Program highlights for Dylan Ratigan’s MSNBC show Friday, which is being shot on Miami Beach: 1. Incisive commentary on how the stagnant housing market is linked to high unemployment. 2. Beautiful view of Biscayne Bay in the afternoon sun. 2. No ranting.

“That was, well, something,” Ratigan recalls of the famous — or infamous, if you were one of the targets — on-air tirade he unleashed against Republicans, Democrats, bankers, Congress, the president, the health care industry, the trade establishment and ...well, just about everybody. “Since then, I’ve tried to keep my anger focused in a way that will lead to some constructive changes in the way we do business.”

Ratigan, who wraps up three days of telecasts from the Mondrian Hotel on Friday, has been a familiar face on cable news for nearly a decade, hosting shows on CNBC and MSNBC. But it wasn’t until his mad-as-hell moment went viral on the Internet last October, inspiring video salutes and even songs from impassioned new fans, that he became a cultural icon.

Nothing about the meltdown was planned, Ratigan swears. He was exhausted from finishing his book ( Greedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry, published earlier this month and already perched high on best-sellers lists) and irritated by what he regarded as an unfathomably stupid debated between Republicans and Democrats over whether to raise the national debt ceiling.

“Too much idiocy, too much work, too little sleep, and I lost my mind and said what I was thinking,” Ratigan recalls. Shouting down his shocked guests, he spent the next five minutes ripping “Republicans who want to burn the place to the ground, and Democrats, with all due respect, who want to offer a plan that gets it through the second term of their presidency, and then screws me and my kids when it’s over.”

At the first commercial break, Ratigan — wondering if MSNBC would merely end his career or take his life, too — gingerly approached Steve Friedman, his veteran producer. “Try not to do that again,” Friedman advised quietly. “Abso lutely,” breathed Ratigan.

But populist fury (though Ratigan dislikes political labels and certainly wouldn’t accept that one) has been a major element in Ratigan’s MSNBC show ever since it launched in mid-2009.

Certain that the financial collapse of 2008 would trigger major political and economic reforms, Ratigan left a successful show on the business network CNBC for MSNBC, which he thought would be a better forum for delving into politics. He was surprised — and ticked off — that little seemed to be happening.

“That was my naïveté,” Ratigan says. “What stunned me was that neither the media nor the political parties were willing to engage in debate on the corruption in our banking system which underlay the financial collapse. Since then, not only is there no debate on banking corruption, but there’s no debate on corruption in healthcare or in trade policy.

“The unifying factor in all those matters is that the funding of both our political parties comes mainly from the greedy bastards, the big corporations, who are buying our politicians.”

The focus of Ratigan’s show since then has been the nexus between big business and government, a dirty game in which corporations use government to leverage big profits, while leaving their losses to be covered by taxpayers. Not that taxpayers are wholly innocent, he quickly adds.

“Everybody bears responsibility for their actions in this,” Ratigan says. “We all — home-buyers, bankers, the government, Freddie and Fannie — participated in a giant scam against ourselves. We said it was OK for banks to lend money they didn’t have to people to buy homes they couldn’t pay for, while the politicians took money from the banks to encourage a cheap housing market.”

The story, however, didn’t end the same way for all its characters, Ratigan says. Banks got bailed out and politicians absolved themselves of any blame. “But for the homeowners it’s different,” he says. “The homeowners are told no restructuring of their debt is possible. That’s where the injustice occurs. We’re playing with two different sets of rules, one for the government and the rich, the other for everybody else.”

Whether you believe in Ratigan’s take on all this or not, it certainly makes for interesting (though not highly rated; his show finishes well behind Fox news and CNN in the time period) television. His guest list bristles with exposé-minded business journalists like David Cay Johnston and white-collar prosecutors like Eliot Spitzer.

Top leaders of the two major political parties refuse to appear, but Ratigan prefers politicians who color outside the normal political lines anyway: His favorites include socialist Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, libertarian Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, and maverick Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Texas.

“I don’t necessarily agree with these guys, certainly not on everything, but they’re all willing at least to have a conversation about the corruption in the system,” says Ratigan. “That’s where we have to start, by having a conversation.”