With "market economies and rule of law in nations with economies in transition" as its agenda, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) held its 5th Economic Forum in Prague from June 11-13. Participants included representatives of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Council, the Council of Baltic States, the European Union and others, including Albania. The OSCE enforces bourgeois multi-party democracy, the "free-market" economy and bourgeois human rights based on the defence of private property as the ultimate achievements of humankind and the "values" to which every country must submit. Amongst other things, it blocks investments to countries which do not comply. The OSCE Forum coincided with the release of the 1997 United Nations Development Program report. It confirmed that the peoples of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have experienced the biggest drop in living standards precisely since the imposition of free market economies began. 120,000 million people, or a quarter of the population, in that area of the world are now living in poverty compared to four million in 1988. Nevertheless, OSCE Permanent Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Henrik Wohlk opened the forum by citing Albania as a trouble-spot for the OSCE, describing it as a "prime example of the fundamental importance of rule of law." He suggested that the pyramid scheme and the absence of laws regulating them are the problem. The pyramid scheme was a quickly unveiled mechanism to get the people to pay the rich. Its false promises of prosperity were more quicky seen than are the other many mechanisms to pay the rich, such as state deficit-financing. This "rule of law," which the OSCE refers to is the dictatorship of the financial oligarchy and the "transition" is towards its perfecting. In most countries IMF and World Bank drafted legislation is already in place for taxation, to create budgetary and fiscal measures that ensure every penny of the public treasury is allocated to the interests of the financial oligarchy, to revoke those laws which entitled people to certain levels of health care, education and social security, etc. In the end, what will exist is the capitalist "rule of law," a body of legislation perfected for the capitalist economy which has developed to the stage where tribute to the financial oligarchy is exacted from the entire society. Under this "rule of law" all the mechanisms to make the people pay are given the highest level of legitimacy, fully backed by the instruments of the police, the army, and the security apparatus. CPC(M-L) Shawgi Tell Graduate School of Education University at Buffalo [EMAIL PROTECTED]