Make Enron Pirates Answer

It was a scam after all.

As California faced desperate electricity shortages in 2000 and 2001, power giant Enron was manipulating the market to drive up prices and turn modest power shortages into critical ones. This arrogant behemoth, since brought down by its own hubris, toyed with the public health and safety of California to boost its own profit, and there's finally a smoking gun to prove it.

Internal Enron documents released by the bankrupt company's new management describe these unethical, if not illegal, trading practices in detail and indicate that other companies were doing the same thing. All the while, everyone from Enron's then-chief Kenneth Lay to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and regulators who should have smelled a rat were saying it was all California's fault. For failing to build enough power plants. For adopting a power deregulation plan that wasn't free-market enough. For environmental laws with a Malibu mind-set. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission refused to accept its legal responsibility to rein in a wildly out-of-control market. Ultimately, commissioners said, the free market would work. For California, that meant a year of crisis, of rolling blackouts, of one major utility going bankrupt and another flat broke, of the state doling out $6 billion to buy daily power and an additional $40 billion for long-term contracts at what we now know are grossly inflated rates. FERC finally acted out of political necessity; it was too little, too late.