Peer2Politics

Mass Mosaic is an online forum for buying, selling, trading, renting, or borrowing goods and services. (Mass Mosaic via Facebook)

Only a brave — or maybe foolhardy — company would take on Google.

Yet from a small office near the banks of the river Seine, a French search engine called Qwant is doing just that.

The French start-up, whose product was released 18 months ago, is tapping into growing anger here that Google has too much control over how Europeans surf the web.

Over the course of the past couple weeks, the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism has been reinforced. With the sickening treatment of Greece by the EU, which saw neoliberal capitalist austerity forced on a people democratically against that very course of policy, there is no wonder why frustration and even hopelessness pervades the psyche of progressives throughout the world.