He almost doubled the previous record, when Oprah Winfrey gave 276 members of her audience a free vehicle, for a total value of just under $8 million. The company got personal information on almost 9,000 people. Whether Oliver is explaining the history of Donald Trump’s family by leading a campaign to change Trump’s surname to Drumpf or starting his own house of worship to better explain how tax-exempt megachurches work, Last Week Tonight is continuing to flawless the art of explaining by doing.
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John Oliver’s HBO show “Last Week Tonight” has raised comedy to a mixture of guerrilla politics and performance art by undertaking real-life actions to reinforce its overall message.
A related question: was Oliver’s $15-million gift, for which he paid only $60,000, the biggest gift ever made on a TV show?
On Sunday’s episode, Oliver explained that American households are roughly $12 trillion in debt with $436 billion of it being more than 90 days past due. “And I can prove that to you, because I’m an idiot, and we started a debt-buying company”. “We called it Central Asset Recovery Professionals, or CARP, after the bottom-feeding fish”.
Oliver said it had cost $50 (£35) to create his company, after which he received the portfolio offering the names, current addresses and Social Security numbers of about 9,000 people.
“There would be absolutely nothing wrong with that except for the fact that absolutely everything is wrong with that”, he said.
He explained those who buy the debts are sometimes buying second or third-hand debts – then chase the debtor for the original account. The largest of these companies, according to Oliver, is a group named Encore, which claims that one out of five consumers in the U.S. has owed them or will owe them money.
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“That’s an apt comparison, ‘” he said, “because just like on “The Walking Dead”, zombie debt comes back from the grave, is incredibly hard to deal with and seems to disproportionately impact minorities”. The segment focused on certain debt collectors in the industry who buy debt from banks for cents on the dollar and then try to make a profit on the debt they purchased using threats and other aggressive tactics without first verifying whether the person they are attempting to collect from actually owes the debt. “How are you gonna put handcuffs on a dog?” Jokingly yelling, “F*** you, Oprah!” as he smashed the red button. You get a vehicle.
