Last Week Tonight was back this weekend with a long piece on the nasty world of debt collection, zombie debt, and debt buying. "There are places in this country where you need to fill out less paperwork to start collecting money from peoples' pockets than you do to collect fish from a fucking lake," said John Oliver.
"It is pretty clear by now that debt-buying is a grimy business and badly needs more oversight," he said later in the segment. "As it stands, any idiot can get into it, and I can prove that to you, because I’m an idiot and we started a debt-buying company. And it was disturbingly easy."
Watch as he explains how he bought a portfolio of nearly $15 million in medical debt from Texas (for less than $60K), then donated it to the non-profit RIP Medical Debt charity so that it could be forgiven. As RIP wrote about the segment, "John Oliver triumphantly Out-Oprah’s Oprah in giving away valuable gifts."
Oliver also got into Donald "The Definition Of Bigotry" Trump, and how he has been relentlessly insulting the judge in the Trump University lawsuit in the press. After surveying a series of recently unsealed documents on the scam, Oliver learned: Trump University was never a university, Trump never handpicked his own instructors as he claimed, "many instructors and mentors had no experience buying and selling real estate," and employees were given "playbooks" on sleazy tactics (including targeting single and struggling parents) to get all the money they could.
“We were told...we would get to have our pictures taken with Donald Trump. It ended up being a cardboard cutout of Mr. Trump," a former student said, according to the papers. "Which is actually a perfect metaphor for Trump University," Oliver explained. "You’re expecting the real thing, but in the end, all you get is a tacky two-dimensional facade with Donald Trump's face slapped on it." Check out the videos below (or the transcripts here).
