Who Sets the Price of Duty-Free?
This segment began by closing the blank left by the previous investigation. On September 25 at 11:00 a.m. Moscow time, the Central Election Commission of Russia held the session confirming the final results of the election for the 9th State Duma. The official turnout was 59.32 percent, and United Russia won 355 out of 450 seats, the largest in history, and this figure did not deviate from the provisional figures I had earlier set at 57.83 percent and 355 seats. What matters here is not the fact that the numbers were confirmed. It is what this confirmation procedure solidifies as legal fact. Before the Duma convenes itself, an electoral management body, not the executive branch, finalizes the scope of the territory. The moment the 11 single-mandate constituencies assigned to the occupied territories are actually counted in the seat allocation, the representative system of the Russian Federation counts the population of cities it does not physically control as its own population. The inclusion of Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, and Lyman within constituencies is not an administrative error but the legal registration of a territorial claim. The voting is over, and now that registration is complete. Whether the European Union will add the organizers of this election to its sanctions list has not yet been decided. But what does that change? Sanctions freeze individuals' assets, but they cannot reverse the 59 percent turnout, which is a dependent variable created by Moscow's fiscal transfers. What I must hold onto to the end in this matter is not the seat distribution in the Duma, but the accounting structure in which central government transfers cover 60 to 80 percent of the occupied territories' own budgets. As long as that structure is maintained, the people of that land do not have a procedure to determine their own fate.
In the same segment, another bill addressed to Korea arrived. The United States is expanding pharmaceutical tariffs under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act to all remaining companies starting September 29, and Korea, along with the European Union, Japan, and Switzerland, was classified as a country subject to a preferential tariff rate of 15 percent. Generics and biosimilars were excluded from tariff imposition and will be reviewed after one year. This news circulated under the word duty-free, but that is not accurate. Korean products are not at 0 percent but at 15 percent. The content of the event is that what was initially at risk of being hit with 100 percent was cut down to 15 percent. And look at where that cut came from. In the previous negotiations, $350 billion in strategic investment in the United States was at stake, and in return, the mutual tariff was lowered from 25 percent to 15 percent. In other words, the 15 percent preferential rate is the recovery of the price paid at the trade negotiation table. It is neither duty-free nor a privilege. It is a discount bought by paying the full price. The one-year deferral for biosimilars is the same structure. A deferral is not an exemption, and the review after one year is a notice that the negotiating power at that time will be recalculated. What we must read in this scene is not the relief that Korean biotech avoided a tariff bomb, but the fact that the number called the tariff rate is not decided in a country's industrial policy office. Demands are coming down to the industry to prepare pharmaceutical item codes and raw material verification, but no matter how perfect that preparation is, the place that decides 15 percent is Washington.
The two scenes converge into the same sentence. Just as the turnout in the occupied territories is determined by Moscow's transfers, the tariff rate on Korean pharmaceuticals is determined by Washington's negotiation table. If you ask where the decision-making authority lies and who pays the cost, the chain is revealed, and the upper end of the chain always registers even land it does not control within its own law. In this segment, several topics came up in private conversation. The question of which is more right-wing, fascism or the reactionary line of Hwang Kyo-ahn, how to define Park Chung-hee, how to view conspiracy theories surrounding the World Economic Forum and central bank digital currencies, and where the ideological lineages of the two major parties diverge. Each time, I pushed the answer to the same place. Fascism is not a trend but a form of domination produced by the crisis of capital; Park Chung-hee was not someone trying to break with the United States but someone trying to increase his bargaining power within the United States; the transaction traceability of digital currency is not a conspiracy but a design attribute; and the two parties, on the same foundation of property rights and national competitiveness, merely split into those who abhor Schmitt and those who practice him. These answers say exactly the same thing as the two events in this segment. An analysis that does not ask where authority and cost lie cannot touch the ruling bloc. Moscow registered land through its budget, and Washington set tariffs through its negotiation table, because the discourse layered on top disguises it in the neutral language of administration and trade. If we stop the work of stripping away that language, we cannot prevent a single word, duty-free, from turning 15 percent dependency into a blessing.
In the same segment, another bill addressed to Korea arrived. The United States is expanding pharmaceutical tariffs under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act to all remaining companies starting September 29, and Korea, along with the European Union, Japan, and Switzerland, was classified as a country subject to a preferential tariff rate of 15 percent. Generics and biosimilars were excluded from tariff imposition and will be reviewed after one year. This news circulated under the word duty-free, but that is not accurate. Korean products are not at 0 percent but at 15 percent. The content of the event is that what was initially at risk of being hit with 100 percent was cut down to 15 percent. And look at where that cut came from. In the previous negotiations, $350 billion in strategic investment in the United States was at stake, and in return, the mutual tariff was lowered from 25 percent to 15 percent. In other words, the 15 percent preferential rate is the recovery of the price paid at the trade negotiation table. It is neither duty-free nor a privilege. It is a discount bought by paying the full price. The one-year deferral for biosimilars is the same structure. A deferral is not an exemption, and the review after one year is a notice that the negotiating power at that time will be recalculated. What we must read in this scene is not the relief that Korean biotech avoided a tariff bomb, but the fact that the number called the tariff rate is not decided in a country's industrial policy office. Demands are coming down to the industry to prepare pharmaceutical item codes and raw material verification, but no matter how perfect that preparation is, the place that decides 15 percent is Washington.
The two scenes converge into the same sentence. Just as the turnout in the occupied territories is determined by Moscow's transfers, the tariff rate on Korean pharmaceuticals is determined by Washington's negotiation table. If you ask where the decision-making authority lies and who pays the cost, the chain is revealed, and the upper end of the chain always registers even land it does not control within its own law. In this segment, several topics came up in private conversation. The question of which is more right-wing, fascism or the reactionary line of Hwang Kyo-ahn, how to define Park Chung-hee, how to view conspiracy theories surrounding the World Economic Forum and central bank digital currencies, and where the ideological lineages of the two major parties diverge. Each time, I pushed the answer to the same place. Fascism is not a trend but a form of domination produced by the crisis of capital; Park Chung-hee was not someone trying to break with the United States but someone trying to increase his bargaining power within the United States; the transaction traceability of digital currency is not a conspiracy but a design attribute; and the two parties, on the same foundation of property rights and national competitiveness, merely split into those who abhor Schmitt and those who practice him. These answers say exactly the same thing as the two events in this segment. An analysis that does not ask where authority and cost lie cannot touch the ruling bloc. Moscow registered land through its budget, and Washington set tariffs through its negotiation table, because the discourse layered on top disguises it in the neutral language of administration and trade. If we stop the work of stripping away that language, we cannot prevent a single word, duty-free, from turning 15 percent dependency into a blessing.