Athens – The Morning After: 48 Buildings On Fire, 150 Looted, Hundreds Arrested

There is a silver lining to Athens’ ever uglier transition to a third world country: the massive GDP boost that awaits it as it sets off to fix broken windows and burned down buildings. In fact, we eagerly await Krugman’s OpEd praising some of the more recent developments out of Greece in the past 48 hours. Granted, the country will need to get even more bailout funding from the Troika for said GDP boost to occur, but who cares about details anymore.

From Athens News:

Police said 150 shops were looted in the capital and 48 buildings set ablaze. Some 100 people – including 68 police – were wounded and 130 detained, a police official said on Monday.

There was also violence in cities across the country, including Thessaloniki and the islands of Corfu and Crete.

Athenians were shocked at the burnt buildings that included the neoclassical home to the Attikon cinema dating from 1870.

“We are all very angry with these measures but this is not the way out,” said Dimitris Hatzichristos, 30, a public sector worker surveying the debris.

Altogether 199 of the 300 lawmakers backed the controversial bill. The 43 who rebelled were immediately expelled by their parties, Pasok and New Democracy.

“Night of terror inside and outside the parliament,” conservative daily Eleftheros Typos wrote on its front page.

Asian shares and the euro gained modestly on Monday and MSCI’s broadest index of Asia Pacific shares outside Japan edged up as much as 0.3 percent.

Some of the more vivid images from this morning’s cleanup crew:

Athenians swept rocks and broken glass from the streets of their city on Monday after a night of violence that gave MPs a taste of the challenge they face in implementing a deeply unpopular austerity bill demanded by the troika.

 

Firefighters doused the smouldering remains of several buildings, set ablaze by hooded youths during protests against the package of pay, pension and job cuts adopted by parliament just after midnight, on Monday morning, after 10 hours of debate.

And while we already knew that democracy is only that on paper, and until someone disagrees, following the expuslion of 43 deputies from their respective parties for disagreeing with the ongoing sacking of Greece by Europes’ banks, here are potential next steps.

“Enough is enough!” said 89-year-old Manolis Glezos, one of country’s most famous leftists. “They have no idea what an uprising by the Greek people means. And the Greek people, regardless of ideology, have risen.”  Glezos is a national hero for sneaking up the Acropolis at night in 1941 and tearing down a Nazi flag from under the noses of the German occupiers, raising the morale of Athens residents.

Odd: the Greeks managed to stand up to the Nazis, yet when it comes to standing up to Europe’s banker cartel, the best the “risen” Greek people can come up with is looting and burning down their own country? Oh well, in the scramble for the last money good asset yet to be pillaged, all is fair in love and rehypothecation.