Goldman Sachs apologized to America—sort of. Goldman’s ceo admitted Wall Street had sinned. Now millions of unemployed are paying the price. But embedded within the halting apology—and obscured by an enormous bribe—is language that shows that nothing has really changed.

“I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer,” Lloyd Blankfein told the Times Online (November 8).

Later he said that there are “people who feel—and are right—that there’s some meaningful things where we may have—not may have, certainly our industry is responsible for things. And we’re a leader in our industry, and we participated in things that were clearly wrong, and we have reasons to regret and apologize for.”

So far so good. Goldman realizes that it has erred. Now Wall Street can go about changing its ways. Right?

Unfortunately, Blankfein’s public relations apology is undermined by comments he made just days earlier to the Times. People need to get over their anger at the big banks, he said.

Goldman Sachs is part of a virtuous system that serves a greater good, he claimed. “We’re very important,” he told reporter John Arlidge. “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise [money]. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth.” It is all part of a “virtuous cycle” in which Goldman serves a “social purpose.”

If you think about it, Goldman Sachs is really just “doing God’s work,” he said.

This firm is often compared to a “robber baron” and an “opportunistic vulture,” but in reality, it is God’s agent on Earth! So says Goldman. When the Goldman bookies take their cut, they are really doing it for the good of the country.

That’s why, Blankfein insinuates—if you can believe it—people should be cheering the return of super-jackpot Powerball bonuses on Wall Street.

Goldman Sachs is set to pay out $20 billion in bonuses to employees this year. In 2008, the average pay package for a Goldman employee was $364,000, which was approximately six times the wage of the average American worker. This year, Goldman employees will earn a record $765,000—almost twice as much. Not bad, considering the rest of the country is mired in recession and hundreds of thousands of workers are losing their jobs each month.

“Everybody should be, frankly, happy,” Blankfein says. The big paydays mean the financial crisis is over. “Wall Street got us into this mess, and Wall Street will get us out.”

But should we trust a ceo from a company with an unofficial modus operandi of “filthy rich by 40” to give us accurate guidance on the direction of the economy?

Let Blankfein himself answer the question. “If you’d ask me, ‘Would real-estate assets at the end of ’06 or the beginning of ’07, at a point at which we were trying to get our risks down, did we think that prices would go down?’ I had no idea,” he said. “… We were in the world of risk management, not in the world of guessing where things were going” (emphasis mine throughout).

If Blankfein couldn’t tell if there was a housing bubble in 2007—at a time when housing prices had blown through all records and banks were giving mortgages to people without jobs, he doesn’t deserve the $68 million paycheck he received in 2007—or the $500 million worth of Goldman stock he has been given.

So either he is incompetent, or lying. Either way, it is a compelling reason to take what he says with a grain of salt.

The reality is that Goldman, probably more than just about anyone, knew that housing prices were in a massive bubble. In fact, that’s part of how it made such a killing when the bubble popped. Two weeks prior to Blankfein’s faux apology, McClatchy newspapers published a report detailing how Goldman sold more than $40 billion in risky mortgage-backed securities in 2006 and 2007 to unsuspecting investors without telling them that, at the same time, the company was secretly betting the farm on a sharp housing downturn that would sharply depress the value of the very products it was pushing. It shorted (bet against) the very products it was peddling.

In today’s world, you don’t make killer profits (a record $3.2 billion this last quarter) unless you are willing to do whatever it takes.

Yet just because Goldman is raking in the dough, it doesn’t mean America will soon be back to health. With all the stimulus money floating around, the bigger shock would be if Goldman wasn’t making money.

First, since March, the markets have bounced up by 50 percent—that makes just about everybody look good. Second, the competition is largely gone. The U.S. federal government made the decision to let investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers fail, and forced the takeover of Merrill Lynch. Of the original five big investment banks, only Morgan Stanley is left to compete with Goldman. So even though the total American economic pie has shrunk, Goldman has come out with a bigger piece.

And don’t forget the other government bailouts: $10 billion from the government’s tarp program, and $13 billion the government funneled it through a backdoor aig bailout.

Then there is the fact that during the height of the banking crisis, the government changed approximately 80 years’ worth of precedent and let Goldman turn itself from a pure investment bank into a bank holding company. This means that Goldman can now borrow as much money as it wants from the Federal Reserve for close to 0 percent. Think of what you could do if you weren’t paying 30 percent on your credit card.

To top it all off, the government then changed the reporting requirements for banks in an effort to pretty up their accounting books. Now they no longer need to disclose the market value of several types of their investments, including risky mortgage-backed investments.

Just because Goldman is profitable, don’t believe that the economy is on the highway to recovery. Goldman has a bigger share of the road-kill carcass, but there is only so much meat left to pick off.

One year after the Wall Street meltdown, what’s left of America’s big banks are back at the roulette wheel as if nothing has happened. It is obvious that Wall Street hasn’t learned a thing.

The implications are frightening.

Goldman Sachs may be the most powerful banking cartel in America. Some even claim it virtually runs the U.S. government—hence the nickname Government Sachs.

The list of former Goldman executives who have held vital positions in Washington is mind-boggling. The frat house list, as reported in the Times, includes:

So if Goldman Sachs ceo Lloyd Blankfein wasn’t able to determine whether or not there was a housing bubble at the time the bubble was at its greatest, what is the probability that these other Goldman Sachs club-member types will save us? The answer is zero.

But don’t worry, to atone for its sins, Goldman is earmarking $500 million to invest in small businesses across the country—as if throwing more debt at the problem will magically solve America’s economic problems.

The most ironic thing is this: Goldman Sachs may actually be “doing God’s work”—just not the way that Blankfein thinks.

A common thread running through the Bible is that of blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. God is clearly sending the curses today. By facilitating the crashing of America’s economy, Goldman Sachs and the other big banks are actually serving to help arrest the nation’s attention.

America needs to wake up. God’s work is being done, but not by Goldman Sachs.