Tribune: "Rice profiteers warned.... Severe punishment for persons selling over new sale price" — yet the new official price isn't mentioned. The price is moving too fast to be fixed. "Government may resort to confiscation to stabilize market." That didn't work when they tried it the last time. Meanwhile rice reached P700 a sack today — higher than the price of sugar for the first time in our history. It's the only topic being discussed today — the war is playing a poor second fiddle.

The cabinet and the combined agencies of the government issued a joint statement placing the entire blame on profiteers, ignoring the buying by Japanese agencies here at any price. Not a word about the Japanese going to a hacendero offering to buy his whole crop for cash (which Biba, incidentally, doesn't have), plus a kicker of cigarettes, lard or matches! Not a word about the fact that the Japanese control our railroad and won't let a single sack through to our "suffering masses." Not a word about the thousands of trucks the Japanese have taken from us; or the fact that they control ALL the sugar in these islands and are using it to manufacture alcohol to fuel their trucks while limiting Filipinos to cupfuls for their own use. If the Japanese, who control transportation by land, sea and air, cannot get enough for their own use so that they have to compete with us here for whatever rice is available, what hope does the government have of getting rice into Manila?

Today I saw rice being unloaded into a Japanese bodega while little urchins (common in China but new to the Philippines) stood ready with brooms and pans to sweep-up errant grains. Sure, large-scale profiteering is going on, but it's a symptom and not the cause of our problem. Apparently there's no one in the government strong or brave enough to call a spade a spade. It's the most sinister thing that has ever happened here; sinister because the Independent Philippines does not exist at all. Because Laurel has never taken the Filipinos into his confidence and is even hoodwinking his own people with deliberately misleading statements. Sinister because it has become a fight for survival on unequal terms, and the law is irrelevant if one cannot feed one's own family. Late today came an authentic report of a mass demonstration in front of Laurel's home — as good a place as any to search for rice.

As for the Japanese, just cast a gander at the three editorial squibs in the Tribune: "It is WE who are failing to control ourselves.... WE must do something drastic against the old selfish dogmas.... WE cannot succeed in coping ... by failing to grasp the seriousness of the situation." All this by E.M., a Japanese who realizes that there will always be rice for him as long as his people are around. When he says "WE" he means only Filipinos, not the Japanese.

When Laurel told his people: "If we starve, we'll all starve together," he didn't mean the Japanese. Now here we have a case of the Japanese causing us to starve, and lecturing us on our inhumanity and selfishness for fighting to feed our families instead of quietly lying down in stoic submission as the Japanese people would do under similar circumstances. It's an incontrovertible fact that the Philippines, under the Constitution and Independence, agreed to supply rice to the Japanese. Laurel agreed and accepted responsibility for it at a time when he surely must have known that the Filipinos would in all probability fall short of feeding themselves. He agreed to it without limit or reservation, without consulting his people, and having done so, failed to mention it at all.

Now it has all come out in the wash. The Japanese have taken advantage of these agreements beyond the spirit of the verbal agreements and over the prostrate appeals of a powerless puppet masquerading as a sovereign leader of a "free" people, to literally steal the food from under the noses of a hungry populace. That's co-prosperity for you. It's obvious that Ambassador Murata, Lt. Gen. Shigenori Kuroda, Col. Saito and the Director General of the Japanese Military Administration are keeping quiet and staying out of the limelight. Even Roxas has been politically outmaneuvered. How could he have known that the additional rice entering Manila would go to the Japanese and not the people? That his own Constabulary would undermine him? The only thing that would alleviate the situation is to allow free passage of rice on the railroads. It just has to happen.