Debts, promises and coups

Schäuble tyrannus

Master and servant

“In Greece the realisation that something has to change, and dramatically, still has to take place among many,” said Schäuble yesterday.

This gem of wisdom, comes from someone who supposedly is in charge of the Greek experiment, the chief of the German economy. I'm not sure how he forms an opinion on what is occurring in Greece, the effects his austerity programmes have on society and the population as a whole, nor do I understand what sort of people advise him on the mindset of the Greek population as a whole. But this didactic tone, coming from someone who obviously, from the effects of the policy he supervises, has not the faintest clue of either the society, or the economy he is helping to demolish and on which he is imposing a developing humanitarian disaster, is colonial in its contempt for the natives.

The Irish Times article linked to in the quotation above, describes Schäuble as one of the negotiators of Germany’s unification treaty, a process which he apparently considers a success and a model for Greece. I leave aside the astonishing idea that the Greek economy is anything like the East German economy was and how terrifying it is that the man running Greece, for all practical purposes, considers it to be a similar project in any meaningful way. I have no first-hand opinion on the matter of course, but it does strike me as odd that the net result is a region which seems to overwhelmingly prefer life under one of the most repressive, intrusive and harsh dictatorships in the Eastern Block, to what Schäuble achieved. So that is what the man calls success: creating mass yearning for dictatorship. I have no doubt that the corrupt and inefficient Third Greek Democracy, ending now, will be remembered with similar nostalgia should current plans persist.

The German leaders' uninformed, yet unabashed shows of contempt, bordering on the racist against Greece and the southerners are, most likely, political theater aimed to please the unthinking Bild readership,vile in its arrogance, but with a broader political aim of enforcing austerity and destroying social Europe as we know it well beyond the Greek borders. Yet one wonders: can they be as cynical as all that? Might the need to make a moralizing argument make them blind and selective as to the sort of "news" and ideas they have about what is happening in the south? I'm not sure... Could it be that it's not just that this is a policy aimed primarily at consolidating the Bild readership, but also a policy informed by Bild?

Meaningless promises burn meaningfully

I have chronicled as best as I could the trials and tribulations of Greek society and its economy, both at Histologion and the European Tribune over the past two disastrous years, and noted the disconnect of the persons in charge of "fixing" the Greek economy with its reality. This whole disaster is turning into a disgusting farce, a farce with real human casualties, but a farce nonetheless. "Greece" is being blamed for failing to meet the programme goals and "lying" to the EU officials. The programme itself cannot be at fault (although it is failing everywhere) so it must be it's lax implementation. This is something that apparently is sold as a fact to northern Europeans, along with the idea that this new package is mainly about "reform" and not about abolishing collective bargaining in Greece, forcefully decreasing private sector salaries to well under official poverty levels and reducing labor law to Burmese levels of worker protection - along with the fire sale of important infrastructure such as the Athens and Thessaloniki water companies and valuable assets such as the state lottery and football pools.

The list of "complaints" about Greece's "broken promises" is impressively ridiculous:

Taxes go uncollected, deficit targets are routinely missed, job cuts from the state payroll are postponed, privatisations have barely begun and pharmacies still shut in the middle of the day. Nearly two years into Greece's bailout, so many promises have been broken that international lenders have largely lost faith in the country's will to reform itself and are torn between imposing stricter outside control and cutting Athens loose.

Let's see how valid the complaints mentioned are:

• Taxes go uncollected:  This is a ridiculous statement. Taxes - flat taxes, and consumption taxes almost all of them- weighed heavily on the poorer and middle class segments of society, have been vastly increased at a time of total economic implosion. You can't collect taxes now, because the capacity of citizens and most businesses is either diminished or non-existent. As household incomes have fallen by ~50% over the past few months, paying last year's taxes for most households becomes an unbearable weight, and for most small businesses an impossibility. The new tax on property including residences, which was supposed to be paid through the electricity bill (or have your electricity cut-off, I kid you not) - has been met with widespread resentment and refusal of payment from an apparently huge percentage of the population, most of which cannot afford to pay the tax, either because they don't have the money (six out of ten households can't afford to even pay the utility bills, much less the extra tax ), or they're not sure that they won't need the money for pressing and basic needs in a climate of total work insecurity, or because they refuse to be blackmailed by an extortionist state. As even the Telegraph rightly notes:

  Greece’s tax revenue from VAT collapsed by 18.7pc in January from a year earlier.
  Nobody can seriously blame tax evasion for this. It has happened because 60,000 small firms and family businesses have gone bankrupt since the summer.
  The VAT rate for food and drink rose from 13pc to 23pc in September to comply with EU-IMF Troika demands. The revenue effect has been overwhelmed by the contraction of the economy.
  Overall tax receipts fell 7pc year-on-year.
  This is a damning indictment of the EU-imposed strategy. Greece is chasing its tail. The budget deficit is stuck near 8pc to 9pc of GDP because the economic base is shrinking so fast.

•  Deficit targets are routinely missed: They are. Of course. The targets are unrealistic to begin with, they are imposed based on political aims and not on some plan for the Greek economy, and then the austerity prescribed causes a much greater slump than originally calculated, which makes meeting the deficit target impossible without further cuts, which then cause a deeper recession which cause even greater divergences from the set goal, and so on in an infinite vicious circle... This forecasting error is not limited to Greece alone, but rather a feature of all IMF analyses, which are tools of political coercion and not objective technocratic estimates:

  The fact is that the optimistic 2012 forecasts presented in September 2011 whenever realistic. It was quite clear that the fiscal austerity being imposed upon the Eurozone was always going to result in sharp contractions in real growth.
  The IMF has a history of providing overly optimistic growth forecasts at a time when it is bullying national governments to impose fiscal austerity. The opposite is also the case, their growth estimates that typically conservative when governments are introducing fiscal stimulus packages

  Thus deficit targets are routinely missed, because they are set up that way, in an imploding economy that has lost 15% of GDP in 18 months...

• Job cuts form the state payroll are postponed: This is hogwash. There is a constitutional ban on firing public sector workers so this can't be done legally as easily as the troika pretends it can. A loophole has been invented in that they can be fired if the position they occupy is canceled. Since 2009, the number of public employees has declined from ~700 thousand to ~500.000. Is this bloated? Well no not even in 2008 it wasn't, according to the OECD:

  Greece has one of the lowest rates of public employment among OECD countries, with general government employing just 7.9% of the total labour force in 2008. This is a slight increase from 2000, when the rate was 6.8%.

  The situation remains significantly unchanged as far as the irrelevance of the size of the public sector employment in Greece to its problems is concerned, even if one adds the broader public sector - quasi-privatized, most of it - which is immediately affected by the troika decisions even though it has no immediate budgetary impact. Now this already low number is to be reduced a further 25%, with promises of firing an extra 150 thousand public employees by 2015. This has literally dissolved the public sector, increased corruption, demotivated the public sector workers and has caused all sort of problems, not least of which is the harm inflicted on the health system, corrupt and inefficient to begin with, which now produces higher mortality rates and superbugs.

•  privatisations have barely begun: This is true. The reason is that interest in privatized enterprises is close to zero, and the goals set were way too ambitious and unrealistic even last year... Now that the Greek economy has tanked they bring diminishing returns. This is aside of any discussion of the social and long-term economic sense and effects of selling-off things such as the water companies. Demanding immediate privatizations now is a demand for allowing the plunder of public resources. That the privatisation plans were not realistic, was noted very early on by many commentators...
• pharmacies still shut in the middle of the day: This doesn't merit a response. The reason Greece is in an unprecedented depression is certainly not the traditional arrangements on the work schedule of pharmacies. If they mean the liberalization of professions, it is now in effect in Greece in such a drastic and idiotic way in most cases, that it has destroyed the livelyhoods of thousands of people while creating practically no jobs for anybody else.

This is the sort of propaganda that promotes that idea that the reason for this whole Greek disaster, is not the actual policies imposed by the troika, which came to Greece with general blueprints and no idea about the reality of Greece's economy, vindicating Joseph Stiglitz's views on the IMF missions to various part of the world - but now with a local, ECB flavor of ineptitude:

When the IMF decides to assist a country, it dispatches a "mission" of economists. These economists frequently lack extensive experience in the country; they are more likely to have firsthand knowledge of its five-star hotels than of the villages that dot its countryside. They work hard, poring over numbers deep into the night. But their task is impossible. In a period of days or, at most, weeks, they are charged with developing a coherent program sensitive to the needs of the country. Needless to say, a little number-crunching rarely provides adequate insights into the development strategy for an entire nation. Even worse, the number-crunching isn't always that good. The mathematical models the IMF uses are frequently flawed or out-of-date. Critics accuse the institution of taking a cookie-cutter approach to economics, and they're right. Country teams have been known to compose draft reports before visiting. I heard stories of one unfortunate incident when team members copied large parts of the text for one country's report and transferred them wholesale to another. They might have gotten away with it, except the "search and replace" function on the word processor didn't work properly, leaving the original country's name in a few places. Oops.

There is no doubt, in short, that the Greek government, a most obedient group of creditors' overseers, lacks credibility. First and foremost it lacks credibility among its population. All polls show, and Sunday's demos proved, that this is a government that has lost all real political legitimacy, and the two parties that support it are in free fall. But the reason it lacks this legitimacy, the reason that they are ineffective tools for the implementation of the IMF/ECB programme is exactly because they are trying to implement a political project of mass pauperization and destruction of the minimal social state that existed in Greece before the arrival of the troika. This is not only an unjust and violent plan, but also a plan fraught with contradictions, misdiagnoses, and ideological fixations that apart from destructive also make it unworkable. It is, I admit, a display of evil political genius, that this impossibility is used to reinforce its brutality, at least as far as the other suckers in this mass bank bailout that is sold under the guise of Greece's bankruptcy, are concerned, namely the taxpayers of the loaning countries. Money given to "Greece" in fact will end up a. feeding Greek banks, already bailed out lavishly on taxpayer money, though their ownership structure will be preserved, with sums that are two orders of magnitude larger than their current market evaluation b. To the PSI participants c. To pay of already existing debt. There is no d. It bodes ill for the future of Greece that the memorandum (which parliament approved in a few hours, in a draft version that had blanks on actual sums of money involved, to be filled after its approval!) is a straight jacket that in practice commandeers the Greek economy for the benefit of bankers and other creditors, to the detriment of its population. That is why the Greek government lacks credibility even to lenders: a democratically  illegitimate government facing elections soon, is not credible because it is not stable. Which brings us to recent developments

An EU coup?

The severity of the measures and the blatant breach of any sort of national sovereignty by the new loan deal, coupled with the growing strength of the actual left in Greece, has created a climate of insecurity for the powers that be in the EU - powers, I should add that are already seen as enemies by much of the Greek population. Thus the German Finance Minister and the EPP axis of austerity around him are apparently considering an ultimatum, or is it blackmail? call it what you will:

There were signs a group of triple A-rated governments, including Germany, Finland and the Netherlands, were hardening their stance towards Athens. During a conference call among eurozone finance minsters, the three countries suggested they may want additional letters from other smaller Greek parties and openly discussed the possibility of postponing Greek elections.
Ahead of the call, Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, said in a radio interview Greece might delay its polls and install a technocratic government that does not include politicians like Mr Venizelos and Mr Samaras, similar to the model currently in place in Italy.

So elections should be put off, according to the debtors wishes, despite the fact that Samaras has guaranteed elections will be held in April and that it is blatantly obvious that the current government is totally at odds with the popular sentiment, as is the parliament. This is not a democratic union anymore. This is a tyranny where political leaders are extorted into signing letters of submission and adherence to a dead-end policy, that has failed in multiple parts of the world. This is the neoliberal cancellation of democracy, the emergence of the European Central Bank as an instrument of transformation of the European Project to some sort of market-driven dystopia. This is not tolerable, and it's not just about Greece anymore.

It seems that the Greek debacle, the realisation of the extent to which European elites are ready to use the debt crisis as an instrument for the neoliberal transformation of the EU has stirred popular forces around the world. From England, to France, to Spain, , Belgium, Italy, even as far away as San Francisco, a lot of people realize that the fight in Greece is more than about fiscal rectitude and balancing budgets, it is the first in a series of battles that will decide the way the debt crises will unfold in Europe and beyond, whether the EU will become another labor wasteland and whether Social Europe as we have known it will continue to exist and develop.

That is the battle we're fighting here, not just for our own skins, although we're trying to avert a descent to a humanitarian disaster, but also the first battle in a world-wide social war over the debt, over who controls the economy and whom it should benefit...
[A briefer and more focused version of this story can be found at the European Tribune]

The battle around Syntagma square

Around 11, I tried to return to the protests. I had to turn back. It was impossible to reach down-town. ~50 buildings have been set on fire and the smell of tear gas is overpowering. A few minutes ago a police precinct was attacked. A bank in Volos was burned to the ground, while MPs offices were attacked in Corfu, Western Greece and Crete...

The mobilization was unprecedented. By 5 o'clock Syntagma was full, so was Omonia square, and almost all of the surrounding streets - but it's difficult to gauge participation though because as soon as the square started to fill up the police attacked the protesters with large amounts of teargas... There is an estimate around the tweetosphere of 500.000, this is not unrealistic. Bear in mind though that after the first chemicals people, especially older people,  decided not to show up, or attempt to approach Syntagma.

Even the orderly and robust communist union's block didn't make it to Syntagma although they attempted an approach from three different directions. The Syriza block attempted many times to reach parliament. They were pushed back, and the block was attacked around 10 - 10:30.

The cops were throwing tear gas canisters in the middle of huge but peaceful crowds. The number of people injured and taken to the hospital tonight officially is 75, but in reality it's much more, the makeshift first aid stations around Syntagma (some of which I hear were attacked by the police) treated scores of people....



Among the first to be hit were Greek resistance icon Manolis Glezos and music composer Mikis Theodorakis (89 and 91 years old respectively), giving a signal that the police was not about to spare anyone. It was obvious that they had orders to keep Syntagma square clear and they did it with extreme brutality.

After that, things got wild, either through some sort of concerted black-block action, or whatever, one after the other buildings were set on fire, banks initially but then other buildings: coffee shops, and cinemas among them - grand old buildings of great contemporary historical significance sadly.
As I write this Athens is still ablaze, and I fear this might be the start of a trend, not just an explosion. Certainly the number of people despising both the police and the current government skyrocketed today and as the state is reduced more and more to shows of police brutality anti-authoritarian or even just blind violence will grow more frequent.

About the vote: As expected. The two leaders, the political and electoral nullity (8% approval rate) of George Papandreou and Antonis Samaras (soon to follow him in disrepute) threw out a total of 41 MPs from their parties. The two teams of expelled MPs are strong enough to create two new parties: one at PASOK's left perhaps (although most of them are also in disrepute exactly for following the PASOK leadership's orders for so long) and one at ND's populist right. Panos Kammenos, an economic populist (and virulent nationalist , it has to be said) is said to be preparing such a party, though not all of the MPs who were expelled would feel comfortable in such a political environment.

The left will gain: Democratic Left as a more "moderate" left is receiving a huge inflow of moderate PASOK voters, looking for a less damaged political roof, but also SYRIZA and KKE have stabilized at very high numbers and the current climate of popular unrest will probably strengthen them. All three of these parties voted against the memorandum and SYRIZA and KKE have promised to undo all of its measures one by one, on constitutional grounds...

There is talk of a continuous general strike planned for most of the country's public enterprises, and a continuous series of strikes in the rest of the public and private sector. I think it is labor now, more than any other part of the Greek population that will carry the torch of the popular battle...

I would also like to point out that those who are building a Europe of solidarity, a real European Union? well it's not Merkel...

Greece: They must not pass...

"Martial law has to be imposed for these measures to be implemented"

This loan shark says, make them pay, beat them until they pay everything, but don't beat them so hard that they can't keep paying.  That loan shark says, if you don't make an example of this one, the others won't respect you.  Beat them to death.  And it is between these two poles that the bankers, ratings agencies, and EU leaders oscillate...

How is Greece taking the new loan deal that accompanies the PSI? Most compare it to a dictatorship, a foreign occupation, the kind of terms a victor imposes on a defeated country. No wonder: Two years of the most grinding austerity, has caused a destruction of the Greek economy that has no precedent, in peacetime, as official nominal wages dropped 15%, unemployment passed the 20% mark and, according to polling company VPRC, the bottom 90% of Greek households, suffered in 2011 alone loss of income on average ~45% of their incomes. Greece is already a "labor wasteland" where jobs are near impossible to find and when they materialize they are more likely to be "black", uninsured, well below the poverty threshold.Yet the new loan deals mandate among other things:
- The dismantling of collective bargaining and the annulment of the current collective agreement. "Labor law" in Greece will not be a meaningful subject any more
- Across the board cuts in nearly all of private sector wages and salaries to the tune of 22%. This includes the minimum wage (which will be now around 580 euros net, and under 500 euros if you are a new entrant into the job market). This affects all sort of benefits i.e. the unemployment benefit which is reduced to 369 from 461 euros. This in a country where the cost of living in its capital is still higher than that of Berlin
- Immediate elimination of rent subsidies for the poorer, cuts in pensions, mass privatization at fire sale prices (including the Athens and Thessaloniki water companies, and the lottery/football pool company, whose market price right now is at two years profits) etc. This on top of galloping social destruction, a health system that is going to the dogs (the decay of which is producing even stronger superbugs) and public services being destroyed or annihilated.
- At the same time whatever debt will remain - and it will be huge and unsustainable anyway - will now be under English law, and not Greek law, meaning that the terms of the loans will be draconian.

And much, much more: 650 pages of it that Greek MPs were required to read in 24 hours since they received the package, Saturday, to vote on it on Sunday. The process is illegitimate, and constitutionally questionable yet the two government coalition partners (socialists and conservatives - the far right LAOS rightly figured that this will destroy it electorally and removed its ministers from the government), are extorting their MPs: "pain or destruction" they warned, along with the PM. Everything will be rationed, Greece will leave the euro and remain a third world country for ever. Sane people disagree. But they are not in government.

Τhe political system is shaken: MP after MP from the ruling coalition either resigns (at least 5 now, but probably more, I've lost count) or announces that they will vote against the new plan. These include among others the former economy minister Louka Katseli, and notably Socialist MP and former World Bank and IMF economist Elena Panaritis, who was close to tears in the Parliament commission today, stating that in her 16 year experience of drafting similar deals (and she worked with the World bank in Peru, for chrissakes), she has not seen anything quite as disastrous as the troika's offer.

It is unsurprising then that despite being hammered by the media and the Papademos government (the Prime Minister being the sort of economist that argues in parliament that if workers don't accept huge wage cuts  the unemployed will stay unemployed - this as real wages are collapsing anyway,) most Greeks prefer immediate bankruptcy to this. The colonial attitude of Ollie Rehn and Jean Claude Junker only inflamed public opinion. What seeps through the media from EU and especially establishment opinion on how this is all the Greeks fault and they should suck it up because they are overpaid, lazy etc. has already caused the first instance of German flag-burning and has resulted in the first time ever that the EU as an institution has a negative reception according to a latest poll.

And so Greece strikes and fights back:

The Law school in Athens under occupation by students, the health ministry by mental health doctors who protest the near-total defunding of mental care, the ministry of Labor by workers belonging to the communist union, the electric grid authority in the ministry of environment and energy by the power company workers' union (a couple of days ago they held the minister hostage for a few hours, until he was released by riot police)... also occupied: the Holargos(a suburb of Athens) City Hall, in Larissa, Chania, Veria, Ermoupolis and Corfu the Regional Governor's building, in Rethymnon the City Hall, in Chania and Trikala the prefecture offices.

I'm not sure how many of these occupations are still in effect, and it is likely that they have multiplied. They will serve as a launch pad all over Greece for what promises to be the largest protests ever (despite the weather) outside the parliament building in Athens and in major squares all over Greece. People are angry, no longer "indignant" but "outraged". If this government proceeds to pass this memorandum, all hell will break loose, on a social and a political level. The political system is destabilized, all options are on the table and theoretically elections are less then a couple of months ahead. And despite the rhetoric of this government's apologists, today's demonstrations are in reality the true pro-european demonstrations. In Greece today there will be the first of a series of big battles in defense of the European social contract, of labor. A test case, a guinea pig, because it is obvious that in one form or another this austeritarian disaster will be unleashed around the EU, and the core should not feel safe from harm. Already labor conditions and real wages in the EU southern periphery are converging downwards towards the poorest members of the union.

Today, after three days of huge demonstrations and general strikes, Athens will be filled with rage. A police officer's union has declared that it will refuse to attack its brothers, and threatened the troika members with arrest... People are prepared for the worse anyway though. I'm heading down to Syntagma to topple a foreign imposed bankers' government, gas mask in my pocket and mad as hell. They must not pass. They will not pass...

[The Greek Left Review has said it will have live coverage of demonstrations today]

The men in black: the police contingent

/ agents / provocateurs /
Victor Grossman, writing about the protests during the recent G-8 summit, reconfirms that certain police tactics are world-wide standard procedure against demonstrators (as we had the chance to observe in the recent student unrest here in Greece):

"But something was funny about four members of the black-clad contingent. One of them, possibly the leader of the little group, wore a jacket with the red logo of a music group called 'Slip-Knot,' popular with globalization opponents. This was unusual, since the others avoided any details which would make them easily identifiable on police videos. And then, as the line of cops took up position nearby, ready to end the blockade, it was these four who started picking up stones from between the railroad tracks and lobbing them over towards the police and shouting, 'Get the bulls'! Then one of the other protesters took a good look at the young man with the logo before he had a chance to pull up his bandana mask.

'That's the same fellow who arrested me during a demonstration in Bremen last year!' he cried, and he and his friends made a grab for the four. Two of the four made it to police lines, one disappeared, but they caught the one with the red logo, presumably the leader. They did not treat him exactly gently, it must be admitted, but one of the group organizers took hold of the man, sheltering him from the crowd, and dragged him over and delivered him to the police line -- and safety."

This is the same type of actions that were reported in Genoa (2001):

A moderator of the Black Bloc meetings held in Genoa declarated "All the independent property I saw destroyed was done by police provocateurs and the police were being as confrontational as possible". (US3). Nevertheless, he sums up - among other actions - one which was evidently made by agents under cover (reported below): his group had come later on and unknowingly joined the provocateurs in their action. This supports the thesis that it is difficult - even for Black Bloc members - assess what was done by infiltrated agents...
... While the Black Bloc was involved in the attempt of defending Piazza Rossetti (where the peasants had their stands) and avoid the breaking of the rally (which eventually happened) I personally saw a group of "pseudo-Black Blocs" getting to Piazza Kennedy closely followed by a crew of video-operator. This is not in their style: the Black Bloc does not want to be object of cameras attention during their actions. The pseudo-Black Bloc pretended to destroy bank windows which had already been destroyed the day before.

Besides producing nice pictures of vandalic acts to be stigmatized on the press, the pseudo-Black Blocs were locating themselves in a strategic position: inbetween the advancing police and the rally. For, they were diverting the demonstrators' attention from the real danger. In fact, the police was coming up with the clear intention of attacking the rally, breaking the river of people in two parts - despite the attempt of resistance opposed by few groups, including true Black Blocs...

...In Miami (2003):

Police infiltraitors in Miami were photographed behind police lines during the Miami FTAA protests. There were also reports that some protesters were kidnapped off the streets, and that provocateurs dressed as Black Bloc participants and other demonstrators (with buttons , banners, ect.) used tasers on real demonstrators, and were seen trying to start fights...

... In Prague (2000):

The Citizens' Legal Patrol, or OPH, which had been monitoring and documenting legal rights' violations during the demonstrations surrounding the meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Prague, has revealed materials allegedly pointing to the presence of police provocateurs among protestors. At a press conference on Wednesday, the group presented videos, eye-witness accounts and other materials documenting the violent activities of people who were later allegedly able to easily pass through police blockades upon showing identification. According to the group's spokesman, Marek Vesely, OPH is gathering evidence of such activities and will present it to the Interior Ministry for investigation.

... In Barcelona (2001):

"Reporters saw a group of men and women in masks gathered on the fringes of the demonstration in the park. Some wore earphones, and though carrying sticks they were able to walk freely past police, pull on their masks and position themselves between police and protesters.

"One man in the group grabbed another and pulled him to the ground, and other members of the group began kicking and slugging each other.

"When demonstrators saw what was going on and joined the fight, the police charged into the park. The masked men and women involved in the scuffle walked through the police line and boarded vans.

"A reporter asked one of them if they were police. He at first said yes, and then said no, before walking by police to the vans."

... In Oaxaca (2006):

Demonstrators have appeared on the radio to denounce the presence of “provocateurs” who say have been launching rockets and rocks at police, and trying to burn police buses.

...In Gothenburg (2001):

During actions of the weekend, police continuously escalated violence by attacking demonstrators with dogs and horses unprovoked. Some non-uniformed police provocateurs destroyed private property in order to discredit demonstrators. In Saturday 16th of June a group of masked police armed with submachineguns invaded another school in which people were staying, claiming to search "arms and terrorists" which they never found. Some demonstrators did involved themselves in fighting with police, but vast majority of the demonstrators were calm even when police behavior
was endangering their lives.

... In Gleneagles (2005):

Back on the coach, I found that the nice Scottish woman I had sat next to on the way up to Gleneagles had since turned into a Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown. I told her of something I had witnessed: a group of three people dressed like activists who were huddled round a CB communicating about positions in the field - almost definately police agent provocateurs. In turn she said that a cabbie had told her of having nervously picked up a group of 'scruffies', only to find that all of them had police badges. Given that the police will go to these lengths, protesters will have to show a lot more ingenuity than they have this week if they are to seriously disrupt summits in future.

And pretty much anywhere there is any sort of massive demonstration - a practice that isn't exactly new.