ATLANTA -- Next to the rock stars, the film stars and the stars of sports, there are the stars of the corporate world, the CEO.

When the nation's top auto executives went up to Capitol Hill to ask for a bailout, Chrysler's Bob Nardelli offered to accept $1 a year in salary. Nardelli doesn't have to worry about stretching a dollars. In 2007, he walked away from the top job at Atlanta-based Home Depot with a $210 million dollar severance package.

During his tenure as CEO, Home Depot stock fell 12 percent while rival Lowe's shares soared 180 percent.

"Nardelli's pay package at Home Depot will go down as one of the most abusive, outrageous, and counterproductive pay plans ever," said Nell Minnow of the corporate watchdog group the Corporate Library.

Minnow said she isn't opposed to CEOs getting enormous salaries and perks, but the compensation must be tied to performance and shareholder value.

That wasn't the case with Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo. He jumped ship with more than a $100 million, while the lender was sinking under the weight of bad mortgage loans.

"Basically corporate executives have been able to turn some of the greatest ideas in economics, the public corporation, into a machine for transferring wealth from the shareholder into their pockets," said Minnow.

She points to Jack Welch. He was once praised as a model CEO as the former head of General Electric. He came under fire from shareholders for a severance package that reached nearly a $1 billion. It included $9 million a year in pension and every imaginable perk, including free toilet paper.

"His Knicks tickets, his flowers, his dry cleaning, permanent access to the corporate jet, the townhouse and just about everything. So the man who had all the money in the world didn't have to pay for anything."

A report by the Institute for Policy Studies says through a series of bureaucratic and tax loopholes, taxpayers are subsidizing excess executive pay to the tune of $20 billion a year.

"Right now, for the average worker, you can shelter about $16,000 in deferred savings. For the CEO there is no limit on the tax subsidy or shelter you get," said Richard Ferlauto, who is the director of pensions and benefits for AFSCME, a company that represents millions of government workers.

Top executives in the United States earn over 300 times more than the salary of the average American worker. In European countries, the ratio is closer to 40 to 1. Executive compensation here is set by boards, run by other CEOs.

Local businessmen we talked to had strong opinions. "These bonuses paid for guys who stay for ninety days and get $25 million, like the guy who left Merrill Lynch, it's absurd," said John Christie.

Metro Atlanta businessman Wendall Matthews said, "It's unreasonable how excessive it is. And it's outside the proportion of their influence on the business and the performance of the companies themselves."