Today's New York Times is buzzing with outrage over rising CEO pay. It trots out the usual suspects -- I'll call them pay ragers -- to rail against public company CEOs who get paid more and more each year regardless of company performance. But despite years of outrage, these self-styled pay ragers backed, in part, by union pension funds are not getting the results they seek. And due to their lack of political clout, their outrage is likely to persist.

The problem seems to be that CEO compensation is going up because performance-based compensation is not a big enough part of the total. As a result, even though performance-based compensation goes down, total compensation rises because the bonuses given at the board's discretion are bigger than the ones linked to performance. In 2007, average compensation for CEOs who had held the job at least two years rose 5% to $11.2 million. To be sure, performance-based bonuses were down in 2007, but the value and prevalence of discretionary bonuses rose.

It seems that pay ragers want CEOs to make less money if their companies don't perform. The Times quotes a Calpers portfolio manager who said, "We're not against pay. But we are certainly against pay for failure, or for just showing up." But it's more than that. In an election year, shareholder activists are hoping to tap into a deep vein of populist sentiment to enact policies that will narrow the pay gap between CEOs and their workers.

Ironically, the New York Times lets former Nixon speech writer Ben Stein make this populist case. He cites Congressional Research Service statistics that "average pay for chief executives stood at 179 times average worker pay in 2005, up from a multiple of 90 in 1994. Adjusted for inflation, average worker pay rose by a total of only 8 percent from 1995 to 2005; median pay for chief executives at the 350 largest companies rose 150 percent."

Stein and the other pay ragers can be secure that the conditions that outrage them will persist. And that's because they lack sufficient political clout. If pay ragers could make larger donations to politicians running for election than public company CEOs, they would be taken seriously. But our system gives us the best politicians money can buy. The most skilled among them seek votes by appearing to sympathize with the pay ragers' populist anger. But they still take the corporate money to finance their campaigns.

It's just not clear that there's much of a constituency for politicians to legislate how much money CEOs make. Meanwhile, Stein is right that public company boards are a CEO club that protects its members. But as we saw in the cases of Merrill Lynch & Co. (NYSE: MER) and Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C), CEOs who put their companies in enough financial quicksand can get summarily thrown out of that club.

That's because the risks that a CEO needs to take to remain in the club these days are immense. With pressure each quarter to beat earnings estimates and raise guidance, CEOs are increasingly taking the blame when the risks they take to satisfy those expectations fall flat. CEOs are well-compensated for living with that pressure. And the ones that succeed should be well compensated.

The CEO club does have a sort of rough justice. Recent CEO firings suggest that the ones who make enormous errors lose their jobs -- in some cases getting booted out with saddlebags loaded with huge severance packages. It's the ones in the middle who make out a little better than they should who stir the pay ragers. But unless their political clout rises dramatically, things will stay pretty much as they are.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He owns Citigroup shares and has no financial interest in Merrill Lynch.