Sept. 17 (Bloomberg) -- An insincere apology is better than nothing since sincere regret in the over-stimulated, coarse world we live in is beyond reach. I’m thinking singers (excuse me, recording artists), sports stars, politicians and bankers who need bailouts.

Last week was large in the annals of having to say you’re sorry. Serena Williams threatened to shove a tennis ball down a referee’s throat over a bad call. She was sorry but explained that it comes from her intensity and love of the game.

Rapper Kanye West leapt on to center stage at the televised MTV Video Music Awards to push the winner aside to announce that his good friend Beyonce should have the prize. He was sorry but still thinks he’s right. The episode got him a coveted guest spot on Jay Leno’s opening show Monday night.

Representative Joe Wilson, the South Carolina Republican who called Barack Obama a liar during the president’s speech to a joint session of Congress, apologized too. He then spent the rest of the week taking it back on talk radio, raising millions of dollars as he happily aligned himself with the tea partiers and town halls extremists, including those who marched in Washington over the weekend carrying signs depicting Obama as Hitler and saying “Africa has lions. We have a lying African.”

Since being sorry is the least you can do, you would think the bankers might try it. They don’t even feel the need to strike an insincere pose of regret for bringing the country to financial ruin.

Pretty Please

When the president traveled to Federal Hall in Manhattan this week on the first anniversary of Lehman Brothers’s bankruptcy, he was the supplicant asking the 150 Masters of the Universe with everything but a pretty please to end their selfish ways and to take up their “obligation to the goal of wider recovery, a more stable system and a more broadly shared prosperity.”

He was greeted coldly. A couple of people fell asleep. The rest sat on their hands. Only once was the president, who’s put about $14 trillion at the disposal of the very people who caused the economic meltdown, interrupted by applause. No one blushed when he said, “You don’t have to wait for a law to overhaul your pay system so that folks are rewarded for long-term performance instead of short-term gains.”

Heads Roll

Of course they aren’t volunteering to be better because they aren’t waiting for a law. There isn’t going to be one. A more unapologetic group you are unlikely to find, and I’m including Lindsay Lohan and Michael Vick.

Bankers have given up nothing compared with the damage they caused. Top heads at Lehman rolled, but at many other banks it was those lower down the ladder who lost their jobs. The rare exception was Merrill Lynch’s clueless chief executive officer, John Thain, who forgot to hide the $35,000 commode in his lavishly redecorated office.

For a while the restaurants in lower Manhattan experienced a lull at lunch time, there were fewer black limos purring at the curb and a few junkets were canceled. Bankers traveled -- ostentatiously on commercial planes -- to Washington to be lectured by members of Congress, many of whom were posturing since so few of them are interested in new regulation.

But the cars and expensive meals are back. The bonuses never stopped, despite an outcry from the public horrified to see failure rewarded.

Keeping Flying

Planes resumed flying -- if they ever stopped. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, which took $25 billion in TARP money, has ordered two Gulfstreams costing $120 million. Such jets can’t live just anywhere. JPMorgan is spending $18 million to renovate a hangar at Westchester Airport near New York City.

Unlike celebrities and mere members of Congress, bankers have no fear of reprisals. They’ve proven how hard it is to curtail an industry that has a knife at the economy’s throat.

In no other industry is “regulatory capture” more prevalent. Congress and the heads of the policing organizations spend so much time with their charges that they accept their world view. Contributions and future jobs are out there. It’s so woven into the fabric of Washington, no words need be spoken.

It’s no wonder that the president’s plan to re-regulate the industry, however weak, has gained little traction on Capitol Hill. A herd of lobbyists -- hired by bailed out banks -- is thundering through the Capitol now to make sure of that.

Republican Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire said we should “be wary of the reality that -- in an attempt to address yesterday’s failures -- Congress will put in place regulatory schemes which will fundamentally undermine risk taking.”

Ludicrous. Already, bankers are coming up with new exotic instruments to take the place of those that blew up. Pay is still based on risks and bonuses are paid out before anyone knows if the risk paid off in the long run. Heads, Goldman Sachs wins. Tails, Goldman Sachs is OK and the taxpayer loses. No one in Washington has clawed back one cent of what the architects of credit default swaps pocketed.

One year in, we know the awful truth. Nothing has changed. Little will. Banks are not just too big to fail and too big to regulate. They’re bigger now than ever and way too big to be sorry. Even insincerely.

(Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 16, 2009 21:00 EDT