CEO's, CFO's, presidents etc. "retiring" with huge bonuses?

Can anyone offer a reasonable explanation why these so called business "leaders" retire with those obscene bonuses. It appears not to matter if they left their company in ruins or if they presided over the company while some huge mistake (disaster, error etc.) took place. They "retire" (read: fired, booted out, forced out, voted out by the board etc.) with bonuses in the millions if not tens of millions of dollars. If any of his/her underlings (below the level of "executive" vice president) had some similarly poor record they would have been summarily booted with nothing. We all know what would have happened to the little guy on the factory floor or the someone in an office working 9 to 5, you know, the worker bee. The CEO that does well for his/her company retires with huge bonuses that can only be clified as outrageous. It seems those big shots do not exist in the same reality as most of us do. You know the saying, "There is no free lunch." Well who do you think ends up paying those bonuses? They are ped on to the consumer as a cost of doing business. Where is our government in all this? Is there never to be a limit on this excess?