Candidate Profile: Katherine Venice For Ward 2 Seat On DC Council

WASHINGTON, DC — There are 29 candidates running for the D.C. City Council in the June 2 primary. In addition, candidates will be facing off in a June 16 special election to fill the vacant Ward 2 seat.

Patch asked the candidates to describe their qualifications and visions for the District.

Katherine Venice is an Anti-Trump Republican running in the June 2 Primary and the June 16 Special Election in Ward 2.

Does anyone in your family work in politics or government?

No

Education

In reverse order:

MBA from the number-one ranked business school in the world for executive education (as ranked by the Financial Times)

CFA charter-holder (the CFA is the gold standard of international investment and finance)

BA in Musicology

Professionally trained classical musician, choral and opera singer from the age of 4 to 21.

I am also the product of an old British all-girls grammar school

Occupation

I am an ethical reformer of capitalism.

I founded a bi-partisan social enterprise, The Ethical Capitalism Group, drawing collaborators such as Nobel laureate and other leading economists, academics from Harvard and other Ivy League institutions, the UN, Democrat State Treasurers, national union leaders, and the largest institutional investor groups in the US. We work to ethically reform capitalism, making it work for the greater good and reversing economic inequality.

Previously, I was one of the largest institutional investors in the US, managing $1 billion of pension assets.

I also advised CEOs of the largest companies in the US on long-term, sustainable, inclusive corporate/business strategy.

Previous or Current Elected or Appointed Office

Former economics adviser to an overseas government minister

Campaign website

www.KatherineWard2.com

What makes you the best candidate for this office?

1. We are in a historic recession (which might well turn into an economic depression). My 25 years of international economic, business and investment experience and credentials are simply un-matched. Council needs my skillset desperately.

For example, it is staggering that all the other candidates haven’t noticed that we are in a historic recession and their platforms are based on spend-spend-spend. Money doesn’t grow on trees, unfortunately – especially in a historic recession.

Further, it is absolutely staggering that none of the candidates have noticed how extremely fiscally reckless and precarious DC was in before the pandemic came along. See my website for more.

2. Council needs my ethical reform credentials and track record.

Council’s corruption by lobbyists has long been well documented by ethical government watchdogs and reporters.

None of the other candidates are addressing this systemic issue at all: instead, they are critically un-informed and are focusing on this as a Jack Evans issue. It’s not: it goes far deeper and beyond that.

Council also needs someone with my proven skills of tackling a corrupt system, who can ethically reform the corruption around Council by lobbyists that goes beyond Jack Evans.

In my pioneering bi-partisan work ethically reforming capitalism, I tackled Wall Street’s corruption of capitalism.

Wall Street hijacks capitalism to serve its own interests instead of the needs of the greater good: lobbyists do the same with democracy, including here in Ward 2.

3. None of the other candidates can match my in-depth, on-the-ground experience – hundreds of hours advocating for homeless people and the reform of shelters (in particular, the systemic abuse by shelter guards of homeless persons).

I know the homeless system and legal framework inside out on this issue, and I know how to reduce the number of homeless persons on the streets.

The homeless problem will get far worse throughout the recession, which will probably last at least 5 years.

4. I am stridently pro-LGBTQ rights and scored one of the highest ratings of all DC Council candidates in GLAA’s recent ranking. Ward 2 needs a Councilmember who will relentlessly push to reduce discrimination and inequities for our LGBTQ community. DC needs an unequivocally pro-LGBTQ Republican voice on Council.

5. One-party states do not function well – and that DC is one of the worst cities in the US for economic inequality, racial inequality, the affordable housing, underserved children, and much more is a testament to this failure.

Academics have long pointed out that cognitive diversity is critical to effective solutions to complex problems, and DC Council lacks this.

Now is the time for an anti-Trump Republican voice on Council – one who is compassionate and inclusive, and has a track record of working with Democrats on shared goals.

How will you help the city recover from the economic impact of the coronavirus?

The other candidates have promised spend-spend-spend. That is fairytale fiscal thinking.

The harsh reality is that we are in a truly bleak economic situation, which we have never experienced before, and for which there is no guidebook.

This reality of pandemic economics requires radical thinking and innovative thinking.

KEY POINTS:

1. We need to plan on the pandemic itself lasting for at least 18 months (before a vaccine becomes available)

2. We need to focus not on re-opening, but on re-building our economy

3. We need to realize that a pre-pandemic economy is not feasible over the next 18 months: instead we need to re-configure economic resources to build a pandemic-centric economy around a Covid-based reality that will look very different to our pre-Covid world

4. We need to urgently remove barriers to this re-callibration of economic assets and resources: specifically, reducing regulatory barriers to new business formation and excessive occupational licensing restrictions, to enable workers to quickly move towards new entrepreneurial opportunities

5. We need to urgently become an innovation-based economy, built around Nobel laureate economist Professor Edmund Phelps’ Mass Flourishing and such innovation frameworks, to enabling home-grown innovation

To see more details of my policy program, please refer to my website. You can also see plenty of economics commentary since February on my website, under the “letters” page.

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Two months ago, I posted the below answer on the Dupont/Logan Circles Forum – using the best academic research that was available at the time (sources at the end). Unfortunately, the federal administration has since squandered the critical opportunity of lockdown to do what was vitally important to saving both lives and the economy. I am including it here as background:

“As Ward 2’s Councilmember, I will help focus the Council’s coronavirus strategy and response by recognizing the core problems first: (i) DC lacks a critical supply of hospital beds equipment, PPE, and more, to successfully manage the pandemic’s effect in the District and protect workers vital to responding to the health crisis, etc, and that this will be an on-going issue for the duration of the pandemic; (ii) there is a critical lack of testing and tracking infrastructure to manage the on-going virus re-infection waves that will inevitably occur over the next 18 months (before a vaccination becomes widely available) as residents start to leave their homes again, and some return to work; (iii) during the period that it takes to gain any effective management over the virus in DC (which might easily take 6 or more months), there will inevitably be immense pressure from residents to break the stay-at-home orders (for social and economic reasons), thus setting back any progress in managing the virus; (iv) that the DC economy cannot start to recover until the pandemic is being successfully managed – otherwise, with uncontrolled, sky-rocketing infection rates, small businesses cannot function with sick workers and customers will not chance going to those businesses.

There has been confusion over this last point above. To be clear: if the pandemic’s health impact is not effectively controlled, the economy simply cannot recover and function. “Saving lives and saving the economy are not in conflict right now; we will hasten the return to robust economic activity by taking steps to stem the spread of the virus and save lives”, wrote former Secretaries of the US Treasury Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, former Fed Chairs Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke, Business Roundtable CEO Josh Bolten, and others in a combined statement on March 25.

(Note that the $2 trillion federal package diagnoses the wrong problems: hence it will not be effective in mitigating the pandemic’s economic damage. You can read my March 24 letter for more on this, or my recent Tweets since then.)

My next steps as Ward 2 Councilmember would be to focus on two goals: first, to minimize the health consequences of the pandemic on DC’s population; and secondly, planning a gradual, carefully-sequenced path back to normal functioning for the District that mitigates the risk of re-infection as much as possible. The latter goal is achieved via precisely planned variations of targeted lock-down (both temporary releases and re-imposition as required on a dynamic basis); the use of testing (including newer antibody testing) and tracing; certification of those who have immunity; and on-going physical distancing. Note that it will simply not be possible to keep DC in lock-down for the next 18 months (which is the length of time that companies such as Moderna, J&J and Abbott already developing a vaccination have indicated it will take before a vaccination becomes widely available): hence the second goal, in combination with the first.

In order to achieve this, there is only one viable option: to re-purpose DC’s economy as quickly and as much as possible to become a pandemic-centric one, for the duration of the pandemic.

It is imperative that we implement a mobilization program to repurpose DC’s economic resources and infrastructure as much as possible and immediately in order to meet the health crisis and to safeguard our lives, by meeting the shortages above. This also offers a safe path to safeguarding DC’s livelihoods and our small business community too. Fiscally, it potentially converts tax-dollars spent on unemployment insurance into output and pandemic solution generation.

As many of our country’s leading academics, including my former collaborator Nobel laureate economist Edmund Phelps (a frequent collaborator with the AEI) and the coronavirus team of multi-disciplinary scholars at Harvard’s Center for Ethics, as well as a highly regarded global management consulting think-tank, have pointed out, it makes sense to utilize the considerable now-idle capacity across the local economy towards solving the health crisis.”

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Mayor Muriel Bowser has talked about the longstanding inequities that have been exposed by the coronavirus. She also has talked about this being an opportunity for the city to address those inequities. What are your thoughts on this?

We didn’t need the pandemic to expose the inequality in DC: it’s been in plain sight to anyone paying the slightest attention.

DC is one of the worst cities in the US for: economic inequality; racial inequality; its affordable housing crisis; the most underserved children; and the list goes on.

It’s time to acknowledge Council’s failed policies on this front.

We should NOT aim to re-open DC’s economy: we need to re-build it, on a new, equitable basis. This starts with providing access to opportunities of inclusive economic growth, pathways to homegrown, grassroots entrepreneurs. We should aim to be the best city in the US for homegrown entrepreneurs and grassroots start-ups.

Let’s create a city of ‘mass flourishing’, along the lines of Nobel laureate economist and leading innovation expert, Professor Edmund Phelps.

Realize too that there is a very common misunderstanding that those who make more money than others, do so because they are smarter. In fact (and there has been an immense amount of research on this, especially focusing on Wall Streeters etc: it’s called rent-seeking and wealth-expropriation), those who make more money tend to be more predatory and sociopathic. In other words, those with the biggest wallets are NOT the best sources of insight and information. Discerning thinkers start with information sources at the grassroots level to get the most accurate information on critical needs, opportunities, possibilities and ideas.

So it is an extremely misguided choice to have stacked the Re-Open committees missing the expertise of core grassroots voices.

What do you see as the biggest issue besides the coronavirus recovery facing D.C.?

Aside from minimizing as much as possible the devastating harm - both in terms of health and lives, but also in economic terms – of the pandemic upon the city’s residents and small businesses, my top goals include:

My top goals #1 - #7:

#1: Pushing through reform of Council’s staggering fiscal recklessness: last year, for example, Council passed $1 billion of new legislation, most of which was impossible to fund because the city’s budget was only $8.5 billion. Furthermore, the DC Auditor has long and repeatedly warned that the city has no standardized internal controls to manage its budget spending: that is a monumentally reckless state of affairs and one which will cost DC dearly in the coming recessionary years. The city will be forced to make relentless cost cuts, and will have to do so blindly. That will harm the most vulnerable in our city.

#2: Pushing through ethical reform of DC Council, including eradicating lobbyist control of Council

#3: Reduce homeless persons living on the streets by cutting the systemic abuse by guards of homeless persons inside DC’s shelters

#4: Pushing through better protections and remedies for our LGBTQ community against hate crime, exclusion from economic opportunity, discrimination, and staggering health disparities

#5: Making our city more affordable for seniors

#6: Implementing an economically-realistic, fiscally responsible solution to the affordable housing crisis, which none of the other candidates are talking about

#7: Putting gender-based violence squarely on Council’s agenda, in order to get the city to start taking this public health taboo taken seriously

What is your position on statehood for D.C.?

If DC wants any chance of statehood, it needs to move away from being a one-party state. That means putting a Republican on the Council.

What accomplishments in your past would you cite as evidence you can handle this job?

My past accomplishments clearly demonstrate my:

(i) truly pioneering, innovative thinking (to the degree that brought me the above collaborators to join and support my work);

(ii) truly devoted service to society, to protect and lift up as many of our human family as possible;

(iii) profound courage to stand up and challenge firmly entrenched systems that cause harm to society;

(iv) capacity as an independent, original thinker

This is the change that Council needs.

The best advice ever shared with me was:

Every lesson in Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man. It is the most important book that I have ever read. I urge all to read it, especially in these times.

Also:

“The worst immorality is in apathy, a deadening of caring for others. .. The worst immorality is in imitating those who give nothing. .. The worst immorality is accepting the status quo because one is afraid of gossip against oneself.” (Andrea Dworkin)

"What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?" (Winston Churchill)

"When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of inner landscape." (John O'Donohue)

"The reasonable [wo]man adapts [her]himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to [her]himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable [wo]man." (George Bernard Shaw)

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My best advice to others: fight for your values, not to win: otherwise any victory will be hollow.

Also: remember that everything – absolutely everything - you have can be taken from you, against your will, with one exception: your values, your courage and your capacity to love our human family.

What else would you like voters to know about yourself and your positions?

Take a look at my website and Twitter: @Katherine4Ward2

Read Other Ward 2 Candidate Profiles:

• Jack Evans
• John Fanning
• Jordan Grossman
• Patrick Kennedy
• Brooke Pinto
• Kishan Putta
• Yilin Zhang