Intemperate language aside (and maybe it sounds better in the original German), they have a point. Felix Salmon points to this article on the startling job security enjoyed by most bank CEOs. Stan O'Neal, for example, had a terrific contract which meant that he could only be fired for "cause". "Cause", in this case, meant breaking the law or Merrill's own internal rules and practices. In other words, as long as he could resist the temptation to steal the office supplies or beat up the interns, O'Neal was unsackable; simply "doing a very bad job" wasn't "cause". (Bet your boots, though, that poor performance counted as "cause" for most of the rest of Merrill's workforce.)
So, as someone else once said when faced with a very similar problem of unaccountable, overpaid executives: What Is To Be Done?
Salmon suggests a change to the pay system -

Here's my bright idea: rather than awarding options, boards should extend enormous low-interest or even interest-free loans to their CEOs, on the condition that all the money be used to buy the company's stock. The fiction of options, of course, is that they have no value if they're awarded with a strike price where the market price for the stock is - that's how companies find it so easy to award so many of them. My idea also costs the company very little, but it does give the CEO much more downside exposure than any options grant does.
If Stan O'Neal had received an interest-free loan to buy Merrill stock on an annual basis, people wouldn't worry so much about how much he got paid each year or how difficult his contract made it to fire him. When he left, he'd have to repay the loan, and the value of that stock wouldn't come close to covering the amount of money he needed to do that.

- but then concludes that boards would simply forgive the loan, so that wouldn't work.
I've mentioned this issue before - and at more length here. This may be a case where government pay caps are the best solution. Let's not, after all, fool ourselves into thinking that it counts as intervention in the free market. The financial market is anything but free - it's about the most heavily regulated (and supported) business in existence.