Episode Review: John Oliver Goes in for a Little Revenge
In his most recent broadcast of Last Week Tonight, Sunday, April 10th, John Oliver ignored the train-wreck you simply cannot take your eyes off of and switched from the destruction of the Republican Party to a deserving trio of entrepreneurs in the service industry, and that is using the word “service” in its broadest possible sense.
Oliver’s main story for this show deals chiefly with the big three players in the credit reporting field. They are, as you probably know already, the entities known as Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Oliver introduces them with a proper show of respect for their place in society, and let’s be fair. They would serve a very useful purpose in the vast, complicated network of our commerce if they could be confined to the area of creditworthiness (which they are not) and, more importantly, if they could be trusted to function properly (which they cannot).
As to that first problem, Oliver points out that these credit rating services are used for more than determining whether or not to lend money and at what rate. The scores they assign you can impact whether or not you get that job you were hoping to land, among other extraneous things. And, while I have never seen a Craigslist job poster ask for my credit score (“Thank the Lord, thank the Lord,” N.N. Johnson, Guys and Dolls, op. cit.), I have no reason to doubt the host when he says they do exist.
Even if that were the only abuse of the system, the producers of Last Week Tonight would be hard-pressed to make a major segment out of it. That would be like blaming the growers of melons or cucumbers because their crops are sometimes used for self-gratification. On the other hand, our cucumber growers do not typically advertise that aspect of their produce, while the credit score growers are not nearly as reticent.
No, the far bigger problem is that the information on those reports is not as accurate as it should be, and by an alarming amount. The defenders (and proprietors) of the system would tell us that their alleged 95% accuracy record (and Oliver does give them that) is nothing short of outstanding. On the other hand, when factored into about 200 million credit profiles, that comes out to ten million of you who are not catching the elevator, but you are getting the shaft.
And even that is not the worst of it. According to some instances Oliver showed us, which may or may not be typical, but probably are, it is next-to-impossible to get rid of egregious errors and absolutely out of the question to get rid of them quickly. Wikipedia, by the very nature of its operation, is choc-a-bloc with errors, but those can be fixed with the snap of a finger, assuming you are nimble enough to type in the correction with one hand while you are busy snapping your fingers with the other. Sad to say, credit score errors are not only harder to correct than with the snap of a finger, but maybe even than with the pull of a tooth.
But then, after walking us through this chamber of horrors, our tour guide treated us to that touch of revenge he invented. No, it won’t cause the credit scorekeepers anything like the anguish it has caused so many of their victims, but it was a nice touch. By the way, I looked up all the names involved with the revenge plot, and they do exist. I would suggest that, if you don’t plan to see the show at a later date (assuming you were unfortunate enough to miss it the first time out), that you check out the link, a bit below.
In one of the show’s short segments at the beginning—in fact, the very first one—Oliver does a bit about the Panama Papers. You know, that’s the situation pertaining to the leaked tax shelters. It was all right, as far as the comedy went, but it left me thinking about how I felt about the whole thing. I am still not sure what I think of Edward Snowden, but my instinct is to applaud the person or people who blew this whistle. On the other hand, it matters little to most of us in the United States. What really matters is that so many of our obscenely rich are still legally entitled to call their tax evasion “tax avoidance” and somehow imagine they are right with the Lord.
Once again, and I almost hate to sound like a broken record, see this episode if you have not already done so.
Last Week Tonight, HBO, April 10. 2016
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Thomas Cleveland Lane
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