President Obama and Governor Romney are talking a lot about how they're going to save the economy. But it doesn't take a genius to recognize that what they're saying is only talk. The debates are an opportunity for them to broadcast campaign promises, but where is the accountability, when past promises have already been left in the dust?

Romney's fairytale features tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulation and more dirty energy. He promises 12m new jobs, but has no plan to get us there. His track record demonstrates off-shoring, not job creation here at home.

Meanwhile, Obama's plan points to General Motors as the model of where we need to go. But GM was bailed out by taxpayers and then went on to slash workers' wages while padding CEO salaries. Obama says he'll create 1m manufacturing jobs by 2016, but these are all low-wage, insecure jobs with poor benefits.

Both Romney and Obama promise to slash public spending on education, healthcare, job training, social security and the environment. And both are calling for corporate income tax cuts. These policies are not only bad for working families, they're killers of economic growth. That's because capitalism doesn't work when capital doesn't move. And capital doesn't move when our government promotes the hoarding, rather than the redistribution, of capital.

In the short term, policies that favor Wall Street make a few people very rich, but in the long term, those same policies create massive inequality that cause Wall Street – and the rest of us – to crash. It's time to take Wall Street out of the driver's seat and to free the truly productive segments of working America to make this economy work for all of us.

This is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Why not use a similar strategy to FDR's for getting us out of it? Under the New Deal of the 1930s, unemployment rates were substantially reduced, and millions of jobs were created.

For this reason, I propose a Green New Deal for the 2010s, which – unlike the doomed-to-fail proposals of Obama and Romney – is proven to work. The Green New Deal will create 25m jobs by implementing nationally funded, but locally controlled, direct employment initiatives. These would offer public-sector jobs that can be "stored" in job banks in order to take up any slack in private-sector employment.

The Green New Deal protects the right to quality healthcare, to be achieved through a single-payer Medicare-for-all program; a tuition-free, quality, public education system from pre-school through college; decent affordable housing, including an immediate halt to all foreclosures and evictions; and the right to accessible and affordable utilities including heat, electricity, phone, internet and public transportation.

The Green New Deal also provides grants and low-interest loans to grow green businesses and cooperatives, with an emphasis on small, locally-based companies that keep the wealth created by local labor circulating in the community – rather than being drained off to enrich absentee investors. We will redirect public research funds away from fossil fuels and other dead-end industries and toward sustainable energy systems such as wind, solar and geothermal. We will invest in sustainable, nontoxic materials, closed-loop cycles that eliminate waste and pollution, and organic agriculture, permaculture, and sustainable forestry.

Most importantly, under the Green New Deal, we will build a financial system that is open, honest and stable, and a political system that protects the rights of voters, not the political parties and their corporate funders.

Most Americans agree that the policies of the Green New Deal are exactly what we need. Yet, many voters remain afraid to vote their values. We've all been told to vote against politicians, not for policies. And the result has been, year after year, that the politics of fear has delivered everything we were afraid of: expanding war, the meltdown of the economy, and the dismantling of our civil liberties.

Our society is at a breaking point: we may not survive four more years of Wall Street rule. We must answer the politics of fear with the politics of courage. The Commission on Presidential Debates has attempted to monopolize the discourse and limit our choices. But the debate about America's future that matters most is the debate that takes place within each of us.

Our country desperately needs a Green New Deal. A vote for me is a mandate for those policies, not only in November, but for the months and years to come.