Maybe in five years, in the middle of some establishment induced crisis, OpenCoin will announce something like that: "The goverment asked us to put some extra XRP into circulation, because of ... the crisis. We will, because of the severe nature of this very surprisingly and unexpected crisis, be responsible and inject xxx RP into the economy to help everyone (and to protect the country/world against this libertarian terrorists)". Satoshi cannot do this.
Satoshi could have done that in the early stages of Bitcoin -- he picked the 21 million number. Ripple is still in those early stages. To the extent that people worry that this will happen, that will be a drag on Ripple adoption which hurts OpenCoin. So we have every incentive to make sure we don't have this kind of control.