Renzi and Napolitano call for change

(ANSA) - Rome, September 22 - Premier Matteo Renzi on Monday called on Italian-American entrepreneurs to give the home country a hand as it struggles shed its old, entrenched ways in order to reform. "I'm changing Italy, you're changing the world," Renzi told researchers and founders of 150 start-ups at the San Francisco Yacht Club. "Change is impossible with a narrow, backward-looking mindset," said the premier, who was in San Francisco before attending a United Nations climate change conference on Tuesday.
    "I'm not asking you to come back...I'm asking you to help us," Renzi said. "We need reform but we also need ideas. I'm here to listen," the premier added. "We are doing everything possible to change Italy into a simpler country, with a different labor market and a streamlined political class - one we no longer need be ashamed of," Renzi said.
    Italy's premier has no masters, and this means Italy is changing, he added. "If the premier is free of godfathers and masters it's a sign that Italy has grown tired of certain rituals and a certain way of doing politics," Renzi said. "We might fail, but as Silicon Valley teaches us, failure is how we learn to do better," the premier said. "This an extraordinary chance to stop crying over spilled milk," Renzi went on. "Italy is a great country with some incredible weak spots," he added. "At some point, you come to a place where you have to make some people angry" in order to push vital reforms through.
    He was echoed on the home front Monday by President Giorgio Napolitano, who told 3,000 students that now is not the time to moan, but to be bold. "New, courageous policies for growth and employment" are needed if Italy and Europe are to emerge from a deep economic and social crisis, the president said in a ceremony marking the beginning of the new school year. "Today not only Italy, but the whole of Europe, is grappling with a profound crisis," he said. "Clearly, this is not the time to huddle within our old national enclosures and moan about the EU, but to come together in a common effort," he said. While the two leaders argued the worth of looking forward instead of back, internal dissenters from the premier's Democratic Party (PD) rattled their sabers as they gathered Monday to write amendments to an enabling law to the premier's signature Jobs Act, a provision of which looks to be generating a split within the ranks.
    The battle is to be played out on the Senate floor, where the bill lands on Tuesday.