Bend over, America! Citibank has a plan for you!

I read a new article on The Red Tape Chronicles yesterday about credit cards. The woman in the article had her Citibank card rate going from 12% to 30%. According to the article, she had a perfect pay history and a credit score in the high 700's. Her two choices were to pay the higher rate or to close the account. In today's kooky financial reasoning, closing the account would negatively affect her credit score. What I can't figure out is why not having a credit card lowers your credit score. If you do enough reading you will notice that, no matter how you handle your credit card, it negatively affects your FICO score. There are so many opinions that they eventually contradict each other. I am amazed at how much power the credit bureaus have. It has gotten to the point that banks and mortgage companies don't look at anything other than your score when making a decision. It also doesn't make sense that, the lower your score, the higher your interest rate. People who need the break with lower payments get the opposite.
Here is an example: two people go the the Chevy dealership to buy a car. One is a doctor. The other is a stock clerk at Walmart. They both need a car. The stock clerk is obviously tight on money since he works at Walmart. Doctors are not generally tight on money. The doctor has a 790 FICO and the clerk has a 620 FICO. The doctor will get 0% financing because he can afford a higher payment with a shorter term. The clerk will pay 15% because he needs 72 month financing. Another thing that doesn't make sense is, the longer the term, the higher the rate. If the clerk had a lower rate, he could more easily make the payment, improving his FICO score.
Getting back to the credit cards, the current shenanigans of the credit card industry are in retaliation to the latest round of regulations imposed by Congress. They are always going to screw us over as long as we as a nation think we have to have the cards. I think it's cool that they can't mess with our debit cards yet but I'm sure it's coming. While there are some logical reasons for using a credit card, most of the time they are used for buying stuff that we could do without for a while. It's that whole "instant gratification syndrome" we are all going through.