When Senator Joker Arroyo speaks out in vehement defence of his boss, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the media in the Philippines and others in step with the goings-on in that banana republic have a field day - and a good laugh.

Joker, who, as Bloomberg columnist William Pesek wryly notes, was not challenging Batman to step out of the shadows and fight like a man. Joker, who is not related to the long-besieged president, had last July challenged the Filipino middle-class who sat in air-conditioned office towers in Manila who wanted the president gone.

And here was his challenge: "If they want, they can go down and march. That is the only way ... They should go out in the streets, get themselves wet and clubbed."

Brave soul, this Joker. He has something in common with the drunkard, gambler and womaniser Joseph Estrada, and Corazon Aquino, who was heaved into power only because of a massive public sympathy manifested in the Yellow Revolution; and of course the mother of cowards, dictator Ferdinand Marcos who fled the country in 1986 with US help.

They all hide behind the institutions of national security. That's the source of their valour. Gloria Arroyo is none different.

There has been more than one coup to dethrone Arroyo, but no amount of bravado by the likes of Joker will stop future coup attempts against the president.

As long as Gloria continues to produce absurd policies that will more deeply entrench the Philippines as the one of the region's and indeed the developing world s basket-case economies, political dissent will only rise.

And she will find this in the faces of 70 percent of Filipinos who live in abject poverty. She will almost certainly find it increasingly within the ranks of a highly fractionalised and discontented military who are disgruntled that they have ever lessening say in Filipino politics in the face of a collapsing economy, growing poverty, a government and country riddled by corruption, and political power still firmly in the hands of the political oligarchy.

Since becoming president in 2001 in a bloodless coup and, like Aquino, installed in Malacanang Palace under the auspices of People Power that ousted the inept Estrada, Arroyo must be wondering if history will deal her a cruel fate.

If she's lucky, she could be hounded from office by a People Power-led bloodless coup. If she s unlucky, it will be the cheesed-off sections of the military that will lead her out of the palace, where she has squatted for far too long without any shred of evidence to date that the Philippines is a better place for its people.

But the kind of luck that will likely befall Arroyo is the same one as Estrada: led through the back door and, ignominiously, sent into political exile, either in the Philippines or, as Filipinos may be praying, in America. And it could happen sooner than Arroyo thinks.

Silencing critics

Having long championed democracy as her goal and the future of her country, Arroyo quickly slapped emergency rule on the Philippines. And she wasted precious little time in trying to shut up her vociferous critics inside and outside her government and party.

She then launched a with-hunt for renegade military officers. She hauled in her military chiefs, gave them a dressing down, and ordered them to find the culprits within their ranks.

But get this: all this craziness was on a whiff of rumours of an attempted coup. If Arroyo is feeling a touch insecure, she only has herself to blame. Throughout her presidency, she has sat on her hands on the policy and reforms fronts.

As a leader she is a joke. And she can forget ever leaving any kind of legacy for all Filipinos; it will likely be as shameful as previous presidents, save, possibly, Fidel Ramos.

Arroyo's failures are legendary. She came to office wielding the bible of free-market economics, Chicago University-style. A Friedmanite. But she has made Filipinos no better off; they re still wearing the economy around their knees.

More, Arroyo came to office promising to unleash democracy in its truest sense so that it will give Filipinos the greatest of possible opportunities. Very Fukuyama-like.

She said this would inevitably open up her government to good governance and transparent policies. But her government and her policies have been strikingly opaque, even mysterious.

Arroyo blamed the scourge of poverty of her citizens on the lack of democratic institutions, but she has done nothing about fixing the problem. In fact, she has been saved through the American-style presidential system in the Philippines, where a six-term president cannot run again, following constitutional changes in 1987.

But this simply means that the president is not made any more accountable to the people through a Parliament.

She acts like her friend, US President George W Bush. Witness the way she handled the major landslide in the Philippines recently. Bush handled it the same way when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Both produced spin, hype, hubris and more baloney.

There's little point in preaching reforms when the majority of Filipinos are hungry and are forced to live demeaning, hopeless lives, eking out a living from scraps of food and metal at the ever-growing mountains heaped with the rubbish of their rich, consumerist fellow citizens.

When Arroyo raced back to head off rumours of her coup, she was in China, and she will need greater Chinese investment to put a floor to the economy from sinking any more.

Even foreign investment will not work if the president continues to display remarkable incompetence and is far too slack to take up domestic policy issues that are ripping off the majority of Filipinos in terms of economic opportunities and wealth distribution.

But don't bet on Arroyo's star suddenly burning bright. Her star waned in the 2004 election which many claim to have been rigged. Her star waned when she was accused of protecting her relatives, including her family, from charges of corruption using her office.

Her star has waned when she continues to be beholden to the powerful political oligarchies - the Makati clique - who still peddle great influence over state policies. And when the spoils of a highly corrupt government aren't shared among other powerful classes, there will be trouble.

This latest coup attempt was a manifestation of that. It will happen again. Count on it. Arroyo's time is up. She would do Filipinos, especially the poor, a great favour if she steps down now and goes quietly and in deserved shame.

MANJIT BHATIA, an academician and writer, is also research director of AsiaRisk, a political, economic and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. He specialises in international economics and politics, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific.