> Galbraith wrote that stuff during the Golden Age. In an era
> of deregulation and relentless shareholder pressure to
> maximize profits, it's hopelessly obsolete.
How is it obsolete? The corporations, that in the Golden Age as you claim, used vertical and horizontal organization to exempt themselves from the competitive pressures of the market, now found themselves in a competitive environment again. Therefore, the basic argument holds - markets create only a race to the bottom, while organization, including corporate organization, exempts economic actors from that pressure and gives them an opportunity use some of their resources to other, hopefully, socially beneficis ends 9instead of price slashing and cutthroat competition). Besides, I think you exaggerate the effect of deregulation - yes there is more competition and more pressure to maximize shareholder returns, but thai is a far cry from the dog eat dog free market competition.
As to your posting on foundations - it would be useful to distinguish between right wing and left wing foundations. Otherwise it is like arguing that "political parties" are responsible for the right turn in politics. Some of them are, but others are not or even pull in the other direction. It is true that giving pattrns of right wing and liberal foundations differ - right wing foundations tend to fund projects that train conservative intelelctuals and stromtroopers, while liberal foundations tend to fund social services, research (e.g. the study of sexuality in the US when the government money was yankend as a result of conservative pressure, or a lots of environment- related stuff), arts and culture. So there is no danger that radical campus groups are any danger of ideological contamination with foundation money.
Besides, I do go out from time to time and know, for example that foundation giving accounts for about 11% of all giving while 75% is direct individual giving, most of which goes to religion. http://www.givingusa.org/index.htm So concentrating of the evil effects of foundation giving (only a relatively small part of which goes to conservative causes, while most goes to direct service provision that do make a difference between life and death) while ignoring the effect of individual giving that funds religion in this country is disingenuous - to say the least. Again this is yet another example of Lefties striving to achieve ideolgocial purity and in the process abeting the causes of the Right - in this aprticular case one that aims at "defunding the Left" by placing restrictions on donations to nonprofits and their tax exempt status (ever heard of the proposed Istook amenedment, narrowly defeated a few years ago?). Other examples abound - from the defunding of menatl health institutions, to championing individual rights that dove tail with neo-liberal goals (cf. last David Harvey's book on that), to property rights movement trying to gut government power to put them to a public use, and to undercutting labor unions.
Wojtek