How much does your job pay? What’s your average raise? Are you entitled to a bonus? Are you held accountable for your job duties, or do you get paid for just showing up? If the department you run fails to deliver on the biggest order your company has ever received, what would happen to you?

In a New York Times article (written by Claudia Deutsch), similar questions are asked–but all of them relate to one specific job: chief executive officer. Shareholders have been angry about excessive executive compensation for years. Tighter compensation disclosure rules were supposed to rein in these excesses. But nothing has changed, and it’s clear that there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

In a down economy, stock prices fall, and CEO pay rises. It doesn’t make sense. It’s just the way it is. Among the top 200 hundred public companies that filed their proxies by March 28, the average annual salary for their CEO’s was $11.2 million. The average discretionary bonus (which means it has nothing to do with performance) was $2.8 million.

Oil companies have done well in the midst of our down economy. The highest paid CEO of these companies made $33.6 million–in one year. One wonders if it was his business acumen that caused the company to do so well or the pure luck of soaring oil prices. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the companies in the middle of the subprime mortgage debacle–like Merrill Lynch. Merrill has a new CEO whose annual compensation package is $83.8 million. I guess big things are expected of him. The old Merrill CEO was canned because of his abysmal performance, but he walked away with a fortune via the severance package he received.

As someone was quoted in the Times are as saying, “We’re paying executives like successful entrepreneurs, without asking them to take entrepreneurial risks.” Among executives today, there is simply no shame. To be sure, most of them have paid their dues. Most have worked long hours to get where they are. Most have sacrificed much–sometimes their families, sometimes their friends, sometimes their health, sometimes themselves. With all those sacrifices, it’s not surprising that shame would be gone, too.