As former New Jersey governor and former Democratic Sen. Jon Corzine returned to Washington in recent days to testify about the sudden collapse of MF Global, it’s like being transported back to 2008 and the depth of the financial crisis. Hearing Corzine describe his firm’s high-risk investments and claiming that he does not know what happened to about $1 billion in client funds is reminiscent of other Wall Street titans talking about the complex financial products that their firms created and sold five or six years ago that contributed to a near-financial meltdown and led to the Great Recession.

Hearing about the collapse of the futures trading firm MF Global, which is the eighth- largest bankruptcy in the United States, suggested little has changed in the Wall Street culture despite Washington politicians boasting about new financial reforms.

As former CEO of the famed Wall Street brokerage Goldman Sachs, Corzine left the business world for politics, using his personal fortune to win a seat in the U.S. Senate and later become governor of New Jersey. After voters rejected his re-election bid, he returned to the world of finance, apparently with something to prove.

Corzine introduced a high-risk culture to MF Global, convincing board members he knew what he was doing. He brought arrogance and plenty of Washington contacts.

Only a few months before his company failed, Corzine was in Washington lobbying regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to dilute a proposed rule that would limit mingling of client funds with the company’s money. That co-mingling is exactly what happened at MF Global and what led to the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars invested by farmers and others making commodity hedges.

Not surprisingly, members of a congressional committee who questioned Corzine asked why regulators did not sound some warnings before MF Global fell.

U.S. Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., said, “It appears to me that no one has learned a thing; that Wall Street is still operating as if 2008 never happened.”

Despite the fact that some financial reforms have been passed by Congress, many politicians talk about financial reform but still take money from Wall Street.

Corzine, it’s been learned, was a major campaign contributor. In fact, Corzine was skilled at pulling together other big donors and became a “bundler” for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

The Sunlight Foundation reported that Obama received more campaign money from Wall Street than any other politician, including former President George W. Bush. Another report revealed that Obama took more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial services companies in his presidential bid than all the other GOP candidates combined.

Wall Street firms were Obama’s second-largest source of campaign cash in his 2008 campaign, after lawyers.

The financial sector, which has grown dramatically in the past several decades, is a major contributor to both Republican and Democratic candidates.

All that campaign money, combined with massive amounts of lobbying and a constantly spinning revolving door that sees top Wall Street executives move into jobs in the Treasury Department or White House, and then go back to Wall Street after a few years in government, suggests much of Washington only talks tough about curbing financial excesses.

Suspicions that Wall Street owns Washington are further raised by the fact that the savings-and-loan scandal in the late 1980s saw 1,100 cases referred to prosecutors. More than 800 bank officials went to jail. But following the 2008-09 financial crisis, barely a handful of cases have been pursued and nobody has gone to jail. Why?

Some say the cases today are more complicated and that federal regulators are outgunned and out-lawyered by the big banks, but it’s clear that Wall Street’s campaign money has bought influence.

Corzine could be an outlier among now-chastened bankers and maybe he just made some very bad bets, but the collapse of MF Global suggests that little has changed in the world of high finance, no matter what politicians say.