Participation levels in an election is a measure of democracy for sure. People can skip for various reasons and just not be engaged or the worry is that the population is excluded or in some way filtered like happened with racism in USA at points in its history. Wider monitoring was really needed from every country of the UN and with thousands of monitors for sure, just one head of an organisation walking around nodding their head to me adds little extra confidence. This applies to lots of countries, there is no perfect instance and I hear little news coverage especially on Venezuela unfortunately.
Oil production is a business that depends on access to credit: if you cannot get loans from banks it's almost impossible to support the high flow of investments needed to keep production up. Venezuela (which is not in default) has been cut off US banking system and that means:
- No access to loans, like anybody else.
- No access to transactions in USD, like anybody else.
I agree, the financing falling apart will have a large effect but also oil or any commodity to some extent itself is a kind of currency and I have to wonder how these companies with such a large resource ended up not being able to conduct themselves efficently with previous profits and successful extraction.
In China I remember reading how they banned the use of copper as a proxy for currency, it was being held and exchanged to settle bills and this was outlawed. Of course copper has a history over thousands of years as a currency and the whole crytpo currency phoneomena we are seeing is related to dollars becoming less used and other elements more useful in exchanging value. I think oil and gold will be part of that, Hugo Chávez thought this about gold I think
