This recession is forcing Rhode Islanders to tighten THEIR belts for the common good. But the  federal government’s bank bailout policies are widening the gap between elite Americans and the rest of us.

Every day brings more evidence of what this downturn is doing to the lives of Rhode Islanders. Many of us have responded.  Workers at Taco, one of the state’s premier manufacturing companies, have gone on 4-day weeks to preserve jobs. Firefighters and teachers who make 50,000 a year are paying more for their health benefits and agreeing to wage cuts or freezes. Local hospitals, too, are reducing wages to avoid layoffs.

These sacrifices are replayed across the country. The United Auto Workers union, in an effort to help the struggling car companies, have agreed to large wage and benefit concessions. Other unions are following suit.

And each day brings news of more lost jobs, foreclosed houses and dreams of retirement or college deferred.

In all this we see that average Americans are willing to sacrifice to help the country through the worst economic mess since before World War II. But last week, these folks finally boiled over with anger.

What provoked IT: The latest outrage from Wall Street and Washington. AIG, the insurance behemoth that is alive only because of billions in U.S. taxpayers subsidies, handed out $165 million in executive bonuses. Washington has dumped $170 Billion into this company, so people quickly figured out that AIG was pulling a reverse Robin Hood with ITS tax dollars.

The AIG disclosures came in the aftermath of other revelations of excess by companies that have accepted billions in federal money, only to use millions for junkets and private jets to carry pampered executives from Washington to their McMansions in the Hamptons.

These bailouts have made clear the huge divide between the Washington GOVERNING and Wall Street banking elites and the rest of us.

Rhode Islanders are familiar with generations of political chicanery and corruption. But in all of the state’s florid history of corruption has there ever been a government as greedy, arrogant and corrupt as the titans of Wall Street who nearly brought down the world’s economic system?

In the last generation, we have become a society where the rewards to the wealthy became divorced from their contributions to the common good. A study of compensation levels in 2007 found that average CEO pay at the Standard & Poor’s top 500 companies was 344 times higher than the average worker’s wage and that the nation’s top 50 investment fund managers took home an astonishing 19,000 times as much the typical worker.

These has been much debate lately about whether President Obama’s activist government policies are socialist. This leads to a larger question: Can a society that has socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor and middle class long survive?

The me decade, Tom Wolfe’s famous moniker for the 1970s, morphed into the me generation. Maybe a better idea would be to make this the We generation.