If your eyes glaze over every time you hear terms like “infrastructure” and “reconciliation,” you’re not alone. The interminable battle over the two major spending bills being considered in Congress is designed to confuse and bore the population into a deep slumber — the needless complexity is not a bug, it is a feature designed to sedate you, or at least distract you from the corruption and looting that tends to happen in the text of thousand-page bills.

But if you tune out all the noise from cable TV news and ignore the bilge being pumped out by Beltway gossip sheets, this particular conflict isn’t that complicated — and the climate disasters battering the country right now illustrate how important the outcome is.

Here’s what it all comes down to: America has a feudal economy built on devastating inequality and on a form of climate ecocide that threatens the survival of the planet’s ecosystem. What’s unfolding in Congress is a last-ditch legislative attempt to modify that awful reality, and the fate of that effort will hinge on the answer to three fairly simple questions.