fudd, a short-lived attempt to have Fudd more closely resemble his voice actor, comedian Arthur Q. Bryan.
Other 1942 Bugs shorts included Chuck Jones' ''Hold the Lion, Please'', Freleng's ''Fresh Hare'' and ''The Hare-Brained Hypnotist'' (which restores Elmer Fudd to his previous size), and Jones' ''Case of the Missing Hare''. Bugs also made cameos in Tex Avery's final Warner Bros. short, ''Crazy Cruise'', and stars in the two-minute United States war bonds commercial film ''Any Bonds Today''.
Bugs became more popular during World War II because of his free and easy attitude, and began receiving special star billing in his cartoons by 1943. By that time Warner Bros. had become the most profitable cartoon studio in the United States. In company with cartoon studios such as Disney and Famous Studios, Warners put its characters against Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and the Japanese. The 1944 short ''Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips'' features Bugs at odds with a group of Japanese soldiers. This cartoon has since been pulled from distribution due to its racial stereotypes of Japanese people. He also faces off against Herman Goering and Hitler in ''Herr Meets Hare'', which introduced his well-known reference to Albuquerque as he mistakenly winds up in the Black Forest of 'Joimany' instead of Las Vegas, Nevada.
Since Bugs' debut in ''A Wild Hare'', he had appeared only in color ''Merrie Melodie'' cartoons (making him one of the few recurring characters created for that series in the Leon Schlesinger era prior to the full conversion to color), alongside Elmer's prototype Egghead, Inki, Sniffles, and Elmer himself—who was heard but not seen in the 1942 ''Looney Tunes'' cartoon ''Nutty News'', and made his first formal appearance in that series in 1943's ''To Duck or Not to Duck''. While he made a cameo appearance in the 1943 Porky and Daffy cartoon ''Porky Pig's Feat'' this was his only appearance in a black-and-white ''Looney Tune'' cartoon. He did not star in a cartoon in the ''Looney Tunes'' series until that series made its complete conversion to only color cartoons beginning with 1944 releases. ''Buckaroo Bugs'' was Bugs' first cartoon in the ''Looney Tunes'' series, and was also the last Warner Bros. cartoon to credit Leon Schlesinger.
Among his most notable civilian shorts during this period are Bob Clampett's ''Tortoise Wins by a Hare'' (a sequel to 1941's ''Tortoise Beats Hare''); ''A Corny Concerto'' (a spoof of Disney's ''Fantasia''); ''Falling Hare''; ''What's Cookin' Doc?''; Chuck Jones' ''Superman'' parody ''Super-Rabbit''; and Freleng's ''Little Red Riding Rabbit''. The 1944 short ''Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears'' introduces Jones' The Three Bears characters.
At the end of the cartoon ''Super-Rabbit'', Bugs appears wearing a United States Marine Corps dress blue uniform. As a result, the Marine Corps made Bugs an honorary Marine Master Sergeant. From 1943 to 1946, Bugs was the official mascot of Kingman Army Airfield, Kingman, Arizona, where thousands of aerial gunners were trained during World War II. Some notable trainees included Clark Gable and Charles Bronson. Bugs also served as the mascot for 530 Squadron of the 380th Bombardment Group, 5th Air Force, U.S. Air Force, which was attached to the Royal Australian Air Force and operated out of Australia's Northern Territory from 1943 to 1945, flying B-24 Liberator bombers. Bugs riding an air delivered torpedo served as the squadron logo for Marine Torpedo/Bomber Squadron 242 in the Second World War.
In 1944, Bugs Bunny made a cameo appearance in ''Jasper Goes Hunting'', a short produced by rival studio Paramount Pictures. In this cameo (animated by Robert McKimson, with Mel Blanc providing the voice), Bugs pops out of a rabbit hole, saying his usual catchphrase; Bugs then says, "I must be in the wrong picture" and then goes back in the hole. He also appears in the 1947 Arthur Davis cartoon ''The Goofy Gophers''
The Bugs Bunny short ''Knighty Knight Bugs'' (1958), in which a medieval Bugs Bunny trades blows with Yosemite Sam and his fire-breathing dragon (which has a cold), won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) of 1958. Three of Chuck Jones' Bugs Bunny shorts — ''Rabbit Fire'', ''Rabbit Seasoning'', and ''Duck! Rabbit, Duck!'' — comprise what is often referred to as the "Duck Season/Rabbit Season" trilogy. Jones' 1957 classic, ''What's Opera, Doc?'', cast Bugs and Elmer in a parody of Richard Wagner's ''Der Ring des Nibelungen''. It has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, the first cartoon short to receive this honor.
In the fall of 1960, ABC debuted the prime-time television program ''The Bugs Bunny Show''. This show packaged many of the post-1948 Warners shorts with newly animated wraparounds. After two seasons, it was moved from its evening slot to reruns on Saturday mornings. ''The Bugs Bunny Show'' changed format and exact title frequently, but remained on network television for 40 years. The packaging was later completely different, with each short simply presented on its own, title and all, though some clips from the new bridging material were sometimes used as filler.
Bugs has made appearances in animated specials for network television, mostly composed of classic cartoons with bridging material added, including ''How Bugs Bunny Won the West'', and ''The Bugs Bunny Mystery Special''. ''Bugs Bunny's Busting Out All Over'' (1980) contained no vintage clips and featured the first new Bugs Bunny cartoons in 16 years. It opened with "Portrait Of The Artist As a Young Bunny", which features a flashback of Bugs as a child thwarting a young Elmer Fudd, while its third and closing short was "Spaced Out Bunny", with Bugs being kidnapped by Marvin the Martian to be a playmate for Hugo, an Abominable Snowman-like character. (A new Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner short filled out the half hour.) Compilation films included the independently produced ''Bugs Bunny: Superstar'', using the vintage shorts then owned by United Artists; as well as Warner Bros. efforts ''The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie'', ''The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie'', ''Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island'', ''Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales'' and ''Daffy Duck's Quackbusters''. He also made guest appearances in episodes of the 1990s television program ''Tiny Toon Adventures'' as the principal of Acme Looniversity and the mentor of Babs and Buster Bunny, and would later make occasional guest cameos on spinoffs ''Taz-Mania'' and ''Animaniacs''. He appears in the beginning of ''Gremlins 2: The New Batch'', where he tries to ride the opening Warner Bros logo, but is interrupted by Daffy Duck.
Bugs has had several comic book series over the years. Western Publishing had the license for all the Warner Brothers cartoons, and produced Bugs Bunny comics first for Dell Comics, then later for their own Gold Key Comics. Dell published 58 issues and several specials from 1952 to 1962. Gold Key continued for another 133 issues. DC Comics, the sister/subsidiary company of Warner Bros., has published several comics titles since 1994 that Bugs has appeared in. Notable among these was the 2000 four-issue miniseries ''Superman & Bugs Bunny'', written by Mark Evanier and drawn by Joe Staton. This depicted a crossover between DC's superheroes and the Warner cartoon characters.
Like SpongeBob for Nickelodeon and Mickey Mouse (a Disney character), Bugs has served as the mascot for Warner Bros. Entertainment and its various divisions. He and Mickey are the first cartoon characters to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In the 1988 animated/live action movie ''Who Framed Roger Rabbit'', Bugs was shown as one of the inhabitants of Toontown. However, since the film was being produced by Disney, Warner Bros. would only allow the use of their biggest star if he got an equal amount of screen time as Disney's biggest star, Mickey Mouse. Because of this, both characters are always together in frame when onscreen. For the same reasons, Bugs never calls Mickey by his name, only referring to him as "Doc," while Mickey calls him "Bugs."
Bugs Bunny was featured in ''The Earth Day Special'' showing his displeasure on how man started mistreating the environment. He was voiced by Jeff Bergman who also voiced Porky Pig and Tweety.
Bugs Bunny came back to the silver screen in ''Box Office Bunny'' in 1990. This was the first Bugs Bunny cartoon short since 1964 to be released to theaters, and it was created for the Bugs Bunny 50th anniversary celebration. It was followed in 1991 by ''(Blooper) Bunny,'' a short that has gained a cult following among some animation fans for its edgy humor.
Bugs made an appearance in the 1990 drug prevention video ''Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue.'' This special is notable for being the first time that somebody other than Mel Blanc voiced Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. (In this video, both characters were voiced by Jeff Bergman.)
In 1997, Bugs appeared on a U.S. postage stamp, the first cartoon to be so honored, beating the iconic Mickey Mouse. The stamp is number seven on the list of the ten most popular U.S. stamps, as calculated by the number of stamps purchased but not used. The introduction of Bugs onto a stamp was controversial at the time, as it was seen as a step toward the 'commercialization' of stamp art. The postal service rejected many designs, and went with a postal-themed drawing. Avery Dennison printed the Bugs Bunny stamp sheet, which featured "a special ten-stamp design and was the first self-adhesive souvenir sheet issued by the U.S. Postal Service."
A younger version of Bugs is the main character of ''Baby Looney Tunes,'' which debuted on Cartoon Network in 2002. In the action comedy ''Loonatics Unleashed'', his definite descendant Ace Bunny is the leader of the Loonatics team and seems to have inherited his ancestor's Brooklyn accent and comic wit. Strangely, Bugs was one of the few Looney Tunes characters who never appeared in the 2003 Duck Dodgers series.
Bugs has appeared in numerous video games, including the ''Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle'' series, ''Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout'', ''Bugs Bunny: Rabbit Rampage'' and the similar ''Bugs Bunny in Double Trouble'', ''Looney Tunes B-Ball'', ''Space Jam'', ''Looney Tunes Racing'', ''Looney Tunes: Space Race'', ''Bugs Bunny Lost in Time'', and its sequel, ''Bugs Bunny and Taz Time Busters'', and ''Looney Tunes: Back in Action'' and the new video game ''Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal''.
On August 13, 2010, Warner Bros. Pictures announced that they are planning a live-action/CG-animated combo feature film based on the Looney Tunes character.
Bugs also appeared in the ''MAD'' episode "Hops", where he appeared at the party.
Bugs will usually try to placate the antagonist and avoid conflict, but when an antagonist pushes him too far, Bugs may address the audience and invoke his catchphrase "Of course you realize this means ''war!''" before he retaliates, and the retaliation will be devastating. This line was taken from Groucho Marx and others in the 1933 film ''Duck Soup'' and was also used in the 1935 Marx film ''A Night at the Opera''. Bugs would pay homage to Groucho in other ways, such as occasionally adopting his stooped walk or leering eyebrow-raising (in ''Hair-Raising Hare'', for example) or sometimes with a direct impersonation (as in ''Slick Hare'').
Other directors, such as Friz Freleng, characterized Bugs as altruistic. When Bugs meets other successful characters (such as Cecil Turtle in ''Tortoise Beats Hare'', or, in World War II, the Gremlin of ''Falling Hare''), his overconfidence becomes a disadvantage. Most of Bugs' antagonists are extremely dim-witted, and Bugs is easily able to outwit and torment them, though on occasion they will manage to get the best of Bugs. Daffy Duck, who is considerably more intelligent, is unaffected by Bugs' usual schemes, and the two usually end up fighting a battle of wits, though Bugs is still the superior.
During the 1940s, Bugs was immature and wild, but starting in the 1950s his personality matured and his attitude was less frenetic. Though often shown as highly mischievous and violent, Bugs is never actually malicious, and only acts as such in self-defense against his aggressors; the only two cartoons where Bugs ever served as an antagonist were Buckaroo Bugs and Duck Amuck; the latter cartoon depicts him as far more sadistic than usual, as he becomes the cartoonist and abuses his newfound divine powers to torture Daffy.
Bugs Bunny's nonchalant carrot-chewing standing position, as explained by Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Bob Clampett, originated in a scene in the film ''It Happened One Night'', in which Clark Gable's character leans against a fence, eating carrots rapidly and talking with his mouth full to Claudette Colbert's character. This scene was well known while the film was popular, and viewers at the time likely recognized Bugs Bunny's behavior as satire.
The carrot-chewing scenes are generally followed by Bugs Bunny's most well-known catchphrase, "What's up, Doc?", which was written by director Tex Avery for his first Bugs Bunny short, 1940s ''A Wild Hare''. Avery explained later that it was a common expression in his native Texas and that he did not think much of the phrase. When the short was first screened in theaters, the "What's up, Doc?" scene generated a tremendously positive audience reaction. As a result, the scene became a recurring element in subsequent films and cartoons. The phrase was sometimes modified for a situation. For example, Bugs says "What's up, dogs?" to the antagonists in ''A Hare Grows in Manhattan'', "What's up, Duke?" to the knight in ''Knight-mare Hare'' and "What's up, prune-face?" to the aged Elmer in ''The Old Grey Hare''. He might also greet Daffy with "What's up, Duck?" He used one variation, "What's all the hub-bub, bub?" only once, in ''Falling Hare.'' Another variation is used in ''Looney Tunes: Back In Action'' when he greets a lightsaber-wielding Marvin the Martian saying "What's up, Darth?"
Several Chuck Jones shorts in the late 1940s and 1950s depict Bugs travelling via cross-country (and, in some cases, intercontinental) tunnel-digging, ending up in places as varied as Mexico (''Bully for Bugs'', 1953), the Himalayas (''The Abominable Snow Rabbit'', 1960) and Antarctica (''Frigid Hare'', 1949) all because he "shoulda taken that left toin at Albukoikee." He first utters that phrase in ''Herr Meets Hare'' (1945), when he emerges in the Black Forest, a cartoon seldom seen today due to its blatantly topical subject matter. When Hermann Göring says to Bugs, "There is no Las Vegas in 'Chermany'" and takes a potshot at Bugs, Bugs dives into his hole and says, "Joimany! Yipe!", as Bugs realizes he's behind enemy lines. The confused response to his "left toin" comment also followed a pattern. For example, when he tunnels into Scotland in 1948's ''My Bunny Lies over the Sea'', while thinking he's heading for the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California, it provides another chance for an ethnic stereotype: "Therrre's no La Brrrea Tarrr Pits in Scotland!" (to which Bugs responds, "Uh...what's up, Mac-doc?"). A couple of late-1950s shorts of this ilk also featured Daffy Duck travelling with Bugs ("Since when is Pismo Beach inside a cave?!").
Bugs Bunny has some similarities to figures from mythology and folklore, such as Br'er Rabbit, Nanabozho, or Anansi, and might be seen as a modern trickster (for example, he repeatedly uses cross-dressing mischievously). Unlike most cartoon characters, however, Bugs Bunny is rarely defeated in his own games of trickery. One exception to this is the short ''Hare Brush'', in which Elmer Fudd ultimately carries the day at the end; however, critics note that in this short, Elmer and Bugs assume each other's personalities—through mental illness and hypnosis, respectively—and it is only by becoming Bugs that Elmer can win. However, Bugs was beaten at his own game. In the short ''Duck Amuck'' he torments Daffy Duck as the unseen animator, ending with his line, "Ain't I a stinker?" Bugs feels the same wrath of an unseen animator in the short ''Rabbit Rampage'' where he is in turn tormented by Elmer Fudd. At the end of the clip Elmer gleefully exclaims, 'Well, I finally got even with that scwewy wabbit!"
Although it was usually Porky Pig who brought the WB cartoons to a close with his stuttering, "That's all, folks!", Bugs would occasionally appear, bursting through a drum just as Porky did, but munching a carrot and saying in his Bronx-Brooklyn accent, "And dat's de end!"
The name "Bugs" or "Bugsy" as an old-fashioned nickname means "crazy" (or "loopy"). Several famous people from the first half of the twentieth century had that nickname. It is now out of fashion as a nickname, but survives in 1950s–1960s expressions like "you're bugging me", as in "you're driving me crazy".
Bugs wears white gloves, which he is rarely seen without, although he may remove one and use it for slapping an opponent to predicate a duel. Another glove-less example is the episode ''Long-Haired Hare'', where Bugs pretends to be the famed conductor Leopold Stokowski and instructs opera star "Giovanni Jones" to sing and to hold a high note. As Giovanni Jones is turning red with the strain, Bugs slips his left hand out of its glove, leaving the glove hovering in the air in order to command Jones to continue to hold the high note. Bugs then nips down to the mail drop to order, and then to receive, a pair of ear defenders. Bugs puts on the ear defenders and then zips back into the amphitheater and reinserts his hand into his glove as singer Jones is writhing on the stage, still holding that same high note.
Bugs Bunny is also a master of disguise: he can wear any disguise that he wants to confuse his enemies: in ''Bowery Bugs'' he uses diverse disguises: fakir, gentleman, woman, baker and finally policeman. This ability of disguise makes Bugs famous because we can recognize him while at the same time realizing that his enemies are stumped. Bugs has a certain preference for the female disguise: Taz, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam were fooled by this sexy bunny (woman) and in ''Hare Trimmed'', Sam discovers the real face of "Granny" (Bugs's disguise) in the church where they attempt to get married. For all the gullible victims of all these disguises, however, for some reason, Daffy Duck and Cecil Turtle are among those who are never fooled.
Bugs Bunny may also have some mystical potential. In ''Knight-mare Hare'' he was able to return to his bunny form (after being transformed into a donkey) by removing his donkey form as if it were a suit. Merlin of Monroe (the wizard) was unable to do the same thing. Later Bugs Bunny defeated the Count Blood Count in a magical spell duel. However, the story was a dream and Bugs Bunny's victory over Count Blood Count was a result of his intellect, not innate magical power.
Within the cartoons, although the term "hare" comes up sometimes, again typically as a pun—for example, Bugs drinking "hare tonic" to "stop falling hare" or being doused with "hare restorer" to bring him back from invisibility—Bugs as well as his antagonists most often refer to the character as a "rabbit." The word "bunny" is of no help in answering this question, as it is a synonym for both young hares and young rabbits.
In Nike commercials with Michael Jordan, Bugs had been referred to as "''Hare'' Jordan."
;Mel Blanc :Mel Blanc voiced the character for 49 years, from Bugs' debut in ''A Wild Hare'' (1940) until Blanc's death in 1989. Blanc described the voice as a combination of Bronx and Brooklyn accents; however, Tex Avery claimed that he asked Blanc to give the character not a New York accent ''per se'', but a voice like that of actor Frank McHugh, who frequently appeared in supporting roles in the 1930s and whose voice might be described as New York Irish. In Bugs' second cartoon ''Elmer's Pet Rabbit'', Blanc created a completely new voice for Bugs, which sounded like a Jimmy Stewart impression, but the directors decided the previous voice was better. Though his best-known character was the carrot-chomping rabbit, munching on the carrots interrupted the dialogue. Various substitutes, such as celery, were tried, but none of them ''sounded'' like a carrot. So for the sake of expedience, he would munch and then spit the carrot bits into a spittoon rather than swallowing them, and continue with the dialogue. One often-repeated story, possibly originating from ''Bugs Bunny: Superstar'', is that Blanc was allergic to carrots and ''had'' to spit them out to minimize any allergic reaction — but his autobiography makes no such claim. In fact, in a 1984 interview with Tim Lawson, co-author of ''The Magic Behind The Voices: A Who's Who of Cartoon Voice Actors'' (University Press of Mississippi, 2004), Blanc emphatically denied being allergic to carrots.
;Jeff Bergman :Jeff Bergman was the first to voice Bugs Bunny (and several other Looney Tunes characters) after Blanc died in 1989. He got the job by impressing Warner Bros. higher-ups with a tape of himself re-creating the voices of several of Blanc's characters, including Bugs. He had rigged the tape player so that he could use a switch to instantly toggle back and forth between the original recording of Blanc and Bergman's recording of the same lines. Upon doing this, it was almost impossible for the producers to tell which voice was Blanc's and which voice was Bergman; thus his vocal ability was established and his career launched.
:Bergman first voiced Bugs during the 1990 Academy Awards and then in ''Box Office Bunny'', a 4-minute ''Looney Tunes'' short released in 1990 to commemorate Bugs' fiftieth anniversary. Bergman would next voice Bugs in the 1991 short ''(Blooper) Bunny'', a Greg Ford-directed cartoon produced to coincide with Bugs' 51st and a half anniversary. However, the short never received its intended theatrical release and was shelved for years, until Cartoon Network rediscovered it and broadcast it on their channel several years later. ''(Blooper) Bunny'' has since garnered a cult following among animation fans for its use of edgy humor. Other works for which Bergman provided Bugs' voice include ''Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers'' (an obvious parody of the 1950s sci-fi classic ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers''), ''Tiny Toon Adventures'' (a popular television program of the early nineties that featured the classic ''Looney Tunes'' characters as mentors to their younger counterparts) in the first season, and ''Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue'' (a television special exposing children to dangers of illegal drugs). Bergman would continue to do the voice of Bugs Bunny until 1993, apparently due to him having difficulty moving to Los Angeles at the time. In 2011, Bergman has returned to voice Bugs for Cartoon Network's new series, ''The Looney Tunes Show''.
;Greg Burson :Greg Burson first voiced Bugs Bunny in later episodes of ''Tiny Toon Adventures''. He was then given the responsibility of voicing Bugs in 1995's ''Carrotblanca'', a well-received 8-minute ''Looney Tunes'' cartoon originally shown in cinemas alongside ''The Amazing Panda Adventure'' (US) and ''The Pebble and the Penguin'' (non-US); it has since been released on video packaged with older ''Looney Tunes'' cartoons and was even included in the special edition DVD release of ''Casablanca'', of which it is both a parody and an homage. Burson next voiced Bugs in the 1996 short ''From Hare to Eternity''; the film is notable for being dedicated to the memory of the then-just deceased Friz Freleng, and for being the final ''Looney Tunes'' cartoon that Chuck Jones directed. Burson also provided Bugs' voice in ''The Bugs and Daffy Show'', which ran on Cartoon Network from 1996 to 2003. He died in 2008.
;Billy West :Billy West has been in television since the late 1980s. His first role was for the 1988 revived version of Bob Clampett's ''Beany and Cecil''. West's breakthrough role then came almost immediately, as the voice of Stimpy and later Ren in John Kricfalusi's ''Ren & Stimpy''. West has since been the voice talent for close to 120 different characters, including some of the most iconic animated figures in television history. Perhaps West's most notable film work came in the 1996 film ''Space Jam''. Starring alongside Michael Jordan, West provided the voice of both Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. West would go on to reprise the roles of Bugs in subsequent ''Looney Tunes'' productions, including his cameos on ''Histeria!'', also he made a cameo appearance on ''Kid vs. Kat'' in "Class Act", the Kids' WB! promotional spots, and the 2006 Christmas-themed special ''Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas'' and the DVD compilations "Reality Check" and "Stranger Than Fiction", along with several ''Looney Tunes''-centric CDs, cartoons, and video games.
;Joe Alaskey :Joe Alaskey, like Jeff Bergman, is well-known for his ability to successfully impersonate many ''Looney Tunes'' characters. In fact, Alaskey voiced Yosemite Sam in ''Who Framed Roger Rabbit'', as original voice actor Mel Blanc had found it too hard on his vocal cords (which makes Sam one of the few voices created by Blanc to be voiced by someone else during his lifetime). Alaskey's first performance as Bugs Bunny came in the 2003 feature film ''Looney Tunes: Back in Action'', although he had tested performing the role in a few earlier projects, such as ''Tweety's High-Flying Adventure''. While still best known for providing the voice of Daffy Duck, Alaskey has also gone on to do Bugs' voice in several subsequent productions, including ''Daffy Duck for President'' (which was released on ''The Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 2'' and dedicated to then-just deceased Chuck Jones) and several recent video games and Looney Tunes cartoons, including ''Hare and Loathing in Las Vegas''.
;Samuel Vincent :Samuel Vincent served as the voice of Bugs in the Cartoon Network TV series ''Baby Looney Tunes''.
;Noel Blanc :Noel Blanc, Mel Blanc's son, voiced Bugs for the ''Tiny Toons'' special ''It's a Wonderful Tiny Toon Christmas Special''. The elder Blanc claimed in his later years that Noel substituted for Mel in various cartoon studios, including doing Bugs at Warner Bros., while he was recovering from a near-fatal car wreck. Noel can also be seen doing Bugs' voice with his father in the documentary on the making of the film ''Who Framed Roger Rabbit''.
Bugs has also had an effect on "live" movie acting. During an interview for ''Inside the Actors Studio'', comedian Dave Chappelle cited him as one of his earliest influences, praising voice actor Mel Blanc.
According to Time Warner, Bugs Bunny became the current official mascot for Six Flags theme parks beginning with their 45th anniversary.
Category:Corporate mascots Category:DC Comics titles Category:Dell Comics titles Category:Fictional anthropomorphic characters Category:Fictional characters from New York City Category:Fictional hares and rabbits Category:Gold Key Comics titles Category:Honorary United States Marines Category:Looney Tunes characters Category:Fictional characters introduced in 1940
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| name | Rupert Murdoch |
|---|---|
| birth date | March 11, 1931 |
| birth name | Keith Rupert Murdoch |
| birth place | Melbourne, Australia |
| nationality | United States |
| citizenship | United States (naturalized 1985) |
| occupation | Chairman and CEO ofNews Corporation |
| networth | US$7.6 billion (2011) |
| spouse | (divorced) (divorced) |
| children | Prudence Murdoch (b. 1958) Elisabeth Murdoch (b. 1968) Lachlan Murdoch (b. 1971)James Murdoch (b. 1972)Grace Murdoch (b. 2001) Chloe Murdoch (b. 2003) |
| parents | Keith Murdoch (1885–1952)Elisabeth Joy (née Greene, b. 1909) |
| relatives | Matthew Freud (son-in-law)Sarah Murdoch (daughter-in-law) |
| awards | Companion of the Order of Australia (1984). |
| footnotes | Australian citizenship lost in 1985 (under S17 of Australian Citizenship Act 1948) with acquisition of US nationality }} |
Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG (born 11 March 1931) is an Australian American business magnate. He is the Chairman and CEO of , the world's second-largest media conglomerate.
In 1953, Murdoch became managing director of News Limited, inherited from his father. He acquired troubled newspapers in Australia and New Zealand during the 1950s and '60s before expanding into the UK in 1969, taking over the ''News of the World'' and then the ''The Sun'', which he built into Britain's best selling daily. He moved to New York in 1974 and expanded into the US market, and in 1985 he became a US citizen. In 1981, he bought ''The Times'', his first British broadsheet. In 1986, keen to adopt newer electronic publishing technologies, he consolidated his UK printing operations in Wapping, causing bitter industrial disputes. His News Corporation acquired Twentieth Century Fox (1985), HarperCollins (1989) and ''The Wall Street Journal'' (2007). He formed BSkyB in 1990 and during the 1990s expanded into Asian networks and South American television. By 2000 Murdoch's News Corporation owned over 800 companies in more than 50 countries with a net worth of over $5 billion.
In July 2011 Murdoch faced allegations that his companies including the ''News of the World'', owned by News Corporation, had been regularly hacking the phones of private citizens. He also faces police and government investigations into bribery and corruption in the UK and FBI investigations in the US.
Murdoch has been listed three times in the ''Time'' 100 as among the most influential people in the world. He is ranked 13th most powerful person in the world in the 2010 ''Forbes''' The World's Most Powerful People list. With a personal net worth of US$7.6 billion, he was ranked 117th wealthiest person in the world in March 2011.
Rupert Murdoch attended the elite Geelong Grammar School, where he had his first experience of editing a publication, being co-editor of the school's official journal ''The Corian'' and editor of the student journal ''If Revived''. He worked part time at the ''Melbourne Herald'' and was groomed by his father from an early age to take over the family business. Murdoch read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Worcester College, Oxford University in England, where he supported the Labour Party. After his father's death from cancer in 1952, Elisabeth Murdoch went on to invest herself in charity work, as life governor of the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne and establishing the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. At 102 (in 2011) she has 74 descendants. Rupert Murdoch did an MA before working as a sub-editor with the ''Daily Express'' for two years.
Murdoch's first foray outside Australia involved the purchase of a controlling interest in the New Zealand daily ''The Dominion''. In January 1964, while touring New Zealand with friends in a rented Morris Minor after sailing across the Tasman, Murdoch read of a takeover bid for the Wellington paper by the British-based Canadian newspaper magnate, Lord Thomson of Fleet. On the spur of the moment, he launched a counter-bid. A four-way battle for control ensued in which the 32-year-old Murdoch was ultimately successful. Later in 1964, Murdoch launched ''The Australian'', Australia's first national daily newspaper, and its first broadsheet, which was based first in Canberra and later in Sydney. In 1972, Murdoch acquired the Sydney morning tabloid ''The Daily Telegraph'' from Australian media mogul Sir Frank Packer, who later regreted selling it to him. In 1984, Murdoch was awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia for services to publishing.
In 1999, Murdoch significantly expanded his music holdings in Australia by acquiring the controlling share in a leading Australian independent label, Michael Gudinski's Mushroom Records; he merged that with Festival Records, and the result was Festival Mushroom Records (FMR). Both Festival and FMR were managed by Murdoch's son James Murdoch for several years.
After McEwen and Menzies retired, Murdoch threw his growing power behind the Australian Labor Party under the leadership of Gough Whitlam and duly saw it elected on a social platform that included universal free health care, free education for all Australians to tertiary level, recognition of the People's Republic of China, and public ownership of Australia's oil, gas and mineral resources. Rupert Murdoch's backing of Whitlam turned out to be brief. Murdoch had already started his short-lived ''National Star'' newspaper in America, and was seeking to strengthen his political contacts there.
Asked about the Australian federal election, 2007 at News Corporation's annual general meeting in New York on 19 October 2007, its chairman Rupert Murdoch said, "I am not commenting on anything to do with Australian politics. I'm sorry. I always get into trouble when I do that." Pressed as to whether he believed Prime Minister John Howard should be re-elected, he said: "I have nothing further to say. I'm sorry. Read our editorials in the papers. It'll be the journalists who decide that – the editors." In 2009, in response to accusations by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd that News Limited was running vendettas against him and his government, Murdoch opined that Rudd was "oversensitive" Murdoch described Howard's successor, Labor Party Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, as "...more ambitious to lead the world [in tackling climate change] than to lead Australia..." and criticised Rudd's expansionary fiscal policies in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 as unnecessary. Although News Limited's interests are extensive, also including the ''Daily Telegraph'', the ''Courier-Mail'' and the ''Adelaide Advertiser'', it was suggested by the commentator Mungo MacCallum in ''The Monthly'' that "the anti-Rudd push, if coordinated at all, was almost certainly locally driven" as opposed to being directed by Murdoch, who also took a different position from local editors on such matters climate change and stimulus packages to combat the financial crisis.
In 1968 Murdoch entered the UK newspaper market with his acquisition of the populist ''News of the World'', followed in 1969 with the purchase of the struggling daily broadsheet ''The Sun'' from IPC. Murdoch turned it into a tabloid format and reduced costs by using the same printing press for both newspapers. In 1997 ''The Sun'' attracted 10 million daily readers. In 1981, Murdoch acquired the struggling ''Times'' and ''Sunday Times'' from Canadian newspaper publisher Lord Thomson of Fleet. Ownership of ''The Times'' came to him through his relationship with Lord Thomson, who had grown tired of losing money on it as a result of much industrial action that stopped publication. In the light of success and expansion at ''The Sun'' the owners believed that Murdoch could turn the papers around. Harold Evans, Editor of the ''Sunday Times'' from 1967, was made head of the daily ''Times'', though he stayed only a year amidst editorial conflict with Murdoch.
During the 1980s and early 1990s, Murdoch's publications were generally supportive of Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. At the end of the Thatcher/Major era, Murdoch switched his support to the Labour Party and its leader, Tony Blair. The closeness of his relationship with Blair and their secret meetings to discuss national policies was to become a political issue in Britain. Though this later started to change, with ''The Sun'' publicly renouncing the ruling Labour government and lending its support to David Cameron's Conservative Party, which soon after came to form a coalition government. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown's official spokesman said in November 2009 that Brown and Murdoch "were in regular communication" and that "there is nothing unusual in the prime minister talking to Rupert Murdoch".
In 1986, Murdoch introduced electronic production processes to his newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States. The greater degree of automation led to significant reductions in the number of employees involved in the printing process. In England, the move roused the anger of the print unions, resulting in a long and often violent dispute that played out in Wapping, one of London's docklands areas, where Murdoch had installed the very latest electronic newspaper purpose-built publishing facility in an old warehouse. The bitter dispute at Wapping started with the dismissal of 6,000 employees who had gone on strike and resulted in street battles and demonstrations. Many on the political left in Britain alleged the collusion of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government with Murdoch in the Wapping affair, as a way of damaging the British trade union movement. In 1987, the dismissed workers accepted a settlement of £60 million.
Murdoch's British-based satellite network, Sky Television, incurred massive losses in its early years of operation. As with many of his other business interests, Sky was heavily subsidised by the profits generated by his other holdings, but convinced rival satellite operator British Satellite Broadcasting to accept a merger on his terms in 1990. They were quick to see advantages of direct to home (DTH) satellite broadcasting that did not require costly cable networks and the merged company, BSkyB, has dominated the British pay-TV market ever since. By 1996, BSkyB had more than 3.6 million subscribers, triple the number of cable customers in the UK.
In response to print media's decline and the increasing influence of online journalism during the 2000s, Murdoch proclaimed his support of the micropayments model for obtaining revenue from on-line news, although this has been criticised by some.
News Corporation has subsidiaries in the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands and the Virgin Islands. From 1986, News Corporation's annual tax bill averaged around seven percent of its profits.
In a speech delivered in New York, Rupert Murdoch said that the British Prime Minister Tony Blair described the BBC coverage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster as being full of hatred of America.
In 1998, Rupert Murdoch failed in his attempt to buy the football club Manchester United F.C. with an offer of £625 million. It was the largest amount ever offered for a sports club. It was blocked by the United Kingdom's Competition Commission, which stated that the acquisition would have "hurt competition in the broadcast industry and the quality of British football".
On 28 June 2006 the BBC reported that Murdoch and News Corporation were flirting with the idea of backing Conservative leader David Cameron at the next General Election. In a later interview in July 2006, when he was asked what he thought of the Conservative leader, Murdoch replied "Not much". In a 2009 blog, it was suggested that in the aftermath of the News of the World phone hacking scandal which is still ongoing in 2011 and might yet have Transatlantic implications Murdoch and News Corporation might have decided to back Cameron. Despite this, there had already been a convergence of interests between the two men over the muting of Britain's communications regulator Ofcom.
In 2006, Britain's ''Independent'' newspaper reported that Murdoch would offer Tony Blair a senior role in his global media company News Corporation when the prime minister stood down from office.
He is accused by former Solidarity MSP Tommy Sheridan of having a personal vendetta against him and of conspiring with MI5 to produce a video of him confessing to having affairs – allegations over which Sheridan had previously sued News International and won. On being arrested for perjury following the case, Sheridan claimed that the charges were "orchestrated and influenced by the powerful reach of the Murdoch empire".
In August 2008 British Conservative leader and future Prime Minister David Cameron accepted free flights to hold private talks and attend private parties with Murdoch on his yacht, the ''Rosehearty''. Cameron has declared in the Commons register of interests he accepted a private plane provided by Murdoch's son-in-law, public relations guru Matthew Freud; Cameron has not revealed his talks with Murdoch. The gift of travel in Freud's Gulfstream IV private jet was valued at around £30,000. Other guests attending the "social events" included the then EU trade commissioner Lord Mandelson, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and co-chairman of NBC Universal Ben Silverman. The Conservatives have not disclosed what was discussed.
In July 2011 it emerged that Cameron met key executives of Murdoch's News Corporation 26 times during the 14 months that Cameron had served as Prime Minister. It was also reported that Murdoch had given Cameron a personal guarantee that there would be no risk attached to hiring Andy Coulson, the former editor of ''News of the World'', as the Conservative Party's communication director in 2007. This was in spite of Coulson having resigned as editor over phone hacking by a reporter. Cameron chose to take Murdoch's advice, despite warnings from Nick Clegg, Lord Ashdown and ''The Guardian''. Coulson resigned his post in 2011 and was later arrested and questioned on allegations of further criminal activity at The ''News of the World'', specifically the News International phone hacking scandal.
On 14 July, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons served a summons on Murdoch, his son James, and his former CEO Rebekah Brooks to testify before a committee on 19 July. After an initial refusal, the Murdochs confirmed they would attend after the committee issued them a summons to Parliament. The day before the committee, the website of the News Corporation publication ''The Sun'' was hacked, and a bogus story was posted on the front page claiming that Murdoch had died. Murdoch described the day of the committee "the most humble day of my life". He argued that since he ran a global business of 53,000 employees and that the ''News of the World'' was "just 1%" of this, he was not ultimately responsible for what went on at the tabloid. He added that he had not considered resigning, and that he and the other top executives had been completely unaware of the hacking.
On 15 July Rupert Murdoch attended a private meeting in London with the family of Milly Dowler, where he personally apologised for the hacking of their murdered daughter's voicemail by a company he owns. On 16 and 17 July, News International published two full-page apologies in many of Britain's national newspapers. The first apology took the form of a letter, signed by Rupert Murdoch, in which he said sorry for the "serious wrongdoing" that occurred. The second was titled "Putting right what's gone wrong", and gave more detail about the steps News International was taking to address the public's concerns. In the wake of the allegations Murdoch accepted the resignations of Rebekah Brooks, head of Murdoch's British operations, and Les Hinton, head of ''The Wall Street Journal'' who was chairman of Murdoch's British newspaper division when some of the abuses happened. They both deny any knowledge of any wrong-doing under their command.
In 2004, Murdoch announced that he was moving News Corporation headquarters from Adelaide, Australia to the United States. Choosing a US domicile was designed to ensure that American fund managers could purchase shares in the company, since many were deciding not to buy shares in non-US companies. Some analysts believed that News Corporation's Australian domicile was leading to the company being undervalued compared with its peers.
On 20 July 2005, News Corporation bought Intermix Media Inc., which held Myspace, Imagine Games Network and other social networking-themed websites, for $580 million USD, making Murdoch a major in online media concerns. In June 2011, it sold off Myspace for US$35 million. On 11 September 2005, News Corporation announced that it would buy IGN Entertainment for $650 million (USD).
In May 2007, Murdoch made a $5 billion offer to purchase Dow Jones. At the time, the Bancroft family, who had owned the Dow Jones for 105 years and controlled 64% of the shares at the time, firmly declined the offer, opposing Murdoch's much-used strategy of slashing employee numbers and gutting existing systems. Later, the Bancroft family confirmed a willingness to consider a sale. Besides Murdoch, the Associated Press reported that supermarket magnate Ron Burkle and Internet entrepreneur Brad Greenspan were among the other interested parties. In 2007, Murdoch had acquired Dow Jones, an acquisition which gave Murdoch such publications as ''The Wall Street Journal'', ''Barron's Magazine'', the ''Far Eastern Economic Review'' (based in Hong Kong) and ''SmartMoney''.
On 8 May 2006, the ''Financial Times'' reported that Murdoch would be hosting a fund-raiser for Senator Hillary Clinton's (D-New York) Senate re-election campaign. In a 2008 interview with Walt Mossberg, Murdoch was asked whether he had "anything to do with the ''New York Post'''s endorsement of Barack Obama in the democratic primaries." Without hesitating, Murdoch replied, "Yeah. He is a rock star. It's fantastic. I love what he is saying about education. I don't think he will win Florida... but he will win in Ohio and the election. I am anxious to meet him. I want to see if he will walk the walk." Murdoch is a strong supporter of Israel and its domestic policies.
In 2010 News Corporation gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association and $1 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Murdoch also served on the board of directors of the libertarian Cato Institute.
On 25 June 1999, 17 days after divorcing his second wife, Murdoch, then aged 68, married Chinese-born Deng Wendi (Wendi Deng). She was 30, a recent Yale School of Management graduate, and a newly appointed vice-president of his STAR TV. Murdoch has two children with her.
After graduating from Vassar College and marrying classmate Elkin Kwesi Pianim (the son of Ghanaian financial and political mogul Kwame Pianim) in 1993, Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth, along with her husband, purchased a pair of NBC-affiliate television stations in California, KSBW and KSBY, with a $35 million loan provided by her father. By quickly re-organising and re-selling them at a $12 million profit in 1995, Elisabeth emerged as an unexpected rival to her brothers for the eventual leadership of the publishing dynasty's empire. But after divorcing her first husband in 1998 and quarrelling publicly with her assigned mentor Sam Chisholm at BSkyB, she struck out on her own as a television and film producer in London. She has since enjoyed independent success, in conjunction with her second husband, Matthew Freud, the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud (the founder of psychoanalysis) whom she met in 1997 and married in 2001.
It is not known how long Murdoch will remain as News Corporation's CEO. For a while the American cable television entrepreneur John Malone was the second-largest voting shareholder in News Corporation after Murdoch himself, potentially undermining the family's control. In 2007, the company announced that it would sell certain assets and give cash to Malone's company in exchange for its stock. In 2007, the company issued Murdoch's older children voting stock.
Rupert Murdoch has two children with Wendi Deng: Grace (b. New York, 19 November 2001) and Chloe (b. New York, 17 July 2003). There is reported to be tension between Murdoch and his oldest children over the terms of a trust holding the family's 28.5 percent stake in News Corporation, estimated in 2005 to be worth about $6.1 billion. Under the trust, his children by Wendi Deng share in the proceeds of the stock but have no voting privileges or control of the stock. Voting rights in the stock are divided 50/50 between Murdoch on the one side and his children of his first two marriages. Murdoch's voting privileges are not transferable but will expire upon his death and the stock will then be controlled solely by his children from the prior marriages, although their half-siblings will continue to derive their share of income from it. It is Murdoch's stated desire to have his children by Deng given a measure of control over the stock proportional to their financial interest in it (which would mean, if Murdoch dies while at least one of the children is a minor, that Deng would exercise that control). It does not appear that he has any strong legal grounds to contest the present arrangement, and both ex-wife Anna and their three children are said to be strongly resistant to any such change.
Rupert Murdoch has been portrayed by Barry Humphries in the 1991 mini-series ''Selling Hitler'', Hugh Laurie in a parody of ''It's a Wonderful Life'' in the television show ''A Bit of Fry & Laurie'', Ben Mendelsohn in the film ''Black and White'', Paul Elder in ''The Late Shift'' and by himself on ''The Simpsons'' first in "Sunday, Cruddy Sunday" and most recently in "Judge Me Tender".
It has been speculated that the character of Elliot Carver, the global media magnate and main villain in the 1997 James Bond movie ''Tomorrow Never Dies'', is based on Rupert Murdoch. The writer of the film, Bruce Feirstein, has stated that Carver was actually inspired by British press magnate Robert Maxwell, who was one of Murdoch's rivals. Since both Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell had the same initials they were often confused by the public. This confusion was exploited by the writers of the British situation comedy 'Drop the Dead Donkey' which was set in a TV newsroom who chose to name the fictional proprietor Sir Roysten Merchant (initials RM). The writers state on their DVD commentares that it was "fortunate" for them that the two men shared the same initials.
In the 1997 film ''Fierce Creatures'', the head of Octopus Inc. Rod McCain (initials R.M.) character is likely modeled after Rupert Murdoch.
In 1999, the Ted Turner owned TBS aired an original sitcom, ''The Chimp Channel''. This featured an all-simian cast and the role of an Australian TV veteran named Harry Waller. The character is described as "a self-made gazillionaire with business interests in all sorts of fields. He owns newspapers, hotel chains, sports franchises and genetic technologies, as well as everyone's favorite cable TV channel, The Chimp Channel." Waller is thought to be a parody of Murdoch, a long-time rival of Turner's.
In 2004, the movie ''Outfoxed'' included many interviews accusing Fox News of pressuring reporters to report only one side of news stories, in order to influence viewers' political opinions.
Category:Living people Category:1931 births
Category:Alumni of Worcester College, Oxford Category:American businesspeople Category:American billionaires Category:American publishers (people) Category:American mass media owners Category:American people of Australian descent Category:Australian billionaires Category:Australian businesspeople Category:Australian emigrants to the United States Category:Australian mass media owners Category:Australian people of Scottish descent Category:Businesspeople from Melbourne Category:Companions of the Order of Australia Category:Critics of the European Union Category:Fox Broadcasting Company executives Category:Los Angeles Dodgers owners Category:Major League Baseball owners Category:Major League Baseball executives Category:Murdoch family Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:New York Post people Category:News Corporation people Category:News International phone hacking scandal Category:Newspaper publishers (people) Category:People educated at Geelong Grammar School Category:People from Adelaide
ar:روبرت مردوخ bn:রুপার্ট মার্ডক bcl:Rupert Murdoch bg:Рупърт Мърдок ca:Rupert Murdoch cs:Rupert Murdoch cy:Rupert Murdoch da:Rupert Murdoch de:Rupert Murdoch et:Rupert Murdoch el:Ρούπερτ Μέρντοχ es:Rupert Murdoch eo:Rupert Murdoch fa:روپرت مرداک fr:Rupert Murdoch gl:Rupert Murdoch ko:루퍼트 머독 hi:रुपर्ट मर्डोक id:Rupert Murdoch it:Rupert Murdoch he:רופרט מרדוק kn:ರುಪರ್ಟ್ ಮುರ್ಡೋಕ್ la:Rupertus Murdoch lt:Rupert Murdoch hu:Rupert Murdoch ml:റുപേർട്ട് മർഡോക്ക് mr:रुपर्ट मरडॉक ms:Rupert Murdoch nl:Rupert Murdoch ja:ルパート・マードック no:Rupert Murdoch pl:Rupert Murdoch pt:Rupert Murdoch ru:Мёрдок, Руперт sq:Rupert Murdoch sk:Rupert Murdoch sr:Руперт Мердок sh:Rupert Murdoch fi:Rupert Murdoch sv:Rupert Murdoch ta:ரூப்பர்ட் மர்டாக் tr:Rupert Murdoch uk:Руперт Мердок vi:Rupert Murdoch yi:רופערט מורדאק zh:鲁伯特·默多克This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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