*ps* AT&T: deforesting, pricegouging....

 i think that what we saw with rockafeller and such, that the mentality is that monopolies are a thing of the past.  and of course the government made laws against it, so we have nothing to worry about, right?

In my opinion, wrong.  Wrong for starters because the government did not really break up Standard Oil, just like the government did not really break up AT&T. What the government did in the case of Standard Oil was give sanction to a shell game that gave the illusion it was breaking up Standard Oil when all it was doing was giving Rockefeller the green light to set up  & build out a system of tax-sheltering scams Foundations, a decade before the government then set about progressively/agressively taxing the income of the people who had no place to shelter. In the process, the government won points with the deceived populous for "taxing those evil rich bastards", or what some in the present would call a Win-Win.  By and large, guess who did not and continues to not have a place to shelter the fruits of their labors from federal taxation?; the common deceived people in large part made up by the middle-class. Rockefeller was certainly in a position to know that the Federal Reserve and Progressive Income Taxation acts were in the near future since his son in-law (Nelson Aldrich) was a principle player in Congress pulling the strings to make these happen. The Federal Reserve Act was originally named the Aldrich Plan. To their credit, the common people of that era were smart enough to know that any congressional act bearing the name Aldrich was one and the same as being the agenda of a The Rockefeller Plan, and the people resisted it. To their discredit, the same common people were not smart enough to recognize that the Federal Reserve Act was merely a new name applied by Congress and their media to the same Aldrich Plan. In other words, central banking and agressive income taxation were desired by Rockefeller. Why wouldn't they be? He certainly had every opportunity to insulate himself from these scams long before they were enacted. Also remember J.D.R. was given credit for being quoted as saying " I wish to own nothing and control everything!" 

Likewise with the so-called breakup of AT&T. Coincidentally, I just happened to be making my maiden entrance into the workforce in the computer industry in 1982 and was affored an especially close up-front view of what was happening inside a large, regional Bell/AT&T HQ facility. Just take a peek at the following picture, which portrays a fairly recent, current view of what AT&T looks like 25 years post divestiture. Yes, they certainly have changed their looks over the years, lots of nips here, tucks there, but still, massive  growth near the waist-line. How broke up do they really look to you?

(note: this photo does not embed well in the CZ editor, click the link, then mouse-over the photo to get the big view)

http://www.freepress.net/ownership/att_history.jpg

I'm not convinced that "monopolies are inherent" the way you describe. For starters, I'm not really sure what you mean by that. Would you please further describe what you mean? To me, inherent implies an element of something that occurs by natural means. If you mean anything along these lines, then again, I do not agree. The prime examples of capitalists' monopoly in the U.S.A. historically have not come to be by any genuinely natural means, but instead have come to be as a result of government-granted privileges. On second thought, if there is ANYTHING that can be said to be naturally inherent in the system that has become the federal U.S.G. it is the thorough and comprehenseive corruption of the people and entities who make up this system. When telegraph technology was evovling towards telephony in the late 1800s, the government looked into it's crystal ball and eventually decided to self-appoint itself as the ruling body of the still-unfolding modern media apparatus by way of inventing what eventually became the FCC. There may have been a brief period during it's inception, closer to the time when A.G. Bell himself was still alive, that Bell Corp. was a genuine and legitimate company. After all, in his earliest years of tinkering with technology, Bell is said to have originally been inspired to seek a method for helping people who were deaf and or mute. But, since the early 1900's, AT&T "Ma Bell" had become a tightly controlled government asset, just like numerous other big-time corps have become over the decades since them. For their troubles, Bell Corp was given monopoly control over the $$ to be harvested out of selling commercial telephone service to the customer base of people hooking up to and using this new-fangled monstrosity that became the public telephone network (PSTN,  AKA> POTS). When the related technology (government-controlled, remember this!) further developed inventions that allowed video images to be sent and recieved via the same "radio airwaves", the television industry was invented and the federal government granted additional monopoly privilege to what is now fondly known as the original Big Three - CBS, NBC and ABC. Co-incidentally, this occured during the latter period of the reign of fdr. Is there anyone here who still remembers those first-gen brain-washing tv & radio programs called Fireside Chats?. The result was three more tightly controlled monopoly assets given wide lattitude to carve, invent, spin and PR as much $$ profit out of their listening & viewing customer base as the big-three  plus  ALLLLLLL the lesser me-too corporations sucking at the teets READ: advertising and or programming via the airwaves) of the Big Three, desired. The double-dip to this particular fabricated (un-natural) monopoly was the subtle, yet far-reaching, brain-washing, dumbing down impact upon the same customer base via state-sponsored media propaganda mill.  

PS - monopolies that exist based upon the above state-controlled paradigm are the antithesis to the idea/notion of Free Market Competition or in other words, is the idea of free-market-enterprise turned upside down, stood on it's head and totally hollowed out and debauched in the process. The capitalists's system as it presently exists in this country is a system of racketeering. Racketeering is a buddy-system that eliminates competition, literally, so as to funnel business to entities part of the buddy network, plain and simple. Just during my lifetime in America, the essence of the idea of "free market enterprise" is dead, gone, over, finished, done, having been mostly replaced with an idea in the average person's head that is somewhere between a misnomer and the populous' nostalgic idea that this country's present system offers a fair chance for anyone and everyone to compete. Except for pseudo reality portrayed in movies, TV and entertainment empire, that is a patently bogus notion. The health-care-industry-prescription-med-wrapped-around-health-insurance monopoly is a perfect present-day example. Legitimate free-market competition allows even the smallest mom N pop drug store OR doctor an equal chance to make/sell/provide service and products to the public. Meanwhile, the buddy system sponsors/lobbies the regulatory agencies to set up regulations READ: financial obstacles out the ying-yang that independents must pay just to get a small business set up in the first place, whereas the buddies are allowed to opt-out / circumvent the same regulations. By and large, as of this moment, today, August 2007,  the health-care insurers are the ones who are increasingly dictating where their insured patients/policy-holders can and cannot get their prescriptions filled, and in many cases they also dictate which doctor a patient can and cannot get covered service from. Call that nearly anything you want BUT please, do not call that legitimate free market forces at work.