On May 16, 2012, Chicago cops raided an apartment in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago in an all-too-common attempt to scare people away from the imminent protests against the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) summit. With guns drawn, the cops arrested 11 people in or around the apartment and quickly disappeared them into the bowels of the extensive network of detention facilities in Cook County, Illinois.

After a few days, a few things started becoming clear…

Judge Thaddeus Wilson – holding down the house in Room 303 of the Cook County Courthouse in Chicago, IL – ruled the Illinois terrorism statute constitutional on its face.

This ruling was issued approximately two months after the attorneys defending the three clients known as the “NATO 3” issued a motion and memorandum arguing the law defied the dictates of the First Amendment because it is overly-broad as currently written, an argument rejected by Wilson.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) currently intend to close fifty-four schools before the year is over. This means Chicago is likely to have the largest number of school closures in any city in America this year.

Billionaire Penny Pritzker, of the plutocratic Pritzker family, has been floated by the Obama Administration as a candidate for Commerce Secretary.

The flow of poetry–its complex use of rhythm and rhymes, the interplay of vision and voice–weaves throughout the lives of the students in Louder Than a Bomb, a strong yet gentle documentary that follows four high school poetry teams as they prepare to compete in the world’s largest youth poetry slam, Louder Than a Bomb, held annually in Chicago.

Three Occupy activists known as the “NATO 3,” who came to Chicago to protest at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit last May and were arrested and later indicted on terrorism charges, are challenging the constitutionality of an untested Illinois anti-terrorism statute under which they were charged.

We have entered an age of protest. Social media tools allow new ways to mobilize activists into public and private spaces and also provide new avenues for amplifying their actions. The Internet, when used properly, can drive activists to an action — or a worldwide coalition of actions — and then make sure thousands more people see and hear about them after. Using simple tools like hashtags, we can monitor the response to actions in real time in a way never possible before.

This was a tumultuous year for working people and their families. From the grassroots uprisings last winter to the low-wage workers’ strikes at year’s end, 2012 saw many people coming together for the first time and finding their voices. Below are the items that I would highlight as the best and worst developments of 2012 in the world of labor and progressive social movements.

Join other Chicagoans tomorrow – December 6th – in the Federal Plaza at Noon where we’ll be demanding that Senator Durbin stand up for our communities instead of championing the interests of Wall Street CEOs. Senator Durbin, the message is simple: revenue, not cuts.

A whistleblower lawsuit on behalf of two Chicago police officers has been filed in federal court. The suit alleges the officers faced retaliation after they discovered one of their fellow officers, Sergeant Ron Watts, was “robbing drug couriers and manufacturing a case against at least one confidential informant” at the Ida B. Wells public housing complex.