This morning Rick Santelli went nuclear on the entire "fraudulent mortgage" game - the culmination of a series of rants that he has (correctly) launched over the last year.

(As an aside, great minds must think alike, as we both had the "extra bathroom" thing in our morning rants!)

You can view it here (can't embed as its a CNBS video clip)

Here's the point folks, when you get down to it:

• The entire last two decades of so-called "Economic Growth" has been fueled by one fraud after another, starting with the Internet Bubble.
• This fraud has been systematic and the mainstream media has been both an implicit and explicit enabler of these frauds, instead of doing its job, which is to root them out.  The looks on the faces of the other CNBC "anchors" was one of abject fear - perhaps parts of "The Fourth Estate" is coming to realize that when the pitchforks and torches come out - and they certainly will if we hold the course we're on - they might have some trouble explaining why they shouldn't be near the head of the list of those being "sought"?
• The conflicts of interest in the media, where their advertising dollars come from those who are promulgating and profiting from these frauds means that they must choose between their job of protecting the public (their essential purpose under The First Amendment) and being a willing accomplice in the theft being performed by the prime actors in these frauds.
• With the exception of a few months around 1995 (which roughly coincided with Microsoft's release of Win/95, the first "consumer" system of wide acceptance that had a dialer built in along with a web browser) the Internet NEVER doubled in size every three months.  Yet this was paraded as the statistic to justify all the bubble companies up until the bubble burst in the spring of 2000.  I was one of hundreds if not thousands of people with access to the core of the network and KNEW this was a lie.  Nobody would report the truth.  Proof?  Read all about it:

  • And that's not the only thing Denninger feels strongly about. Though the Internet made him a millionaire -- his stake in MCS was rumoured to be worth US$12 million at the time of the company's sale -- the feisty Midwesterner has nothing but scorn for the industry overall.

    "I refused to take any stake in the acquiring firm. The shell game being played by these corporations is astounding," he said.

    Denninger has also steadfastly avoided investing any of his personal fortune in the Internet: "I refuse to have anything to do with the Nasdaq 100. There will be a shake-out, and when it comes, it will be ugly and it will happen fast."

    He might as well have been speaking of Black Week, April 10 through April 14, when the Nasdaq crashed.

    The volatility of Net stocks in the past few weeks makes Denninger seem prescient, but his dislike for the unseemly marriage of breathless hype and dubious business plans is visceral.

• When the Internet bubble collapsed it was decided to intentionally pump liquidity into the system and ignore both banking regulations and the law, making possible the housing bubble.