I'm hardly one to support the esurient greed and rapacity of the finance industry, but you can't deny that there is some reason for the CEOs to feel put upon.  While it's become all the rage to blame the Bushies for our current economic problems (and Lord knows they've played an important role in it), the fact is that the American public has for long and long admired and envied those who could amass huge fortunes without regard to the morality of their methods.  The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was not popular because people were secretly appalled by the excesses described therein.  People actually wanted to have enough goodies to get on the show and be interviewed by Robin Leach.  Having been raised in this kind of environment, it's not hard to understand why the modern CEO would think that amassing presposterous amounts of wealth for his/her self and (by extension) the stockholders of her/his company would be regarded as virtuous.

This is surely not the first time in American history that personal wealth has been so regarded (see, for example, the Gilded Age).  Generally it has taken an immense financial meltdown to redirect the attention of the Great American Public away from the lure of money and towards more socially useful virtues, just like now.  In the process of a such a readjustment, those who benefited from their own greed became demonized and held up to scorn, ridicule, and hatred.

For the sake of the poor put-upon CEOs of today, one can only hope that as they are having their posteriors chewed off by self-righteous congressional committees and the equally self-righteous media, they can take some comfort that in being selected as the Poster Children of Evil, they are performing a service to the nation.