Word: eca
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Last week on the back of a cigarette box, Sophocles Venizelos' new government (Greece's 18th since liberation), a Liberal-Populist-Social Democrat coalition, looked fine. It totted up to 158 seats. But ECA officials had lost patience with cabinet shuffling. At week's end ECA and State Department officials announced a slash in Greek assistance funds. "This action," said a Department spokesman, "is based upon the conclusion, after careful consideration and analysis, that the rate of progress in the Greek program has not been sufficient to allow complete and effective utilization of the amount originally contemplated...
...blow fell only six weeks after Greece's ECA Chief Paul Porter had told a U.S. correspondent: "You can say I'm optimistic-better make it cautiously optimistic." Added Porter: "We have attained relative economic stability, and for the first time the Greek budget looks like a real budget!" Porter drew the reporter's attention to the fact that for the first time since the war the gold sovereign rate had dropped, taxes were being collected, and some foreign capital was trickling in. The Greeks were getting out those long-hoarded gold sovereigns from their mattresses...
Desk-Bound Intellectuals. The Democrats, on the defensive for what was indeed a wretched record, even suffered a defection from their own ranks. Nevada's Pat McCarran, a blustery Democrat whose chief concern with foreign policy has been a single-minded drive to bring Spain into ECA, declared that the dust had settled long enough in Asia. Roared McCarran: "I am quite familiar with the doctrine of those desk-bound intellectuals who got all mixed up, those gentlemen who would probably describe Al Capone as the product of an unhappy childhood, those gentlemen who saw a boil on China...
...Senate. When Nevada's white-haired Pat McCarran, who had once enjoyed Franco's hospitality, brought up his perennial resolution to give Spain a big slice of Marshall Plan money, he found the Senate surprisingly receptive. Administration leaders managed to keep the money from coming out of ECA's pockets, but could not stop the bill itself. The Senate voted 65 to 15 to give Franco the $100 million...
...State Department was first stunned, then furious. Nobody had told it that McCarran would bring up his bill, or that it stood a good chance of passing. State wasn't against lending Spain the money out of the Export-Import Bank, as a straight business proposition. But, like ECA, it was flatly opposed to handing Franco $100 million to do with as he pleased. Even nations like Britain, who were wartime allies, got no such favored treatment. ECA nations had been required to sign tough bilateral treaties with the U.S., to subject their spending plans to U.S. scrutiny...