As if the United States didn’t have enough on its plate, the risk of a bungled response to the terrible situation in Venezuela is on course to rise considerably.

At a time when political debates are increasingly nationalized and national debates are waged on the basis of abstract principle, it will be hard to muster the careful, prudential judgment needed to react wisely. If things continue to sour, the Venezuela question could draw together all of America’s prevailing political crises into a single perfect storm.

Venezuelans are suffering under the cruel and unjust rule of a despotic ideologue — so much so that much of Latin America has come out in unison against the maleficent regime.

“Peru summoned top diplomats from the region to discuss Venezuela in Lima, Peru’s capital, where 12 nations condemned the ‘rupture of democratic order’ in Venezuela and said they would not recognize any action taken by the constituent assembly,” as Reuters recently observed.

According to Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, whose creature the so-called assembly is, his enemies, including Peru’s former Wall Streeter president, are once again rehearsing a kind of capitalist yankee imperialism bent on denying Venezuela its sovereign right to handle its own affairs. Meanwhile, inflation is over 100 percent, food shortages are the norm, and talk of civil war and a refugee crisis is in the air.

How to respond? According to the school of thought associated with liberal internationalism, the U.S. and its allies could find themselves faced with a so-called “responsibility to protect” Venezuelans being crushed by their own regime. According to neoconservatives, U.S. interests and values may dictate that the Maduro regime should be punished or driven from power. Traditional realists may counsel a hands-off approach or something more Kissingerian in its covert muscular pursuit of a more friendly administration.

Venezuela could easily expose ideological fissures running through the left and right. Socialists are reluctant to come out swinging against Maduro, while liberals find it hard to tolerate dictatorship in the New World while decrying the malign rule of Putin, Erdogan, and other strongmen. Conservatives, for their part, have watched anxiously, feelings torn, as president Trump has vaguely threatened a military response — not unheard of for Republican foreign policy in Latin America, but not particularly well thought out either.

Complicating matters still further is the rise of an newly organized racialist right in the U.S. Over 40 percent of Venezuelans self-identity as white or of European descent. Many Americans have no memory of a full-blown breakdown in civic order in a country with such a large Caucasian population.

It remains to be seen how such a catastrophe in the internet age will emotionally or politically alter Americans’ opinions of the right course of action — or the degree of risk worth adopting in order to act. Liberals could find, agonizingly, that Venezuela meets all the classic criteria demanding a humanitarian military intervention, but refuse to act because of support coming from right racialist groups.

Finally, even worse, a potentially fierce debate has already begun to stir around the overwhelming share of key administration positions that president Trump has staffed with generals. Civil-military relations have been on a downward trajectory for decades, and any unpopular decision to become involved in Venezuela could exacerbate that trend at a moment of great strain on the legitimacy of government.

There are now so many ways that the legitimacy of the administration and the workings of government could be called into question and vocally opposed, it is hard to imagine what response to a full crisis in Venezuela would avoid any of them.

In all these instances, too, prudential judgment will be at an institutional disadvantage — bad news in a national, regional and global moment when the level of uncertainty has made it so difficult to predict the consequences and reverberations of various policy options.

Such an inauspicious setting, of course, suggests that the best way to avoid disaster for the U.S. may be to sit back and let it unfold in Venezuela. But in times of deep dissatisfaction and perceived impotence, the call to do nothing may be resented most of all.

James Poulos is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.

The politicization of state pension fund investments has once again come back to bite us — this time in coal stocks — harming taxpayers and government employees alike.

Under the Public Divestiture of Thermal Coal Companies Act of 2015, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and California State Teachers’ Retirement System were required to divest their coal holdings by July 1, 2017. Unfortunately for taxpayers, this divestment coincided with a strong rebound in coal stocks. As the Sacramento Bee reported, “Stocks for 13 of the 14 companies are worth more than they were a year ago when the pension fund was divesting from the industry.”

This is just the latest example of politically motivated divestment policies, which have also targeted tobacco companies, firearms manufacturers, private prison operators, companies that might compete with state and local government workers for contracts, and companies that did business with apartheid South Africa. This has often had a significant negative impact on pension investment performance. CalPERS’ divestments cost it approximately $8 billion over a 15-year period, according to an October 2015 report from Wilshire Associates, CalPERS’ main investment consultant.

That has not stopped politicians from sacrificing the pension funds’ fiduciary duties for their own ideological crusades, however. During the current legislative session, lawmakers have put forward proposals to divest companies that build or finance the Dakota Access Pipeline, companies that work on President Donald Trump’s border wall, and Turkish bonds.

Not only do these measures hurt taxpayers, who must make up the difference whenever the pension systems’ investments underperform their assumed averages, they also harm many existing government workers, particularly at the local level, as the resulting higher government pension contribution rates mean that pension costs are taking up more of the budget and squeezing out government services — and government jobs.

It has gotten to the point that a number of unions, who typically support the Democratic lawmakers that push for such divestment policies, have begun to speak up about the perils of ideological investing.

“It’s time for CalPERS to re-evaluate their investment strategies and focus more on improving their investment returns and less on ‘socially responsible’ investments,” Steve Crouch, director of public employees for the International Union of Operating Engineers, which represents roughly 12,000 state maintenance workers, told the Bee.

“We cannot afford to lose funding for law enforcement officers in exchange for a socially responsible investment strategy,” Police Lt. Jim Auck, treasurer of the Corona Police Officers Association, told CalPERS board members at a meeting in May. “Your fiduciary responsibility is to the employees, the employers and the taxpayers of this state, not to the many agendas of the many special interests that dominate Sacramento politics.”

Playing politics with government workers’ and retirees’ pension funds does not serve them or the rest of the taxpayers in the state. This is all the more reason to remove politics from the equation altogether and switch to a 401(k)-style defined-contribution system that lets workers invest their retirement funds as they please.

Maria Rivera was a single mother raising two boys in Orange County when her youngest got into trouble. In 2008, he became one of tens of thousands of youth — disproportionately black and brown — who are referred annually into the state’s juvenile justice system, where he spent more than a year in detention.

Then came the bills.

Ms. Rivera was charged $23.90 for every day her son was detained and $2,200 for his court-appointed lawyer. All told, Orange County said she owed more than $16,000.

State law authorizes counties to charge families administrative fees for children’s detention, lawyers, supervision and electronic monitoring. The fees are supposed to help counties recoup some of their costs, but they are also required to determine whether families can afford to pay the fees.

Ms. Rivera was unemployed and unable to make payments, so Orange County should have waived her fees. But the law puts the burden on families to show inability to pay. Like many families with youth in the juvenile system, Ms. Rivera was unable to meet the county’s demands to make such a showing.

Instead, Ms. Rivera sold her house and paid the county $9,500. The county was still not satisfied, and obtained a court judgment against her for almost $10,000 (exceeding what she owed by more than $3,000 for reasons the county never explained).

Once a court orders the fees to be paid, the debt becomes a civil judgment enforceable against the parent or guardian. Unlike most other civil judgments, juvenile fee debt lasts forever. If families fail to repay the debt, counties refer their accounts to the state Franchise Tax Board to intercept tax refunds and garnish wages.

As a result of the court order against her, Ms. Rivera filed for bankruptcy. Her juvenile fee nightmare appeared to be over when a bankruptcy court discharged her debt to Orange County. But the county would not relent, persuading the bankruptcy court to reinstate the debt.

In our research, we found that counties pursue fee debt aggressively, even if they net little or no revenue. In Orange County, 85 cents of every dollar in fee revenue pays for collection activity against other families, not for services to youth. Before it stopped charging juvenile fees last year, Santa Clara County spent more money on collection activity than it generated in revenue.

Since black and brown youth are overrepresented in the juvenile justice system, even after accounting for alleged offenses, fee debt falls hardest on families of color who are less likely to have the resources to satisfy these debts. In Alameda County, we found that the average African American family faced double the juvenile fee liability as the average white family; Latino families faced one and a half times the liability of white families.

Our research mirrors studies of criminal justice debt in both the adult and juvenile systems, where sociologists and criminologists have found that such debt compounds disadvantage by reducing income, limiting opportunities and increasing recidivism.

Under pressure from local advocates because of the regressive and racially discriminatory burden of juvenile debt on vulnerable families, California counties are starting to end the practice. In the last 18 months, several large counties have stopped charging and collecting juvenile fees, relieving tens of thousands of families of more than $40 million in debt.

But most counties, including Orange, still impose such debt on families, resulting in significant consequences. In Ms. Rivera’s case, a federal appeals court eventually decided that her juvenile fees were dischargeable in bankruptcy. While relieving her of the remaining debt, Ms. Rivera prevailed only after spending several years in court and losing her home.

Sensitive to the harms that can result from such practices, the appeals court chastised Orange County for actions that “compromise the goals of juvenile correction and the best interests of the child, and, ironically, impair the ability of his mother to provide him with future support.”

While court victories can help individuals like Ms. Rivera, and local reform is important, families across California are still liable for juvenile fee debt.

Even after the court case, the Probation Department said that 44 families who were in (or had recently exited) bankruptcy still owed Orange County almost $190,000 in juvenile fee debt.

Fortunately, California can make juvenile fees a thing of the past. Sens. Holly Mitchell, D-San Diego, and Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, introduced Senate Bill 190 to repeal county authority to charge juvenile fees. The bill received bipartisan support in the Senate, and is one committee vote from reaching the floor of the Assembly.

The Legislature and governor have an opportunity to end this injustice for all California families.

Jeffrey Selbin is a Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Policy Advocacy Clinic at U.C. Berkeley School of Law and co-author of “Making Families Pay: The Harmful, Unlawful, and Costly Practice of Charging Juvenile Administrative Fees in California.” Abbye Atkinson is an Assistant Professor of Law at U.C. Berkeley School of Law and was the Thomas C. Grey Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School; she is the author of “Consumer Bankruptcy, Nondischargeability, and Penal Debt.”

Millennials hate commitment — to a degree.
Edited, a retail analysis organization reviewed Millennial consumer behavior within the luxury sector. The research uncovered that despite the falling of overall full-price sell-outs in the segment, accessories, particularly bags benefited a rise in sales.
“With its low prices and swiftly developing trends, fast fashion has facilitated this demographic’s endless switching-up of garments. But that’s not to say the Millennial shopper isn’t attuned to the finer things in life, which is where luxury accessories play a key role,” said Katie Smith, senior retail analyst at Edited.
The research reviewed data collected from 30 U.S. luxury women’s wear retailers that included over 5,000 brands in the first half of 2016 compared to the first half of this year. On the upside, the study found that luxury retail discounts decreased five percent year-over-year, suggesting that retailers are turning to updated alternatives for improved revenue gains.
According to the analysis, the top-performing brands in this year, in descending order, were Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Saint Laurent, Valentino and Dolce & Gabbana. The handbag category posted the highest boost. The research found that full-price sell-outs of the item were up 22 percent with an average price of $1,465.07.
Gucci was the big winner

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IT’S A FIRST: Eva Longoria, Rosario Dawson and Alysia Reiner are part of the batch of well-known newcomers that will be showing during next month’s New York Fashion Week.
They will be part of Kia STYLE360’s roster at Metropolitan West, which is located at 639 West 46th Street where live-streaming the shows, 360-degree virtual reality broadcasts and Facebook Live will all be part of the deal. Staring things off on Sept. 11, will be Studio 189 by Dawson and Abrima Erwiah. The proactive duo are trying to use artisanal sustainable fashion as an agent for social change. That night Andy Hilfiger, who certainly has attended his share of runway shows over the years, will be hosting one of his own as creative director of Artistix by Greg Polisseni.
With three directing projects “Black-ish,” Dylan McDermott’s new show “L.A. to Vegas” and Kaitlin Olson’s Fox show “The Mick,” Longoria will have no trouble calling the shots at the first show for her affordable Eva Longoria Collection on Sept.r 13. Another familiar face from the small screen is Vanessa Simmons of MTV’s “Run’s House,” who has been tweeting about her upcoming fashion week debut. Bad Butterfly presented by Candice Cuoco x Vanessa Simmons is on deck for

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LAS VEGAS — Yes, orders were filled and buyers discovered new lines across the nearly 20 recently ended trade shows in town this week. But there remains an overarching air of uncertainty as the industry and trade show model evolves to address a strong focus on going direct at both the trade show and vendor level.
UBM Fashion, which oversees 13 different shows in Vegas ranging from WWDMagic to FN Platform, is exploring ways of adjusting the traditional trade show model in a bid to reach the end consumer. Kelly Helfman, vice president of the WWDMagic, Project Womens and Fame shows, pointed to Intermezzo Collections’ New York vintage marketplace for consumers that proved successful in testing said types of programming and added they’re looking to do more of that as it continues to gain importance.
“Consumers now more than ever want to have a story,” Helfman said. “They want to have a story behind the brands that they’re actually wearing and they want to know more. So as these leaders within the fashion industry, it’s important for us to not only now connect buyers and brands but now consumers directly to those brands and, really, that’s the consumer telling us this. Millennials

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SPORTY STRIPES: Hailey Baldwin and rapper Michael Ebenazer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr. — better known as Stormzy — have been tapped by Adidas and JD Sports to star in the fall 2017 EQT campaign. EQT is part of the Adidas Equipment range that was launched in the Nineties for runners.
Baldwin’s campaign was shot by Bella Newman in Los Angeles while Reto Schimd photographed Stormzy in London. Baldwin and Stormzy were both wearing Adidas Originals gear. Baldwin is pictured wearing 3-Stripes high-neck crop top, California T-Shirt, 3-Stripes leggings and the chevron sweatshirt with Adidas Originals EQT Racing ADV sneakers.
Baldwin said she liked EQT’s mix of Nineties style and modern street-led aesthetic. “It brings a throwback element to your look but with a super modern interpretation,” Baldwin said. “I’m all about off-duty style and the EQT is super versatile.”
Meanwhile, Stormzy is pictured wearing a California T-shirt and a zip hoodie with Adidas Originals EQT Support 93/17 trainers. “I grew up wearing Adidas and copping new clothes from JD Sports, so they both hold a lot of meaning for me,” the musician said.
The campaign will run in JD Stores across the U.K., Ireland and Europe and on the JD web site.

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Traditional artisanal techniques help infuse the model with a spectacular spirit of hospitality.

The U.S. audio manufacturer introduces a thoroughly modern CD player for those still stuck in the past.

Michael Berman chats about his new wallpaper collaboration with Fromental.