Around 300 bars and restaurants in Minnesota will not be able to buy alcohol until the state reaches a budget agreement and ends its government shutdown. Since closing down all but the most important services on July 1, the state has stopped issuing the $20 buyer cards required by retailers to replenish their alcohol inventories — bad news for Minnesotans already hurting from the cuts to their social services.

Restaurants are already reporting being low on inventories, and Frank Ball, the executive director of the Minnesota Licensed Beverage Association, calls the situation “crippling” to the alcohol retail industry. In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio’s Cathy Wurzer, Ball warned against beer spoiling in warehouses and bars closing:

Wurzer: “The penalty for buying or selling alcohol without this card is about $250 for the first offense. Do you think it might be wiorth it to some of these bars and restaurants and liquor stores and their providers for that matter to just kind of chance it and risk paying he fine?

Ball: “They’re sitting on millions of dollars worth of sales here, and they could be fined up to a thousand dollars for the suspension of their license for each event. But there’s nobody to enforce that law. So we don’t cover the wholesalers–that’s a decision they’ll have to make–but [with] our retailers, we’re telling them, if you’ve got a wholesaler that will sell to you, buy. Because otherwise if they run out of their product, our bars and restaurants are going to fold. They’re going to close.”

Along with losing their neighborhood bars, Minnesotans may also have to cope with the loss of MillerCoor’s 39 brands of beer. After misfiling its brand-label registration paperwork in June, the company could not procure the necessary documents from the state before its offices shut down a couple of weeks later.

But beer is only the latest victim in the state’s government shutdown debacle. Each day, Minnesota is losing $1.25 million from lottery sales and $200,000 from the closures of its state parks. By month’s end, the state coffers will be short $52 million it would have collected in tax revenues. And yet, as social services suffer and government workers idle without paychecks, lawmakers have made no movements recently toward a budget compromise. If the state legislature stopped focusing on politics and started focusing on people, we might start to see progress.

–Sarah Bufkin

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News Corporation faces a potential U.S. investigation and prosecution under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), a law that bars companies with U.S. ties from bribing foreign officials to get or retain business, stemming from widely-reported allegations of bribing police. News Corp, like several other major corporations recently targeted under the law, would not only be liable for the costs of any investigation — whether or not it is ever charged — but could also face billions in fines and even jail time for its executives if it were found guilty of violating of the anti-corruption statute.

The Obama administration has stepped up enforcement of the FCPA in recent years, and one FCPA expert, Butler University Professor Mike Koehler, told the Guardian that he would be “very surprised” if U.S. authorities don’t become involved in the growing News Corp scandal.

This stepped up enforcement of the FCPA has not escaped the notice of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has reportedly received millions of dollars in funding from News Corp. The Chamber is now leading a high-profile campaign to weaken the landmark anti-bribery law.

On October 27, 2010, the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform held a summit at which it released a white paper outlining the Chamber’s suggestions for weakening the FCPA. After its 2010 summit, the Chamber began actively lobbying Congress to weaken the FCPA. In March of this year, the Chamber’s ILR hired marquee talent, former Bush administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey, to aid in its push to weaken the law.  According to filings with the Senate, the Chamber’s ILR  spent $6,030,000 lobbying on the FCPA and numerous other bills during the first quarter of 2011. During the 4th quarter of 2010, the Chamber’s ILR spent an additional $14,490,000 lobbying on the FCPA and other bills.

In addition to its own direct lobbying activities, the Chamber’s ILR engaged several lobbying firms during the first half of this year to help it push Congress to weaken the anti-bribery law, including Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, and Schreck; Hollier & Associates; Akin, Gump, Strauer, Hauer & Feld; and Debevoise & Plimpton (Mukasey’s firm).

The Chamber’s ILR, in its white paper, lamented the fact that the corporations would continue to be held accountable for their criminal activities:

Unfortunately for the business community, an active FCPA enforcement environment appears likely to continue.

Specifically citing the Chamber’s lamentations, the Republican-led House of Representatives is currently drafting a bill to weaken the FCPA. A hearing held last month by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, gave Chamber lobbyist Mukasey a platform to reiterate the Chamber’s ideas for weakening the anti-bribery law.

While any changes to the FCPA may come too late to help News Corp, it’s clear that the Chamber’s campaign to weaken the landmark anti-bribery law is already showing some early signs of success.

Despite massive protests outside the state capitol, Republicans in Ohio’s state legislature pushed through Senate Bill 5, a union-busting law that went even further in curbing public employees’ collective bargaining rights than a similar law in Wisconsin. Gov. John Kasich (R) signed the wildly unpopular law, and has since seen his approval ratings plummet to depths that he struggles to explain.

The protests did not stop with Kasich’s signature, however, and opponents of the law went to work collecting signatures to put a referendum on the ballot next Election Day that could repeal SB 5. In fact, the law’s opponents collected nearly 1.3 million signatures, a million more than they needed to successfully get the referendum on the ballot. They brought so many signatures to the state election board, they needed a tractor-trailer to deliver them.

But this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Kasich pretended that the opposition to his signature piece of legislation was no big deal, saying with all sincerity that “there was no drama” in his first six months as governor:

KASICH: What’s driven my negatives up is the fact that we’re trying to rein in and give local communities the abilities to control their costs with public employees… So it’s just protesters and noise. But when it comes to the budget, no protests, no noise, and we got it through. And got through virtually all of what we really wanted.

Watch it:

The people of Ohio, however, disagree. Not only do big majorities support repealing SB 5, they also oppose his budget. As for Kasich himself, polls have shown that if Ohioans could have a do-over of 2010, when he defeated former Gov. Ted Strickland (D), they’d hand him a 25-point defeat. Of course, to Kasich, that’s all just noise.