America Beyond Capitalism

E-Posters for Democracy

Graph description of income level.
America Beyond Capitalism Poster

The Imaging Research Center assembled an interdisciplinary team from the UMBC campus to partner with the Democracy Collaborative, a multi-university public policy think-tank at UMCP, to investigate ways of raising public awareness about, among other things, the nature of wealth. Some basic facts about the economy, including work and income trends, wealth ownership, and taxes were put into a set of ten e-posters: images with text and graphs that could be tagged onto an email and sent around to one’s friends and associates as a “viral” message campaign. A web-based gallery of the posters also referred people to the new book on the subject, America Beyond Capitalism, by political economist Gar Alperovitz. The book suggests that capitalism and socialism never even existed in their truest forms and that neither adequately describes the best wealth-building systems now benefiting the middle class.

The chart illustrates a gradual decline in Social Security tax payments over the years.
The chart highlights a significant rise in top CEOs’ salaries over time.
The production per capital is compared to the length of work per week.
Union worker
The chart depicts the steady growth of the business owner’s income over time.

Researcher and Creator 

Project Director: Lee Boot
Artists: Kelley Bell, Aaron Oldenburg, Nicole Shiflet, Eric Smallwood
Statistical Research: Edward Cox
Democracy Collaborative Director: Ted Howard
Chief Content Consultant: Gar Alperovitz
This IRC interdisciplinary collaboration is being supported in part by funds from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.