1-percenters starting to defend themselves

They're tossing back weeks of assaults by Occupy protesters, many of whom assume that being rich and successful makes you a terrible person. Their main argument: Being smart, hard-working and rich is not a crime. From Bloomberg:

If successful businesspeople don't go public to share their stories and talk about their troubles, "they deserve what they're going to get," said Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, 82, a founding member of Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit that develops talking points and op-ed pieces aimed at "shaping the national agenda," according to the group's website. He said he isn't worried that speaking out might make him a target of protesters. "Who gives a crap about some imbecile?" Marcus said. "Are you kidding me?"

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Not all affluent Americans are on the defensive. Billionaire Warren Buffett, 81, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has called for increasing taxes on the wealthy, as has Patriotic Millionaires, a group whose supporters include Ask.com co-founder Garrett Gruener and Peter Norvig, director of research at Google Inc., according to its website. "Rich businesspeople like me don't create jobs," Nick Hanauer, co-founder of aQuantive Inc., an online advertising company he sold to Microsoft Corp. for about $6 billion, wrote in a Dec. 1 Bloomberg View article. "Let's tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth."

If you look at recent polls, the very wealthy tend to have mixed views on taxes, politics and even the Occupy movement. I realize it screws up the narrative, but the 1 percent is not a monolithic class.