None too soon, the Obama administration will finally start acting against those planned multimillion-dollar bonuses to executives of banks and corporations that took huge taxpayer bailouts in the Wall Street and Detroit economic meltdowns.

The delay in slashing the special compensation to about 175 bosses in seven major corporate entities had allowed public distress to grow to outrage in recent months. It further fueled the so-called Tea Party Movement protest that dominated last summer's town meetings across the country.

The action will not quash that protest, but it will at least indicate that the Obama administration does not have a tin ear for the public lament, magnified by a continuing rise in the national rate of unemployment, now approaching 10 percent.

Word that Kenneth Feinberg, the Treasury official in charge of the compensation review, would cut in half the bonuses to the 175 biggest recipients in the rescued banking, insurance and auto-making giants will be well-received on Main Street, though not on Wall Street.

This unprecedented intrusion by government into private management affairs is certain to intensify cries of rampant "socialism" from the dominant conservative base of the Republican Party.

Its warnings of a government takeover in the current debate over health-care reform will only be broadened by the administration's assault on the bonus babies.

Never mind that among the most popular federal programs are Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, all government-run entities whose long existence have not yet brought down the American capitalist system.

Yet the bugaboo of government involvement remains a prime conservative argument against health-care reform, especially against the option of an alternative government insurance plan as competition to private insurance.

The seven targeted companies — Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, General Motors, GMAC, Chrysler and Chrysler Financial — together got bailouts of about $250 billion in taxpayer money from Congress in the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) program last year.

As negotiated by Feinberg, cash salaries for the 25 highest-paid executives in each of the seven will suffer an even more severe cut of an average of 90 percent. In other words, a boss making a million dollars a year will receive only $100,000. But he will also be eligible for stock grants, with delayed redemption schedules.

What has brought a second round of public protests against the well-heeled executives is the apparent rebounding of Wall Street seen in rising stock values, the swift repaying of TARP loans by some recipients and the profit postings of others. In this sense, the new pay cuts to the bigwigs have come just in time.

One of the reasons major investment houses like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase have repaid their TARP loans is that doing so lifts the requirement on them to limit compensation. Inasmuch as managers of these firms make much of the competition for top executives, some of whom were not faultless in the market meltdown, huge bonuses can be expected despite continued public outcries.

Nevertheless, the administration's actions against the 175 bosses in the seven targeted entities provides some limited evidence that the Obama administration has heard the famous citizen cry for help in the movie "Network" — "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore." Or not as much of it, anyway.