In a persistent drizzle on 17 January, a group of protesters swathed in green ponchos unfurled tarps and sleeping bags on the sidewalk in front of Goldman Sachs’ high-rise building on the West Side highway in New York City. A few of them wore handmade swamp creature masks; others bore signs with the swamp creatures on them. A light-board sign declared the bank “Government Sachs”.

The protest was the beginning of a multi-day camp-out aiming to stay on the sidewalk outside the investment bank until the inauguration of Donald Trump, and to bring people affected by the bank’s policies to the doorstep of some of the world’s richest people – some of whom will belong to the Trump administration.

“It’s about highlighting the lie that was told to millions of people in this country, the lie that Trump was draining the swamp. If we really want the swamp to be drained, we have to do it ourselves and we’re doing it by going to Goldman Sachs,” says Nelini Stamp of the Working Families party.

Steven Mnuchin was called Mr Foreclosure. Do you want Mr Foreclosure to be secretary of the treasury?

As the crowd of about 100 people set up camp, the police erected barricades around them but mostly held off as the crowd moved from chanting “The swamp is getting deeper! The swamp is Goldman Sachs!” to a series of speak-outs from the crowd about the bank’s connection to payday lending, the economic crisis in Puerto Rico, foreclosures and more.

For Jean Sassine, who lost his job and nearly lost his home during the 2008 financial crisis, fighting the influence of the big banks in Washington is personal. He became a member of community organization New York Communities for Change (NYCC) six years ago as a way to fight back, and for him the Goldman action “means trying to wake people up that these are the people who were part of the big crisis in 2008, that Steven Mnuchin was called Mr Foreclosure at OneWest and Goldman Sachs. Do you want Mr Foreclosure to be secretary of the treasury?”

The organizers targeted Goldman Sachs because, as Stamp explains, the bank “is a pipeline to government”. Through Democratic and Republican administrations, she notes, Goldman Sachs in particular has fed its bankers into high-ranking government positions – if Mnuchin is confirmed as treasury secretary, Trump will be the third of the past four presidents to have hired for that job from Goldman’s ranks. To Stamp, particularly in the post-financial crisis era, this means the bank is being rewarded for its involvement in subprime mortgages and the financial instruments created to profit from them.

On that front, says Renata Pumerol of NYCC, it is important to confront the power brokers directly as well as the elected officials who work with them. Calling them “Government Sachs” is a way to highlight the level to which they have captured Washington and influence policy that benefits themselves.

As for the occupation itself, the tactic obviously brings echoes of Occupy Wall Street, but Pumerol says that this demonstration differs in its specific demands – to halt the appointment of Mnuchin as well as fellow Goldmanites Gary Cohn, Anthony Scaramucci, Dina Powell and Steve Bannon. Also, she notes, this action is led by people of color and people who have been directly affected by Goldman’s actions.

“It’s an interesting circle of life for someone like myself, who was involved with Occupy,” Stamp adds, “to see this fake crony populism of ‘draining the swamp’ while the swamp is actually continuing to be filled.”

‘Wall Street is a bipartisan opportunist’

A protester at the Goldman Sachs offices. Photograph: Pacific Press/Rex/Shutterstock

For many of the people involved in the Government Sachs action, it seemed obvious that Trump’s promises to drain the swamp were less than genuine. But for Richard Robinson, they resonated and led him to vote for the president-elect.

The 60-year-old veteran and truck driver from Utah lives on social security after a work accident nearly killed him and pushed him into medical retirement. Out of work, he says, he found himself “sitting at home feeling worthless, didn’t feel like I was accomplishing anything”. A friend suggested he get a hobby, and, he laughs: “I became an activist, I guess.”

Robinson lives in a manufactured home community, and through forming a group called MH Action to deal with the issues that he and his neighbors faced, he began to get in touch with other people working on similar issues around the country.

Robinson’s community is owned by a multistate corporation that also owns apartment complexes in New York and Chicago, which helped him get in touch with NYCC. “These companies are buying communities, buying apartment complexes and their business model is not acceptable to me. It’s to raise rents as quickly as possible and decrease maintenance of the communities, and that’s not a good business model for America,” he says.

His vote for Trump, he says, was based on the assumption that because the president-elect was not a career politician, “maybe things would be run differently in Washington”. But the number of Wall Streeters and ultra-wealthy in the administration has him frustrated, and brought him to New York in protest. “He actually hit Hillary Clinton over meeting behind closed doors with [Goldman Sachs] and now I believe he was meeting with them at the same time. He’s appointed them so quickly that I’ve got to believe at the same time he was campaigning hard on Hillary Clinton for meeting with them behind closed doors, I believe he was doing the same thing.”

It is clear they are ready to raid the American people. Government is supposed to be for the benefit of the people Jean Sassine, New York Communities for Change

Nomi Prins, former managing director at Goldman Sachs turned journalist and author of All the President’s Bankers, says that rather than make sincere promises Trump simply attacked weaknesses, taking advantage of widespread anger at Wall Street to score points against first his Republican opponents and then Clinton. Mnuchin, she points out, was his finance adviser the whole time. “There were more apparent Wall Street connections through Hillary Clinton because of the foundation, the speeches and because of Bill Clinton that were real,” she says, “but these are bipartisan relationships; Wall Street is a bipartisan opportunist.” (That relationship is visible in New York City, where Alicia Glen, formerly of Goldman Sachs, serves as deputy mayor to Bill de Blasio.)

That bipartisan relationship, and the bipartisan anger at the power of finance, is what makes it so important to target the banks and lay groundwork for white working-class communities to come together with communities of color to fight, Pumerol says. Adds Sassine: “It is clear that they are ready to raid the American people as opposed to benefiting. Government is supposed to be for the benefit of the people, whether you believe in small government, big government, it’s supposed to be for the benefit of the people.”

‘I’m the strongest, I’m the best, I’m the top dog’

Goldman’s tendency to wield outsize behind-the-scenes influence is part of the reason for the action, Pumerol says. People tend to think of the bank that they interact with daily, but Goldman, famously deemed the “vampire squid” by Matt Taibbi, has incredible reach.

That reach has long extended right up to the presidency, Prins notes. In the wake of the Great Depression, Sidney Weinberg, the then head of Goldman, reinvented himself as an ally to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even as Roosevelt railed that “government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob”, Weinberg helped raise money to put him in the White House.

‘Government is supposed to be for the benefit of the people.’ Photograph: Pacific Press/Rex/Shutterstock

Goldman Sachs wasn’t the only bank to have a close relationship with government, but its closeness with the halls of power stands out from FDR through to Bill Clinton, who took Robert Rubin to run the treasury, and George W Bush, who picked Hank Paulsen as his treasury secretary, a man widely criticized for handing bailout dollars to his cronies after the 2008 crash.

Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform and a former Wall Streeter, notes that Goldman’s reputation for being elite even among other big investment banks adds to its power. “In some ways that aligns with Trump; the idea of Trump being the best is much more about smoke and mirrors, but there is a parallel about I’m the strongest, I’m the best, I’m the top dog.”

But beyond the idea of eliteness, Prins notes, the very nature of Washington has ensured a symbiotic relationship. “It’s a place, as is Wall Street, where people rely on their connections. If you’re already there, you can reach out to the next generation or your colleague and bring them in. It feeds on itself.”

And so conservatives have criticized Trump’s choice of Mnuchin, who has donated to Democrats in the past and who Goldstein calls “a banker’s banker”, noting that he is second-generation Goldman Sachs. Both Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, Prins points out, have a long history at Goldman, rising through its ranks and thriving in its high-pressure, high-risk culture. “Those two are just examples of that particular element, running trading desks, working on complex products and securities, squeezing out the juice of financial instruments and taking big bets.”

On the other hand, Goldstein notes, Steve Bannon, who didn’t last long at Goldman before leaving to, among other things, run Breitbart News, represents a different thread. “His rhetoric and the racism and white supremacy perpetuated by Breitbart is the kind of thing that Wall Street is very invested in maintaining that it is against,” she says. The banks, she says, like to tout their diversity and welcoming nature and philanthropy, but “anyone who signs up with the Trump administration is more interested in power and money than justice and equality”.

There is no bigger sign of that than the impact of the foreclosure crisis, the gutting of public services of Jefferson County, Alabama, and other such dealings. Early in 2016, Goldman finally agreed to a $5bn settlement for fraudulently creating and selling mortgage-backed securities (a settlement that probably amounts to much, much less than advertised), but less than a year later, as Stamp notes, its second-in-command is headed to advise the new president.

Anyone who signs up with the Trump administration is more interested in power and money than justice and equality Alexis Goldstein, Americans for Financial Reform

All of this leads Sassine of NYCC to be incredibly suspicious. Goldman, he notes, owns the mortgage on one of Trump’s NYC buildings. “How serious is the president going to be against his landlord?” Sassine asks.

Camping out in January, if that’s what it takes

The encampment at Goldman Sachs is connected to a larger effort, one that extends across the country. The Working Families party has put out calls for action every Tuesday, meant to challenge the Trump administration and also to pressure Democratic elected officials to stand up to Trump. The previous Tuesday saw protesters outside the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn home to demand he whip votes against Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for attorney general. In Nevada, activists went to Senator Dean Heller’s office with a similar demand.

Richard Robinson is particularly concerned that the financiers in Trump’s administration will aim to privatize the social security he depends on. “We should be strengthening the social security system within the government as it is, by increasing the taxes of corporate America and doing away with the [tax] cap, not turning it over to Wall Street and private industry – that’s not a good system,” he says. To that end, and to strengthen his MH Action group, he is looking forward to learning from the New York action.

Goldstein points out that the wave of action around Trump’s election is just the latest in recent years, building off the momentum of other mass demonstrations. “I think the challenge moving forward is intake and absorption of all the people that are wondering: what should we do now? Courage is contagious, organizing is empowering, there was something about that particular alchemy that was powerful for me, as a participant in Occupy.”

Pumerol agrees, noting that the movements have got to step up in a more militant fashion in the next four years. “When I heard camping out, I said: ‘Oh dear God, camping out in the middle of January’ – but that’s what it takes.”

Sassine has a list of demands for the Trump administration to make him believe in their populism.

“When they put out a plan for a moratorium on foreclosures, when [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] stops selling my communities out wholesale, hundreds of mortgages at a time, when they put forth a living wage plan out, then they’ll start convincing me.”