RUTHFULLY YOURS

The US Census Bureau announced last week that New York slipped to fourth place in population among the 50 states.

Though babies are still born here every day, and immigrants still flock in, overall population growth lags because New Yorkers are abandoning the state.

Don’t blame the weather. Blustery Montana and North Dakota aren’t having this problem. New Yorkers are escaping high taxes and dismal job growth.

Other high-tax states like Illinois and New Jersey, which has the country’s second-highest tax burden, are also hemorrhaging residents. Families are uprooting and moving to places with lower taxes, more growth and fossil-fuel-friendly policies.

In the November elections, voters in Illinois expelled their high-tax incumbent Democratic governor, Pat Quinn, while voters in Massachusetts and Maryland rebuked tax-and-spend Democrats by putting the governor’s seat in GOP hands.

I filed a 15-page objection with the court over a Verizon settlement, and you can do the same in other cases.

Mr. Walpin, an inspector general under President George W. Bush , is a New York attorney and a former president of the Federal Bar Council.

If you own any stock, you know the frustration of getting a notice announcing settlement of a lawsuit, commenced by a lawyer on behalf of a class composed of all shareholders—you included. The notice informs you that, under this settlement, you get nothing. What that really means is you get zilch but you must pay a pro rata share of your corporation’s legal expenses and of the legal fees for the lawyer who commenced the lawsuit—often millions of dollars. I recently experienced this frustration firsthand, but as I’ll explain the outcome was surprisingly gratifying.

The game works like this. Certain lawyers have an inventory of shareholders, owning very small amounts of shares in corporations, who are on call to act as plaintiff in a lawsuit. As soon as a corporation announces an asset acquisition or sale, the lawyer finds one of his ready-plaintiffs and files a class action to stop the transaction. Such behavior is ubiquitous. As an analysis of merger litigation in the February 2014 Texas Law Review showed, the likelihood of a shareholder suit exceeds 90%.

Tel Aviv

A decade ago, I wrote an op-ed on the election of Mahmoud Abbas to the Palestinian presidency following the death of Yasser Arafat. It ran under the headline “From Strong Man to Good Man.” Mark that one down in the annals of lousy political judgment.

Maybe it’s because I had recently spent some years working in Jerusalem—watching up close as Arafat bombarded Israelis while bamboozling Westerners—that I felt optimistic about the Palestinian future. Maybe it was because I was too taken with the promise of Arab democracy, and with the notion that those elevated to power through a ballot wouldn’t rule by the bullet.

Or maybe I was simply impressed by Mr. Abbas himself, with his grandfatherly mien and progressive rhetoric. “We need clean legal institutions so we can be considered a civilized society,” I heard him say at one well-attended rally in Ramallah, just a day before the election. Also: “We won’t allow any illegal weapons.” And: “We need to make the law the leader in this country, and nobody can be above the law.”

For years the federal government has been hiding potentially exculpatory evidence involving former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg . And now the feds won’t let him make it public.

That’s according to a bombshell legal memorandum that attorneys for Mr. Greenberg and former AIG executive Howard Smith filed on Monday. They’re asking a federal court in Connecticut to allow them to disclose the evidence that prosecutors still claim should be kept under seal. If Messrs. Greenberg and Smith aren’t able to let the sun shine on this abuse, tainted evidence could be used against them by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in a civil trial due to begin next month.

A Schneiderman predecessor, Eliot Spitzer , began investigating Mr. Greenberg roughly a decade ago for an allegedly fraudulent reinsurance transaction between AIG and Gen Re. But attorneys for Messrs. Greenberg and Smith only learned of the potentially exculpatory evidence last fall as they prepared to go to trial.

The information the feds have been sitting on all these years relates to Richard Napier, a former executive at Gen Re who was the government’s star witness in a separate criminal case over the transaction. Mr. Greenberg was never charged, but a trial initially resulted in convictions in 2008 of one AIG employee and four Gen Re employees. Those convictions were vacated in 2011 by a federal appeals court because of errors by the trial judge, and the appellate judges also made clear what they thought of Mr. Napier’s testimony.

“Compelling inconsistencies suggest that Napier may well have testified falsely,” wrote Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs on behalf of a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Among the reasons the appellate judges found his testimony “suspicious” was that Mr. Napier, who had struck a deal with prosecutors to avoid prison time, had changed his story on who had committed the alleged fraud. Also, for a key meeting he described in the construction of the alleged fraud, the government could present no evidence that the meeting took place.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 2001 IN AUSTRALIA/ISRAEL REVIEW

Last month, a singular event in Israeli cultural history occurred. The music of Richard Wagner (1813-83) was played at a concert of the Israel Festival by Argentinean-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim. Tempered flared and some Israeli public figures called for boycotting Barenboim in future musical events. These developments have renewed controversy over the logic and consistency inherent in such a ban.

Why the ban on Wagner? Ironically, Wagner was played at the first concert of the then Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra in 1936 when Arturo Toscanini showed his solidarity with Jews by undertaking the journey to Tel Aviv in the middle of the Arab Revolt to lead the newly-formed orchestra of émigrés from Nazi Germany.

This changed, however, with the advent of the Nazi genocide; Wagner occupied a pre-eminent place in Hitler’s personal Valhalla and in the political and cultural life of the Nazi regime – and thus in the memories of many of its survivors. Additionally, as Wagner’s own great-grandson Gottfried – a personal friend, I should note – has indicated, Wagner’s compendious political writings consistently urge Nazi elimination of Jews from German life and it does not take a detective to find antisemitic stereotypes and encoded political messages in his operas instantly recognisable to Wagner’s contemporaries.

On December 14th, Sweden’s largest daily newspaper published an interview with Bjorn Soder, vice speaker of the Parliament and member of the Swedish Democrat Party. Maybe some of you have heard of it, or at least seen the international headlines that said “Speaker of Swedish Parliament says Jews have to abandon their faith in order to be Swedish “or perhaps the more popular “Jews not Swedish, according to Swedish politician”?

Well, let’s just take a step back and look at what Mr. Soder actually said:

There are examples of people that belong to the Sami or Jewish Nation living in Sweden. I believe that most people with Jewish heritage that become Swedish leave their Jewish identity. But if they don’t it does not have to be a problem. One has to make a distinction between peoplehood and citizenship; they can still be Swedish citizens and live in Sweden. The Sami and The Jews have lived in Sweden for a very long time.

So what Mr. Soder is saying in this statement and throughout the interview is that he does not believe that one can be both a Jew and a part of the Swedish nation, but one can be a citizen and enjoy all the benefits and responsibilities of any other citizen. That distinction — and an important distinction it is — seems to have been lost on the frantic readers.

Within hours after this article was published, the avalanche of criticism came rolling down the medial mountain, and Jews and non-Jews alike were calling racism on the top of their lungs.

I read the article over and over again but was unable to find the source of this national upheaval. Instead I found that Bjorn Soder was saying pretty much exactly what I have always said, albeit with some eloquence left to be desired.

You see, I am not Swedish. I’m Jewish. I am a part of the Jewish people who happens to be a citizen of Sweden. I pay my taxes and I follow the laws, but that does not make me Swedish. Nor do I have any desire to ever claim that title. Instead I value and protect my Jewish identity and it is with pride that I affirm that through action, faith and tradition.

So why the upheaval?

Israel rights group, Shurat Hadin, has announced its intentions to file complaints against three officials of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO, Fatah) at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Complaints will be filed against Jibril Rajoub, Majed Faraj, and Rami Hamdallah for war crimes and human rights violations in the Palestinian Authority.

Attorney for the NGO, Nitzana Darshan-Leitner said, “Abbas and his friends in the terrorist organizations think that the law can only be used as a weapon against Israel, but that they not be held accountable for crimes against Israel or their own people. The PLO and Hamas need to understand that the International Criminal Court is a double-edged sword.”

Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Center) has filed three more war crimes suit against Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) officials in the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague.

The NGO says that while the Palestinian leadership can be indicted for terror acts carried out from 2002 onward, Israel can only be indicted for deeds done from the day the PLO joined the Rome Statute – the request to join was signed last week.

The most senior U.S. delegation in decades will soon be in Havana to engage a declared enemy of the United States in discussions about “normalizing” relations. Covering much more subject matter than routine migration issues, these meetings stem in large measure from the December 17 return of spies to Cuba who are responsible for American deaths.

Obama sent three Cuban spies back to the island, trading them for the release of American Alan Gross. Mr. Gross had been held hostage for five years for the “crime” of teaching Jewish Cubans how to connect to the Internet. As part of this lopsided deal, the Obama administration also declared American policy a failure and offered a large basket of potential economic and diplomatic benefits.

The experts there are getting the change they believed in — and just listen to them howl.

Obamacare has come to Harvard, and the faculty is in a state of shock and dismay.

In what has to be considered an early contender for the most hilarious and enjoyable news story of the year, the New York Times recounts the tumult over Obamacare in Cambridge.

“For years,” the Times writes, “Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to the Harvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.”

For even the most heinous crimes, juries are very reluctant to impose the death penalty.

Unless the federal court indulges last-ditch efforts by the defense for further delay, the least interesting aspect of the case against accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will begin this week: the determination of guilt or innocence.

That is the backwards nature of a capital case. In ordinary trials, a jury is there only to decide the question of guilt. When the death penalty is involved, though, the jury also imposes the sentence, usually the task of the trial judge. A death-penalty case is thus a bifurcated trial, and it is the later sentencing phase that really matters.