Forced to buy power at exorbitant rates, the crisis cost California alone at least $40 billion and contributed to the state's budget crisis. The state suffered through a series of blackouts, even as large users of power in the Pacific Northwest were closing plants for a price to allow their electricity to be shipped to California.

There was widespread accusations by authorities that the energy companies were manufacturing a crisis, in part by deliberately shutting down power plants and trading power out of the state. This was denied by Enron and other firms engaged in energy trading.

Finally, however, there is a smoking gun to prove the charges: newly released taped conversations of Enron energy traders joking and boasting of their exploits in pushing the price of power up to $350 a megawatt hour, power that had cost an average of $28 the year before the crisis.

The obscenity-laced tapes are sickening in revealing an outrageous attempt to bring the nation's largest state to its knees. Beyond the criminality is the amorality of these individuals gleefully contemplating the havoc they were inflicting through their actions on the state and its individual citizens as they bragged of stealing up to $1 million a day from California ratepayers alone.

But while the words came out of the traders' mouths, the policies came from higher up the corporate ladder. Like Enron employees and retirees, who will never see the pensions they were promised, the West Coast states, utilities, ratepayers and others adversely affected by the manipulations of the energy traders will be lucky to get a dime on the dollar, if that, in recompense. The $3 billion refund settlement to be disbursed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is well short of the damage inflicted.

One thing all too apparent is that FERC, whose chairman Pat Wood was recommended to the Bush administration for appointment by former Enron Chairman Ken Lay, failed to respond in timely and effective fashion as the crisis in California unfolded. It was the one agency in a position to smell a rat, to know whether California was facing a real crisis or an orchestrated one.

And despite a mountain of evidence that rates were manipulated, FERC has refused to revoke contracts that utilities up and down the West Coast made at exorbitant prices during the crisis.

Something is seriously wrong when an attack on the integrity of the power system can be launched on such a scale and three years later only three lower-level players in the scheme are facing justice.

The phony California energy crisis should never have happened. But there is little to suggest that a serious effort has been made to ensure that it never happens again.