He has ambitions to replace the diesel generators of Lagos and other African cities with inadequate grids -- generators so prevalent that he says when the lights go out the entire city hums like a swarm of mosquitoes -- with roof-top solar systems that will dramatically reduce Africa's desperate power deficit. .
The policies, to be implemented over two years from January, have been described as the death knell for the urban middle class, already hit by a barrage of taxes on incomes, purchases and property by governments desperate to meet deficit targets set by foreign lenders.
At a time when Britain is desperate to reduce its deficit, BP is a huge contributor to British tax revenue, paying nearly $1.4 billion in taxes on its profits last year.
Many of its buildings are subsiding, the local authority has been unable to keep up with repairs, and residents have grown tired of complaining about mould on walls, leaking roofs and stairwells inhabited by drug dealers.Tower Hamlets council, whose housing revenue account will soon be £500m in deficit, is desperate to get the problem off its books.
So important is oil to India's trade deficit that desperate bidding for scarce dollars by Indian refiners helped drive the rupee briefly to a record low on Wednesday, before the Reserve Bank of India stopped the rout that evening by arranging to transfer dollars from its reserves to oil importers.
Faced with gaping deficits, some desperate governors slashed payments to hospitals and doctors, or refused to pay for trips to the dentist or oculist.
In the last three years, the UK's major listed employers have spent more than £15bn topping them up in a desperate bid to close deficits.
Desperate to cut budget deficits, officials in several states have begun reducing the amount or quality of food served to prison inmates, an issue that has long been a sensitive one for inmates and has often provoked protests.
And is Pethokoukis so sure that the next debt deal (and the one after that, and the one after that) will be negotiated in environments more congenial to conservatives than the aftermath of a Tea Party-driven midterm sweep, when the Democratic incumbent seems desperate for a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal to boast about on the campaign trail?
Are seemingly bizarre collaborations in popular music desperate attempts to cover a deficit of genuine creativity?
