Casino Zürich (Zurich, Swiss) - Review - Tripadvisor

Source : http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-41762132.html
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" The "Osservatore Romano", which registers all visitors to the Holy Father in its daily court chronicle, recently left a prominent guest unmentioned: the Italian Baron Bernadino Nogara, Pope Pius XII had given a special audience. Nogara, although a layman, has been one of the key figures in the Vatican for decades. As "Delegate of the Special Administration of the Holy See", he practically fulfills the functions of Minister of Finance of the Catholic Church.
Baron Nogara, who is already 86 years old and also suffers from atherosclerosis, had a clear reason for his visit:
He asked the Holy Father to release him from his ministry for reasons of age. As his successor, he proposed the sixty-year-old Baron Massimo Spada, who, like Nogara, has been a member of the Vatican's financial brainwave for many years and is the official treasurer of the Italian Catholic Action.Pius XII. allowed the aged Nogara to transfer part of his duties to Baron Spada, who has practically taken over the financial department. But he did not officially resign, which was considered a gesture of special favor in the Vatican to a person credited with the main merit that the Vatican is probably the largest shareholder in the world today.
The secrecy surrounding Nogara's audience with the Holy Father was consistent with the traditional discretion with which the Curia has handled all matters of finance since the founding of the Vatican City. Not only does the Vatican refuse any information about its assets or financial transactions, it also refuses to give account to its believers about its budget.Nevertheless, it is no secret that the Holy See is one of the world's largest financial powers and its political influence has grown steadily in recent years, not least for this reason. The sheer size of the Vatican's business activity is indicated by the fact that the name of the Money Manager Nogara appears on at least 74 boards of major companies. (In the Federal Republic, the banker Hermann Abs holds the top with 26 supervisory board posts.)
Maintaining the Vatican business secrets is, above all, ensured by the fact that the management of shareholdings is concentrated in the hands of a few lay Catholics. The left-liberal Roman weekly "Espresso" (subsidy donors: formerly the office machinery company Olivetti, now Fiat) recently published a list of these personalities, which has eleven names:Next to Nogara and Spada there are the three nephews of the Pope (Carlo, Marcantonio and Giulio Pacelli), Count Pietro Enrico Galeazzi (Director of the Vatican City Technical Works), Giovanni Battista Sacchetti (Upper Palatine), Eugenio Gualdi, Count Paolo Blumenstihl, Francesco Maria Oddasso and former Italian Ambassador Vittorio Cerruti.The names of these personalities appear on the boards of almost all leading companies in Italy, with the exception of the car rust Fiat and the rubber company Pirelli and thus give valuable information on where the Vatican has shareholdings.
In the banking sector, the Vatican has a blocking minority, most notably the Banco di Roma (Chairman of the Board Giulio Pacelli), and has significant stakes in Banco di Santo Spirito (Chairman Baron Spada), Milanese Banco Ambrosiano and Banco Novarra. Nogara's name appears in Milan's largest bank, Banca * Commerciale Italiana, Spada's name in Credito Italiano, both of which are predominantly owned by the public sector.The fact that the pope's nephews are also members of the boards of directors of the Roman gas and power stations is exploited time and again by communist propaganda. Roman workers jokingly call the word "Pacelli" to their wives when they have used up too much gas or electricity to suggest that Pacelli should not be earning any more.
As a Roman scandal revealed last year, the Vatican also has share packages of almost all property companies in Italy. In the "Generale Immobiliare", the largest company of this kind, which owns 800 hectares of land in Rome and its immediate vicinity, the Curia is likely to be directly or indirectly involved with about 40 percent. Chairman of the board of "Immobiliare" is Baron Nogara, General Director Eugenio Gualdi, who sits in a number of similar companies and is the property specialist of the Vatican.Overall, the "espresso" estimates the assets of the Holy See to $ 12 billion, which corresponds to an amount of 50 billion marks. (The nominal capital of all West German corporations amounts to about 26 billion marks.)
The rise of the Vatican to one of the world's most important financial powers has taken place in the last 80 years. The effort to invest the assets of the church in shares goes to Leo XIII who became famous as a proclaimer of the Catholic social doctrine, but at the same time was an ingenious financier and who closed the alliance of the Catholic Church with modern capitalism.The expropriations by the state immediately after the Italian unification in 1870 had been a heavy blow to the Vatican, whose possession had been predominantly immovable. Leo XIII One year after his accession to the throne in 1878, he founded the real estate administration "Beni Stabili", with the help of which he restored the chronically disordered finances of the Roman Curia in a few years.
His successors, the canonized Pius X and Benedict XV, who became known during his First World War peace mission, did not make much sense for such mundane matters as stocks and foreign exchange, so that the Holy See soon became in serious financial trouble again. Only Pius XI, predecessor of the present Pope, was able to cope with this calamity.
Pius XI founded the "Special Administration" of the Holy See to administer the two billion lire (at that time about 450. million Reichsmark), which paid Italy's government under Mussolini after the signing of the Lateran contracts for the after 1870 expropriated in Italy, church property. While the "Beni Stabili" manages the land ownership, the special administration oversees the shareholding of the curia.The current ruling Pope Pius XII. added a third to these two institutions, the "Opera Religiosa" ("Institute of Religious Works"), which has become the house bank of the Vatican. She works closely with the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt in Zurich, which in turn is to be involved with the Jesuit Order with a sizeable package. The close connection between the two financial institutions is already evident in the fact that an employee of the Swiss Credit Institute sits as a permanent liaison in the Roman "Opera Religiosa".
Account No. 1 of the "Opera Religiosa" belongs to the pope and is considered his private casket. The Peterspfennig, which flows into Rome as a contribution from the dioceses of the world, is also paid into this account. The "Opera Religiosa" has the advantage over all other banks that it can guard banking secrecy as well as confessional secrecy, since no tax authority of the Italian state has insight into business transactions on Vatican territory.
There are a number of privileged personalities in the Italian financial world who are allowed to set up accounts in the "Opera Religiosa" and benefit greatly, not least because Italian foreign exchange regulations do not apply in the extra-territorial Vatican City. Thus, it is alleged on Roman stock exchanges that the abdicated Italian royal family had secretly made substantial assets into neutral foreign countries as early as 1942 via the "Opera Religiosa".In addition to the billions of Vatican shares, it is necessary to include those assets that are in the hands of religious orders and are therefore controlled in whole or in part by the Vatican. In the first place as a shareholder is the Jesuit Order, whose holdings are estimated at five billion dollars.The influence of the Society of Jesus in the American financial world first became apparent fifty years ago, when Italian financier AP Giannini founded the Bank of California, which today is one of the largest banks in the world under the new name Bank of America. Giannini was an extremely skilful financier who owed his starting capital to the Jesuits and figured as their trust or straw man. Today, Bank of America is 51 percent owned by the Order.
In San Francisco, the Society of Jesus financed another Italian financier, the Sicilian Antonio Di Giorgio, who founded the politically influential fruit company "Di Giorgio Fruit Company". The group owns extensive fruit and banana plantations in Central America and a transport fleet of more than 100 ships.The Jesuits are also involved in the major US steel companies Republic Steel and National Steel, as well as in the four major US aircraft plants: Boeing, Lockheed, Douglas and Curtiss-Wright. They also control the independent petroleum company "Phillips Oil Co." in Galveston, Texas, and the Creole Petroleum Co., which has extensive concessions in South American Venezuela.
Until American companies launched competitor companies in South America a few years ago, the Society of Jesus also had a monopoly on mercury. In fact, in 1923, the Order's financial experts managed to seize all the shares of Almaden's famous Spanish mercury mines held by the Madrid bank Banco Hispano-Americano.
From the point of view of stock market history, it was a masterly coup, for the Jesuits beat America's largest chemical concern du Pont de Nemours out of the field; who also wanted to acquire the Almaden shares. The founder of this trust, Alfred II du Pont de Nemours; said then: "I have had a great experience, one should never argue with priests, especially with Jesuits."
In 1932, the Jesuits acquired the Tuscan mercury mines in Italy, which, together with Almaden, supplied the world market almost exclusively until a few years ago. During the Second World War, the Order earned on both sides with this armor-important resource. While the Spanish company supplied mainly to the Allies and Russia, the Italian mines supplied the German armaments.In France, the interests of the Society of Jesus extend to the car companies Peugeot and Citroen and the "Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas", the numerous companies in France, Belgium and Holland, such as Schneider -Creusot, but also the casino controlled by Ostend. The Jesuits also have a decisive influence on the Paris Bancque Francaise et Italienne for l'Amérique du Sud, in whose supervisory board again the Vatican financial expert Nogara appears; this financial institution virtually dominates the South American coffee market and the New York coffee exchange.
The assets of the Order are, however, largely in the hands of the American Jesuits, who are economically independent of Rome and do not wish the Holy See to have direct control over their possessions. The last Extraordinary Religious Consecration last fall saw considerable tensions as the Roman Curia demanded control of the entire American estate of the Order.The eight thousand American religious patrons, however, were able to escape access to Rome until further notice because they had the American bishops on their side. Their position is strong enough for the Roman Curia as well: The Vatican receives more money each year from the Archdiocese of New York than from all European Catholics.
* In Italy, banking institutions use both the masculine and older forms "Banco" and the newer feminine form "Banca".
Pope nephew Giulio Pacelli
On the stock exchange ...
... never quarrel with priests: Papal banker Nogara"

Quote of the Day

The past revolutions show us only too well: “the red flag can be waved against the red flag” until the freikorps arrive.

— Theorie Communiste
Word of the Day
Top-Down — Denoting a system in which actions are initiated at the top of a hierarchy. One might think the opposite to be "bottom-up," but this still assumes an "up"; many grass-roots initiatives make this error, attempting to exert leverage through political channels rather than developing the power to achieve their goal autonomously. Better simply to topple pyramids than to attempt to defy gravity.
1553 — Francois Rabelais dies, Paris France. His last will states:

"I have nothing. I owe much. I leave the rest to the poor."

1626 — Death of Francis Bacon, statesman/philosopher.
1754 — New Old World: Letter from Indian slave trader to South Carolina Governor J. Glenn asking for permission to use one group of Indians to fight another:

"We want no pay, only what we can take & plunder, & what slaves we take to be our own."

1802 — Elias Lönnrot lives (1802 - 1884). Collector of folklore, linguist, medical doctor, professor in Finnish philology. Compiler of the Finnish national epic Kalevala for which he traveled among the Lapps, the Estonians & the Finnish for about 10 years interviewing & writing down their stories, poems & songs.
He also compiled a Finnish-Swedish dictionary & began the first magazine in Finnish, Mehiläinen (The Bee). Not enough: he also wrote & arranged psalms.
1821 — Charles Baudelaire lives (1821-1867), Paris.
One of the great 19th century French poets, who formed with Stéphane Mallarmé & Paul Verlaine the so-called Decadents. His translations of Edgar Allan Poe made Poe better known in France than the US. He became addicted to opium & hashish, & contracted syphilis, which proved lethal, while in law school.
When his Les Fleur du Mal appeared in 1857 all — author, publisher, & printer — are prosecuted & found guilty of obscenity & blasphemy.
After a lecture tour in Belgium he became seriously ill & died in Paris in his mother's arms.

"Genius is childhood recaptured."

1834 — France: In Lyon, the insurrection of the Silk workers begins. It is the beginning of the "Sanglante semaine" (Bloody Week).
1839 — Eadweard Muybridge, pioneered study of motion in photography, lives, Kingston upon Thames, England.
1859 — US: Caution? Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is licensed as a Mississippi steamboat pilot in St. Louis after his two-year apprenticeship.
1865 — US: Civil War ends with Lee's surrender at the Appomattox courthouse. Over 500,000 lay dead (out of a 35 million population).
1866 — US: Congress passes a bill — over the veto of Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Andrew Johnson — guaranteeing the same civil rights to all persons born in the US (citizenship for all — except Indians, of course). The prez is empowered to use the Army to enforce the law.
1874 — US: Crapshoot? Muckleshoot Indian Reservation established (Washington State). (The casino came much later.)
1877 — Louis Rimbault, French anarchiste & vegetarian, lives (1877-1949).
1879 — William Claude Dukenfield, a.k.a. W. C. Fields, lives (or Jan 29?).

"Taint a fit night out for man nor beast..."

1880 — Maria Jotuni (1880 - 1943) lives, Kuopio. Novelist, playwright, one of the classic feminist authors in Finland. Jotuni was influenced by postnaturalism & impressionism, expressed in her choice of form: short stories, fragments of prose, impressions & dialog. She often shows society from a woman's point of view, as in her major novel, Huojuva Talo (1963).
1885 — France: During this month, début de la parution, à Paris, sous la direction de Jean Grave, de la deuxième série de l'organe anarchiste Le Révolté.
1894 — France: Hunger revolt in Lyons.
1898 — US: American Renaissance man Paul Robeson lives, Princeton, New Jersey. Football star, actor, singer, black liberation fighter.
During the Cold War, Robeson was not allowed to leave the Land of the Free & the Blacklist virtually destroyed his career. (Oddly, seemingly the same rightwingers who deny the Holocaust ever happened also deny existence of the Blacklist.)
Exiled communist, with a voice so international that it could be heard on the only juke box in the only public bar in the only hotel in Ulan Bator, Mongolia during the bad old days of Stalinism.
He renounced his US citizenship.
1908 — US: Beloved & Respected Comrade leader President Teddy Roosevelt investigates legality of not only barring anarchist propaganda that advocates political violence, but also prosecuting those who produce the material.
1914 — Admiral Henry T. Mayo, acting on his own, provokes an international incident by demanding a special 21-gun salute from Mexicans at Tampico. To save face Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Woodrow Wilson sent an American fleet to Veracruz, & occupied the city in retaliation for the arrest of US sailors in Tampico.

"They sell a little image of us in the markets of Mexico, with a bowie knife in one side of the girdle, & a Colt's revolver in the other, a huge loaf of bread in the left hand, & a slave whip in the right. That is America!"

— Wendell Phillips
1915 — US: Frank Abarno & Carmine Carbone, members of the Italian anarchist Gruppo Gaetano Bresci, accused of planting bombs in St. Patrick's Cathedral & the Church of St. Alphonsus on the five year anniversary (October 13, 1914) of the execution of Francisco Ferrer, are today sentenced to 6 to 12 years in prison.
1917 — English poet, Edward Thomas, dies in Arras, France.
1918 — Russia: In Moscow, anarchist black guards confiscate the car of the American ambassador.
The car is seized in an effort to effect the release of political prisoners & trade union militants imprisoned in America. This action serves as a pretext for the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, to mount a sweeping attack on the anarchists on the night of April 11.
1919 — Bavaria: Spartacus League attempts a military coup d'etat against Bavarian Councils Republic to establish a "proletarian dictatorship."
1919 — Bavaria: Second Bavarian Councils Republic destroyed by "Freikorps" under orders of Social-Democratic government.
1919 — John Presper Eckert, co-inventor of first electronic computer (ENIAC), lives.
1919 — The 8th 'Dada-Soirée', at the 'Kaufleuten-Saal.' During a reading of Walter Serner the audience begins with interjections & finally some of them attack the stage. The whole auditorium is in commotion & Dada-Zurich ends in tumult & chaos — just as it began.
1927 — US: Massachusetts: Death sentences for "those anarchistic bastards" (quote from the trial Judge Thayer during the trial) Nicolas Sacco & Bartolomeo Vanzetti are upheld.
excerpt...AMERICA

...America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die...

— Allen Ginsberg
1928 — The 20th century's greatest living American classical composer, arranger, musician, singer: Folk singer, protester Tom Lehrer lives.

I'd like to take you now, on wings of song as it were, & try & help you forget for a while your drab, wretched lives.

— Tom Lehrer, "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"
1930 — High Seas: IWW organizes 1700 member crew on the Leviathan, then the world's largest vessel.
1932 — Yippie! The 20th century's greatest living American journalist, The Realist editor Paul Krassner, lives! Accompanied Groucho Marx on his first LSD trip, cofounder of the Youth International Party. Yippie!!
1932 — Rock n' Roll's Carl Perkins lives, to wear Blue Suede Shoes.

"If it weren't for the rocks in its bed,
The stream would have no song."

— Carl Perkins
1936 — Italy: La Società delle Nazioni, riferendosi all'aggressione in Etiopia, accusa lo stato italiano di aver effettuato bombardamenti sulla popolazione civile, di aver condotto operazioni contro obiettivi contrassegnati dal simbolo della Croce Rossa, di aver utilizzato gas asfissianti. Sono accuse gravissime che dovrebbero spingere alla vergogna tutto il popolo italiano che, invece, continua ad esaltare lo stato fascista ed il suo duce.
1942 — Norway: Teachers returning from strike publicly reject Nazification.
1947 — US: First day of Freedom Ride, the "Journey of Reconciliation," sponsored by CORE & FOR, with white & black activists riding (otherwise) segregated buses through four southern states.
April 9-23 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsors interstate bus ride to test June 3, 1946 Supreme Court ruling that Negro passengers can not be forced to sit at the back; Bayard Rustin, of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Igal Roodenko, & Joseph Felmet serve 30 days on a chain gang. Lynchings in the south have reached 1918 levels, as Negro G.I.s return, talk of getting the rights they fought for.
1948 — Colombia: If they do not kill him, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán will be president.

Buy him, they cannot. To what temptation will he succumb who despises the pleasures, who is single, who eats little, drinks nothing & refuses anesthesia to remove a tooth?
The poor & ragged ones adore him, flock to hear him speak. They say when Gaitán speaks it breaks the fog in Bogota.
The arrogant caudillo, tidbit statue face, speaks the naked language of the oligarchy, sitting on the knees of the imperialistic ventriloquist — an oligarchy without its own life, its own words, mouthing agrarian reform & other truths that end a lie.
— ¡Lo mataron! ¡Lo mataron! —
In the street, three shots. Time has run out, Gaitán is left unemployed... Jorge Eliécer Gaitán is assassinated. Listening, earthquake noises, a human avalanche comes to him above. From suburbs & hills, advances a whirlwind, a hurricane of the pain & wrath comes sweeping the city, breaking show windows, upsetting street cars, setting afire buildings...

—Eduardo Galeano, Century of the Wind
1948 — Palestine: Menachem Begin's Irgun & Stern Gang terrorists murder about 120 men, women & children of the neutral Palestinian-Arab village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem (Deir Yassin massacre).
1950 — France: A group of lettrists — including Serge Berna, Jean-Louis Brau, Ghislain Desnoyers de Marbaix & Michel Mourre — perpetrates the Notre-Dame Scandal, when Mourre, dressed as a Dominican monk, reads a sermon prepared by Berna announcing the death of God at Easter mass.
1956 — US: African American songster Nat King Cole is beaten up by a group of racial segregationists in Birmingham, Alabama.
1963 — Winston Churchill, 88, is proclaimed an honorary US citizen by Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Boot-Legger's son, John. Dad Joe Kennedy, Ambassador to England & a notorious WWII right-wing defeatist, rolls in his grave.
1966 — US: Week of Angry Arts Vietnam Mobilization fund raiser at Longshoremen’s Hall, 400 North Point St., in Frisco.
1967 — US: Digger Emmett Grogan arrives in NY (6 week trip, having left someplace about March 1).
1967 — US: Second day of riots in Nashville, following Stokely Carmichael's speech at Fisk University.
1969 — US: Deanie Babies?: Harvard students take over the campus administration building, ousting the deans. 300 led by SDS seize University Hall. More action to come over next few days.
1976 — Folk singer Phil Ochs hangs himself at his sister's house, Far Rockaway, NY.
1979 — Longest doubles ping-pong match of 101 hours, begins.
1981 — Canada: Members of Big Stone Cree end a 250 mile march to Edmonton, Alberta, to highlight economic plight of Big Stone Cree in northern Alberta.
1984 — US: One day after his administration announces it will not recognize the Worlds Court's jurisdiction over the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader acting President Reagan proclaims May 1 as "Law Day USA."
1986 — US: The Sam Goody record chain & top company executive are convicted of trafficking in pirated tapes.
1989 — US: Over 300,000 choice supporters march in Washington, D.C., to defend the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. A 1985 poll showed that 74 percent of the country did not believe that abortion could be outlawed again. But with the right to choose clearly in danger, agitated volunteers have inundated the National Organization for Women, the National Abortion Rights Action League, Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union & the Fund for the Feminist Majority.
1992 — Comedian Sam Kinison dies when a pickup truck slams into his car on a desert road between L.A. & Las Vegas.
1995 — US: Over 100,000 at Rally For Women's Lives, Washington, DC.
1997 — Mad Cow Disease — while much of the world shuns British cows, a Cambodian newspaper suggested yesterday that the animals be shipped to Cambodia & allowed to roam free & detonate the millions of land mines littering the country.
1999 — The People's Poetry Gathering, sponsored by City Lore, is scheduled to take place all around Manhattan. (April 9-11)
2002 — Phil Ochs Tribute, Tractor Tavern in Seattle, Washington. Includes local musicians such as Baby Gramps, Reggie Garrett.