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The New York Times recently ran a series outlining the widening gap between wages of regular workers and the CEOs, who rule over them, feudal style.

This article begins this way:

IN 1977, James P. Smith, a shaggy-haired 21-year-old known as Skinny, took a job as a meat grinder at what is now a ConAgra Foods pepperoni plant. At $6.40 an hour, it was among the best-paying jobs in town for a high school graduate.

Nearly three decades later, Mr. Smith still arrives at the same factory, shortly before his 3:30 a.m. shift. His hair has thinned; he has put on weight. Today, his union job pays him $13.25 an hour to operate the giant blenders that crush 3,600-pound blocks of pork and beef.

His earnings, which total about $28,000 a year, have not kept pace even with Omaha's low cost of living. The company eliminated bonuses about a decade ago. And now, almost 50, Mr. Smith is concerned that his $80,000 retirement nest egg will not be enough — especially since his plant is on a list of ones ConAgra wants to sell.

"I will probably have to work until I die," Mr. Smith said in his Nebraskan baritone.

Not so for Bruce C. Rohde, ConAgra's former chairman and chief executive, who stepped down last September amid investor pressure. He is set for life.

All told, Mr. Rohde, 57, received more than $45 million during his eight years at the helm, and was given an estimated $20 million retirement package as he walked out the door.

Each year from 1997 to 2005, when Mr. Rohde led ConAgra, he was awarded either a large cash bonus, a generous grant of stock or options, or valuable benefits, such as extra years' credit toward his guaranteed pension.

But the company, a food giant with more than 100 brands, struggled under his watch. ConAgra routinely missed earnings targets and underperformed its peers. Its share price fell 28 percent. The company cut more than 9,000 jobs. Accounting problems surfaced in every one of Mr. Rohde's eight years.

Even when ConAgra restated its financial results, which lowered earnings in 2003 and 2004, Mr. Rohde's $16.4 million in bonuses for those two years stayed the same.

It ends thusly:

Mr. Smith, the meat grinder, has seen his wages grow at a pace of 2.7 percent a year for the last 28 years. But, adjusted for inflation, his $13.25 an hour salary today is roughly two-thirds his $6.40-an-hour starting wage.

The CEO, Mr. Rohde, has seen his salary alone rise at 8 percent a year, and he collected more than $22 million in cash compensation during almost nine years at the company. Since stepping down in September, he started collecting $2.4 million in severance pay, twice his most recent salary, as well as full health benefits, which he will have through 2009. ConAgra shareholders are footing the bill for a secretary and an office near his home. And that $984,000 annual pension? It reflects 20 years of service, even though he was a ConAgra executive for not quite nine. In July, Mr. Rohde told The Omaha World-Herald that he hoped to spend part of his retirement flying his helicopter between his home and his family's Minnesota getaway home.

Gretchen Morgenson followed up with this article, where she profiles Ivan G. Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon Communications:

For Ivan G. Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon Communications, 2005 was a very good year. As head of the telecommunications giant, Mr. Seidenberg received $19.4 million in salary, bonus, restricted stock and other compensation, 48 percent more than in the previous year.

Others with a stake in Verizon did not fare so well. Shareholders watched their stock fall 26 percent, bondholders lost value as credit agencies downgraded the company's debt and pensions for 50,000 managers were frozen at year-end. When Verizon closed the books last year, it reported an earnings decline of 5.5 percent.

And yet, according to the committee of Verizon's board that determines his compensation, Mr. Seidenberg earned his pay last year as the company exceeded "challenging" performance benchmarks. Mr. Seidenberg's package was competitive with that of other companies in Verizon's industry, shareholders were told, and was devised with the help of an "outside consultant" who reports to the committee.

This "outside consultant" turns out to be an executive compensation consulting company named Hewitt Associates. But get this:

Verizon is one of Hewitt's biggest customers in the far more profitable businesses of running the company's employee benefit plans, providing actuarial services to its pension plans and advising it on human resources management. According to a former executive of the firm who declined to be identified out of concern about affecting his business, Hewitt has received more than half a billion dollars in revenue from Verizon and its predecessor companies since 1997.

In other words, the very firm that helps Verizon's directors decide what to pay its executives has a long and lucrative relationship with the company, maintained at the behest of the executives whose pay it recommends.

WHAT?? How can this be? The very company that is determining the CEO's pay is paid more than $500 million over the past 9 years by the company run by the CEO?? Can you say Quid Pro Quo?

In fact, Hewitt had $2.8 billion in revenue in 1995, with 71 percent coming from outsourcing, 29 percent coming from its human resources consulting unit, and a very small fraction coming from compensation consulting (in fact, the industry standard is less than 2% of revenues come from human resources consulting).

It turns out that this practice is common throughout the Fortune 500 world:

A recent study by the Corporate Library, "Pay for Failure: The Compensation Committees Responsible," identified 11 major companies whose shareholder returns had been negative for five years, but whose chief executives' pay had exceeded $15 million during the last two years combined. "The disconnect between pay and performance is particularly stark" at these companies, the study noted. They include AT&T, BellSouth, Hewlett-Packard, Home Depot, Lucent Technologies, Merck, Pfizer, Safeway, Time Warner and Wal-Mart.

Finally, this article outlines how much executive pay has risen recently. In fact, "Gap more than doubled the compensation of its chief executive, Paul S. Pressler, to $19.1 million, even though the company posted its worst results in years."

Unbelievable. The only answer must be that the oligarchs at America's top companies are so greedy, and can get away with this sort of thing, that they are pushing the pedal to the medal while their boy, Bush, is still in office. It's just so obvious that the rich are raiding not only the corporate coffers, but the national coffers into which all Americans contribute.

It's shameful that America has become this way. It really is.

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