First-class mail doesn't pay the bills at the USPS; junk mail does. The junk mailers are the customer, and as the saying goes about online services, "If you're not paying you're the product."
I think you (and the folks making the same point below) misunderstand. The USPS is indeed part of the problem. They would also be utterly incapable of carrying out the kind of "enhanced" treatment of direct marketing "people" that's required.
Since the USPS is only the instrument, giving all the postal covers to the FBI, I say let the FBI/CIA/NSA/NRO have a shot at the direct marketeers. Those organizations have demonstrated a willingness to "deviate" from the usual behaviors in the defense of Truth, Justice and The American Way. They're just the sort of folks you'd want to "handle" the Direct Marketing Association.
Because direct mail campaigns aren't crimes, and are crucial to the current funding model of USPS? They'd sooner decide to stop carrying mail from individuals, and only deliver mail from customers large enough to drop ship their mail to the local BMC in palletized presorted bundles.
We could always drop the (ridiculous) expectation that the USPS should show a profit and just fund mail delivery through our tax dollars, of course. We did things that way for nearly 200 years -- the current quasi-private incarnation of the postal service only goes back to 1970 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Reorganization_Act) -- and it worked pretty well.
It's always amusing to hear people complaining about the USPS putting junk mailers before the rest of us. The reason the USPS does that is because we forced them to. If you take a public service and turn it into a for-profit corporation, you shouldn't be surprised when it starts looking out for the interests of those it can make the biggest profits off of.
