Here we groan again

Remember how just the other day I was going on and on about how the American Dream, the generations-old notion that however much you had to struggle you could believe your children would be better off than you are, was fading away?

Not for everybody.

A new Associated Press calculation shows that compensation for America's top CEOs has skyrocketed into the stratospheric heights of pro athletes and movie stars: Half make more than $8.3 million a year, and some make much, much more. ...

The high cost of chief executive pay has drawn criticism in recent years as salaries rose, stock options paid off like lottery jackpots, and perks like chauffeured cars and private jets spread. ...

The top 10 earners were in disparate industries, but they all had one thing in common: They were paid at least $30 million each in 2006. ...

Of the 386 companies in the AP list ... only six reported their CEOs made less than $1 million last year. ...

A recent report by the Congressional Research Service helps to put the executive pay issue into a real-world context. CEOs make, on average, 179 times as much as rank and file workers, double the 90-to-1 ratio in 1994, according to the agency's calculations.

That ratio was as "low" as about 42:1 in 1980, but particularly soared during the dotcom boom of the late 1990s until by 2000 it was estimated at a jaw-dropping 525:1. When the boom went bust, average CEO pay dropped by double digits in both 2001 and 2002. That drove the ratio down, but it was something of a false shift: The average pay dropped largely because the very top-level players got smacked down, but that's not the only measure. That is, even as

average exec pay plunged by a third [in 2002], the median pay for our 365 CEOs [surveryed] actually rose by 5.9%, to $3.7 million,

said Business Week in 2003. [Emphasis added.] And, as the AP noted, that median is now $8.3 million a year - a 180% increase over the last six years.

As for the rest of us, well, here's an additional bit of real-world context, courtesy of a Congressional Research Service report from February:

During the past several decades, average pay for non-management workers has stagnated, after adjustment for inflation, falling slightly since the early 1970s.

And one more, again from the article:

If the minimum wage had risen at the same pace as CEO pay since 1990, it would be worth $22.61 today, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.

Do these comparisons matter? Not according to S. Randy Lampert of Morgan Joseph & Co.:

"Compensation is only excessive when it exceeds industry norms and the stock performance has been underwhelming," he said.

Or, more bluntly, no matter how stratospheric their pay is, top corporate bosses are not overpaid - because all the other corporate bosses have equally obscene incomes. So it's just the "industry norm," they'll smirk.

Of course, that's a norm established by, in the words of J. Richard Finlay of the Centre for Corporate & Public Governance in Toronto, "a small clique of like-minded directors, most of whom are themselves past and current CEOs with a vested interest in perpetuating a failed, but to them, remarkably generous, system."

But woe be to those who point out the obvious: To do so is to be guilty of that most heinous of social crimes, that of "engaging in class warfare." And the CEO's much prefer going after an unarmed opponent.