"The conspiracy ... allowed Enron to exploit and intensify the California electricity crisis and prey on energy consumers at their most vulnerable moment," Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson said.
I am glad that somebody else used the c-word first. While we at this subject, manipulating energy prices may not be the only conspiracy cooked by what Paul Krugman (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/22/opinion/22KRUG.html) calls crony capitalism business elite (and what in ex-USSR was called the 'nomenklatura'). It is possible that the DC-area sniper attacks, which have been conveniently scheduled just before the Novemer election, are a tactic devised to divert public attention from the major fuckup the business elite has procured under Bush administration and keep them in power for another term. If somebody is capable of masterming a conpiracy on the scale of CA energy crisis, (or for that matters, breaking into your political opponent's HQ, or illegally sell arms to a foreign terrorist organization for drug money), finding a professional hit man who would shoot people at random and disappear while getting the cops on a wild goose chase looks like a piece of cake. It would not be too much of a surprise if the sniper was the same operative who launched the anthrax attacks after 9/11. Both seem to be highly professional jobs - the operative(s) behind it know exactly what to do have a maximum impact on the public, they use highly sophisticated tools, appear to be highly skilled, and know perfectly well how to avoid detection - seemingly aimed at diverting public attention from the major screw ups delivered by the Bush pack.
Wojtek