Word: segni
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Three weeks ago, beset by the threats of strikes among Italy's teachers and civil servants, Premier Antonio Segni passed out an average raise of 12% to every civil servant-an annual total of $425 million. Compared to Italy's gross national product, this generous gesture was equivalent to raising the cost of government in the U.S. by $7 billion at one stroke. Everybody agrees that 1) Italian civil servants are underpaid, 2) Italy's 1,000,000-man bureaucracy is inefficient, cumbersome. Segni, before raising the pay, had had parliamentary permission to change the system...
Only one member of Segni's administration. Treasury Minister Silvio Gava, was spoilsport enough to ask where the money was to come from. When he got no satisfactory answer to his question, Gava threatened to resign, and was only talked out of it with some difficulty...
...fellow-traveling Stalin Prize winner Pietro Nenni have always been regarded as forbidden fruit, something to be enviously eyed but eventually rejected. The price always looked too high. Last week Fellow Traveler Pietro Nenni, one of Italy's shrewdest politicians, embarrassed the Christian Democratic government of Antonio Segni by offering his votes free...
...saved the government from serious embarrassment. A government budget bill was about to be defeated because about 40 government supporters were absent. A Nenni henchman, while publicly opposing the budget, sent 30 or 40 Communist and Socialist members out of the hall to match the missing Christian Democrats. The Segni government was saved from a defeat. Philosophizing on his new strategy (which Italians are calling the Strategy of the Smile), Nenni said: "The slow disintegration of the majority is turning the Houses of Parliament into a sort of jungle . . . We are not concerned with overthrowing ministers by secret votes...
Decision: Monopoly. Premier Segni's government last week decided to amend the outmoded laws, but in such a way as clearly to favor state monopoly. It was a major defeat for the oil companies, and a severe setback to the U.S. efforts to help stabilize Italy politically by helping it to stabilize itself economically...