Not really. They don't have a way to change their laws. It's Putin's Russia.

Neither does the USA according to the Oligarchy Report being reported across the Western media.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/21/americas-oli...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...

If that were strictly true, then SOPA would have passed.

How is the temporary shelving of SOPA proof that on over 1700 policy issues US citizens have essentially zero chance of affecting the outcome of the legislation?

As for SOPA - say hello to SOPA 2.0 http://www.uspto.gov/news/publications/copyrightgreenpaper.p...

How is that SOPA 2.0?

Try reading it. Or at least searching for the report which is commonly referred to as SOPA 2.0 by various opposition groups.

In essence however, SOPA in some form will pass and this document represents a new approach.

As someone posted before - it does not matter if it is SOPA 14.0 or SOPA 22.0 - it just needs to pass once. Very few examples of legislative repeal exist outside of social equality.

The report didn't claim the great Corporation of the Elites are omniscient and omnipotent; just that 'they' owned all Intellectual Property rights, and that We, the People, must offer remittance for air.

Agreed. It is actually a really bleak and depressing read; I am certain the UK is not much different at all.

Future dystopian writers can certainly draw upon it as a non-fiction source.

Yup. Just like South Africa had the moral upper hand because they maintained official segregation laws when in the US it was illegal by law but still a de-facto practice through social bias.

Not exactly.

Contrary to NSA story (who are known to collect data without court orders), we have no information on SORM-2 abuse at all. It's unknown whenever in absence of active court warrants those boxes are just idling on a rack dropping packets or do something they're not (legally) supposed to do.