If superpacs dont coordinate with candidates then why this?

[SwampG8r]

i was being robocalled everyday for a week and a half about what a huge bag of infected weasel assholes gingrich is, and how ethics will bring him down, and that the only vote for a great america was romney (i dont know why they call me. i got calls from rick scotts mom in the last governors election here, they just do)from some superpac here in florida.
finally after 4 calls on monday i got mad
i called romneys office here
i told them truthfully that romney could expect zero support from myself or family because of these calls
i was told 'we dont control those people"
i said "righhhhhhhhhhhhhht" and gave them my number and said i do not ever want to hear from these people again
tues day 4 calls before noon
today no calls at all
zero zip nada
no coordination though i am sure

not one of these people will be their nominee i still say it
gingrich will drop befor feb1

[unblock]

1. it's a complete sham, like not recognizing open trust / price-fixing

in order to be prosecutable, companies need to explicitly agree to price-fix.

but it's quite easy to implicitly fix prices. gas stations on the same corner do it all the time.

simply be changing the price and publicizing it is all the communication the competitors need. absent an agreement, there's a price war. eventually they try creeping up the prices and see if the other stations do likewise. if they go too high or one of the stations otherwise drops the price, the others drop in kind to retaliate. eventually they all learn the game and figure out it's to their advantage to cooperate on a slightly higher price than true competition would force them to.

and not a word was spoken.



superpacs maintain essentially the same fiction. they can't help but notice what the candidate wants or needs, and they can't help but fill that void. it's ludicrous to think they can truly be separate.

your particular case may actually be a technical violation, if they're talking about phone lists.
i'm sure it happens all the time, though.

[TheWraith]

2. Because they do coordinate.

They just don't do it openly. I'm not a lawyer, but I can think of half a dozen ways off the top of my head to circumvent that rule, the most obvious being the use of an intermediary which they ARE allowed to coordinate with, like a paid consultant which works for both the campaign and the super-PAC.

[librechik]

3. Yep, watch the exchanges between Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert about Stepen's Superpac

It's obvious, even with a lawyer there, that they can "pretend" to not coordinate and still get everything they need-- and it's legal.