HE’S A LOSER: De Blasio’s Uber Attacks Just Like Anti-Charter Schools Campaign.

It’s as easy to use Uber as it is not to. This is a priceless taste of transportation freedom formerly reserved for the oligarchs. As a non-driver, it’s almost enough to make me even like cars.

The chartering power, like the awesome functionality folks now command from their cell phones, enables the creation of new schools that are nimble, creative, and customized to the needs of students. And with a mission that isn’t bound by location and that doesn’t bow to the notion that some kids who live in the wrong borough or who have the wrong parents just won’t get a great education, they bring the same sort of “freedom” to the people that Uber does. In New York in particular, Uber and charter schools are opposite sides of the same disruptive, empowering coin.

If you like both of these things then Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent attacks on Uber at the behest of the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) and its well-heeled, medallion-wielding financiers might look stunningly similar to his volleys against the city’s charter school sector.

The rhetoric is so similar that — short on time and desperate to support another protectionist monopoly — it’s like the mayor and his staff reused the same playbook. And the players all line up similarly as well. De Blasio and Governor Cuomo. The TLC and Uber. And, of course, the city’s charter sector and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).
Just compare the tactics.

When cronies defend cronies, it tends to look the same.