Why do CEOs make 300x or more than those doing the work?  Here's two more reasons:
(1) Lack of any reward for long term planning;
(2) Groupthink

There's an old joke about "long term planning on Wall Street means next quarterly report."  Outsourcing everything to India/China means they'll make their gazillion dollar bonuses and can exercise their "golden parachutes" in a few years.  Earning large salaries while running a company into the ground has gotten quite popular lately.  Anyone seen any reports of salary cuts for upper management at General Motors - or any of their executives fired ior demoted for poor long-term planning?  

Groupthink in executive board compensation committees remains the rule rather than the exception.  Many directors and top executives in large companies live in their respective company's version of George W Bush's Bubble World. The larger the company, the less its top management tends to remain connected to reality. Dissenters are purged, sycophants are promoted.  

In the long term, of course, US mega-companies will either move their management overseas, or fail as new overseas competitors with lower executive salaries.  The overseas companies will, of course, eventually fall into the same "bloated executive compensation" trap and the cycle will repeat somewhere else.

As for the US?  There was once a center of learning and scientific achievement known worldwide for its weapons technology.  Unfortunately, a bunch of religious fanatics took over the various Universities and replaces science with religion.  Nothing could be taught except the "Good Book."  Today, Syria's Damascus is just another city and Damascus Steel is just a historical curiosity.