From my research since I began this thread I have come to the following conclusions:
The current world financial 'crisis' has been engineered like every other financial collapse before it, in the same way pretty much every major war since the French Revolution has been started on false pretences, all engineered by the elite for their own ends. You can safely bet the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and any other uprising has been deliberately provoked, and allowed, by the people whose interests it serves.
The official narratives of terrorist attacks on both the US and the UK are so incoherent when compared to the facts that it seems obvious they were instigated by those much closer to home than the unfortunate individuals and groups they were pinned on. These events were staged in order to facilitate the propaganda that would make it easier for governments to push through legislative controls to further their agenda, controls which the masses would never have accepted otherwise.
Those in power on all sides have publicly alluded to their agenda for a one world government, aka a New World Order, although they have not been open about what this actually means in real terms, or how they intend to achieve it. The true implications of this, and the orchestration of it to date, is what is being ‘hidden’ by the powers that be. This is happening now and the plan will continue to progress for as long as it is not resisted by a critical mass.
Mind control of the masses is not some outlandish suggestion, after all, advertising companies do it all the time! The mass media is highly controlled and spews out whatever governments want the people to know, hiding the real truth and keeping them ignorant. At the same time, the media machine is also used to distract the masses with sports, entertainment, and consumerism so that they're kept busy enough not to do the intellectual work to find out what's really going on.
The Illuminati is an outdated term - there is no one 'secret' society, but a network of inter-related elite groups that go under several different names whose primary aim is to forward the agenda of global government. Religion is simply another tool in accomplishing their goal and the WTS is as much a part of the religious machinery as any other church, perpetuating systems of mind control that keep people disempowered by fear and guilt and thereby supports the elite’s agenda.
The origins of the WTS are steeped in occultism and it seems that Russell was involved in groups associated with the so called 'illuminati' as it was at the time, notably the highest levels of the Freemasons. The current organisation has a long-standing affiliation to the UN which is an integral part of the interconnected web of elite groups. Hidden early involvement with the occult origins, political connections, not to mention recent highly speculative investment in hedge funds, all suggest that at the very least they are not as ‘separate from the world’ as they would have people believe.
My final conclusion, after everything I've seen and read, is that we’re all screwed. W hether or not we're seeing the fulfillment of bible prophecy, it seems that the whole world may well be ‘lying in the power of the wicked one’ after all (whatever you interpret that to mean). All we can do is seek out the truth, use what power we have to resist the whittling away of our liberties, and prepare as best we can for what’s coming.