Gary and Patty Quarles lost their only son, Gary Wayne, in the Upper Big Branch mine explosion. Earlier this year, they negotiated a multi-million dollar settlement from Massey Energy, the company whose negligence and greed killed Gary Wayne and 28 other men.

At first, the Quarles were determined to sue, because they knew that’s what their son wanted. They didn’t have to guess. He told them so before he died. But in the end, Massey came up with an offer that Patty Quarles felt she couldn’t refuse, for the sake of her two grandchildren, whom Gary Wayne had entrusted to her care.

None of these sorries made [Patty Quarles] feel better. And the financial settlement, perhaps the biggest sorry of all, brought its own burden.

On one hand, as many miners did, her son had explicitly talked about suing the coal company if anything ever happened to him. After his divorce, he changed his beneficiaries to his two children and, as he wrote on the legal form, “Mom,” with her legal name in parentheses.

Her son’s decision told her that he trusted her to handle things right, that he wanted to take care of his children, of his dad and of her. And this was what she carried with her into the final mediation at the golf resort, when she was almost blind with a migraine headache, the blackout curtains in the hotel room drawn.

She thought about his wishes, about her grandchildren having a future outside coal mining, about her husband, who was still sitting over there humming to Ralph Stanley.

“I wanted it over,” she said. “I wanted it over so bad.”

“At the same time,” she said, and now Patty Quarles was crying, “this is your mom saying this is what your life’s worth. Like your mom has sold you out. . . . When the lawyers said 3 million I was so mad I couldn’t see straight. I wouldn’t have settled. I wouldn’t have settled for one red cent.”

And then she did.

She is legally prohibited from saying how much the settlement was. But she can say that when her husband saw the amount, she thought he was going to pass out. And that when she finally agreed to it, she felt anything but better.

“  ‘Gary Wayne, well, this is what you was worth,’ ” she recalled thinking, and in that sense, the settlement has inflicted pain on top of pain.

Stephanie McCrummen’s story is a devastating portrait of grief, doubt, and the special love between parents and their adult children. It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.

As horribly as the Quarles are suffering, they fared better than most of the survivors of workers killed on the job. There are over 4000 such fatalities each year, and most families never see a cent of compensation.

Gary and Patty continue to lobby for tougher mine safety regulations in the hope of protecting other miners.

[Photo credit: Lindsay Beyerstein, all rights reserved.]

Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon takes a critical look at the claim that labor is an effective counterweight to conservative super PACs:

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reignited a battle over money in politics when it reported that labor unions have been spending about four times more on political activity than was previously understood. Using public disclosure forms unions filed with the Labor Department, the Journal concluded that unions have spent over $4 billion on political advocacy at all levels of government since 2005.

“The result,” the Journal explains, “is that labor could be a stronger counterweight than commonly realized to ‘super PACs’ that today raise millions from wealthy donors, in many cases to support Republican candidates and causes.”

Four billion in seven years sounds like a lot of money, but lets put it in perspective. Seitz-Wald points out that if you stack organized labor up against all sources of corporate money in politics, business outspends labor by a margin of about 15-1. 

The WSJ claim is disingenuous for another reason. Conservative groups are already doing everything they can to undercut unions’ abilities to spend dues on political activity. So, regardless of what they may have done in the past, their future as a counterweight to the Republican cash machine is far from certain.

[Photo credit: Blue Robot, Creative Commons.]

Let’s dispense with the polite fiction that the Republican’s obsession with voter fraud is about the security of the vote. It’s pure voter suppression. An exhaustive search by the Department of Justice unearthed no evidence of large scale voter fraud. A 5-year probe came up with 86 cases of voter fraud in the entire country, none of which were of the type that could have been prevented by voter ID. The system isn’t broken.

Eugene Robinson reports for TruthDig: 

Recent developments in Pennsylvania—one of more than a dozen states where voting rights are under siege—should be enough to erase any lingering doubt: The GOP is trying to pull off an unconscionable crime.

Late last month, the majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Mike Turzai, was addressing a meeting of the Republican State Committee. He must have felt at ease among friends because he spoke a bit too frankly.

Ticking off a list of recent accomplishments by the GOP-controlled Legislature, he mentioned the new law forcing voters to show a photo ID at the polls. Said Turzai, with more than a hint of triumph: “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania—done.”

Voter ID laws help GOP because people without driver’s licenses, the most common form of photo ID, are more likely to be poor, African American, and/or city-dwellers. All of these constituencies tend to vote Democratic. In the swing state of Pennsylvania, 9.2% of the registered electorate lacks a driver’s license, and a quarter of these voters live in the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia. Coincidence? No.

[Photo credit: Secretlondon, Creative Commons. I know, it’s probably a UK polling place, but I liked the picture.]

The July Sidney goes to Monica Potts of the American Prospect!

Potts spent two-and-a-half months reporting in Owsley County, Kentucky. Her story, “Pressing on the Upward Way,” chronicles the trials and triumphs of the Christian family as they struggle to get ahead financially through education, opening a small business, and playing live music. The story was the centerpiece of the Prospect’s special issue on poverty.

Read my interview with Monica at The Backstory. We talk about how she reported the piece, what Sue Christian’s can teach us about the role of women in overcoming poverty, and much more.