Paige Cognetti’s support for weapons shipments to Israel and Ukraine fits an unfortunate pattern in her party this election cycle
Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti is running for Congress in northeast Pennsylvania in one of the most contested races in the U.S. mid-term elections as a Democrat under the slogan “Paige Against the Machine”—the corrupt Democratic Party machine, that is.
Cognetti claims that, as Scranton mayor, she took on special interests and battled corruption in City Hall and that, as a congresswoman, she will do the same.
Cognetti’s foreign policy positions, however, show her commitment to enhancing the most pernicious of all political machines: the U.S. military-industrial complex.
In September 2024, Cognetti gleefully autographed an artillery shell that was produced at the General Dynamics Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in the company of then Senator Bob Casey (D), then 8th District U.S. Representative Matt Cartwright (D), Governor Josh Shapiro (D) and Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelensky, who made a special visit to the plant.
Zelensky presides over a CIA-subsidized torture gulag that harbors an estimated 20,000 political prisoners and provoked Russia into a deadly war that has resulted in more than a million deaths, repeatedly shelling the populations of eastern Ukraine and Russia with bombshells made in Scranton.[1]
In April 2025, Cognetti proposed legislation that unanimously passed the City Council establishing a sister city relationship between Scranton and Sheptytskyi, Ukraine. She has worked closely with religious figures in Scranton who helped raise money for combat gear for Ukrainian soldiers, many of whom have fascist sympathies and are implicated in war crimes in eastern Ukraine.
Cognetti is also a staunch supporter of U.S. aid to Israel, despite the genocidal conduct of the Israeli military in Gaza and Lebanon and its aggression in Syria and Iran.
The UN reports that at least 20,000 children have died in Gaza, with more than 44,000 children suffering severe physical or mental injuries.
For Cognetti, the “Israel question” is “very simple.” In January she parroted the usual Democratic fallback: “I vehemently support Israel’s right to defend itself,” Cognetti told Jewish Insider.
In an appeal to Jewish-based organizations and future funders, she vowed to “take extremely seriously Congress’ role in ensuring they have the military aid that they need to defend themselves in a really dangerous neighborhood.”
Cognetti added that “there has never been a question, to me, about what the U.S.’s role in supporting Israel should be,” and that she “will continue to support Israel as a member of Congress.”
To further ingratiate herself to neo-conservatives, Cognetti bragged about the General Dynamics Scranton Army Ammunition Plant that continues to produce “the shells that we use for our own defense, but also that we ship to our allies, like Ukraine and Israel.”
Last year, when pro-Palestinian activists confronted Cognetti along with Casey and Cartwright about the genocide in Gaza, the three resorted to the narrative framed by “Israel’s right to defend itself” and recounted the horrors of Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023—as though the narrative began at that moment rather than in the decades of illegal Israeli oppression and slaughter of Palestinians.
Further, left out of their assessment is how Israel has functioned for decades as a strategic investment for U.S.-led imperialism and protector of U.S. military and economic interests in the Middle East centered on controlling the region’s oil supply and keeping out rival powers like Russia and China.
In the Belly of the Beast
Pennsylvania is seventh in the country in defense spending and defense contractors and their suppliers in Northeastern Pennsylvania play a vital role in the region’s economy. Militarism is good for business and jobs in Northeastern Pennsylvania. And what’s good for business is good for political officeholders and candidates.
Tobyhanna Army Depot in Monroe County is the logistics center for the Department of Defense and is the largest industrial employer in an 11-county region in Northeastern Pennsylvania. It contributes more than $3 billion to the local economy that results in the creation of thousands of jobs that support area workers. Compared to most manufacturing jobs in the area, these jobs are high-paying and provide good benefits.
An authorization of $68 million for Tobyhanna which is supported by the current U.S. Representative for the 8th District, Republican Rob Bresnahan whom Cognetti hopes to replace, will expand ‘radar test range.
The Army opened a new manufacturing line at the Depot in June and produced two brushless direct-current motors marking a step forward in the Pentagon’s effort to build unmanned aircraft without components from vulnerable foreign supply chains.
Artillery production at General Dynamics, the contractor that runs the 118-year-old Scranton Army Ammunition Plant where Cognetti signed a shell, has more than doubled since 2022 when the Russo-Ukraine war broke out.
More than 200 jobs have been created. Cognetti told The Washington Post in 2024: “Northeastern Pennsylvania hopes to prove the premise that aid for Ukraine matters just as much to the local economies that manufacture the material.”
Gentex, a military contractor in nearby Carbondale that manufactures military helmets, has increased staffing by 10% since 2023. German glass firm Schott, which makes high-tech optical products for civilian and military uses in Duryea, has boosted employment by dozens of jobs over the past five years.
Lockheed Martin’s 350,000-square foot facility in Archbald, Pennsylvania, is a full-service missile and fire-control mission area that provides design, manufacturing, engineering and service and support. In addition to being the home for the Precision Guided Systems and Navy Electronic Systems product lines, more than 500 Archbald employees manufacture assemblies for many other Lockheed Martin products.
The facility currently provides electronic assemblies and metal fabrication for programs such as the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS), Apache Fire Control, and Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3).
The Northeastern Pennsylvania Industrial Resource Center, a regional public-private partnership, emphasizes that all of these defense contractors rely upon a network of local subcontractors, logistics companies, food service providers, maintenance firms, IT support firms and other businesses in order to fulfill their contracts, bolstering many smaller manufacturers and several other sectors of the regional economy and benefiting the entire regional supply chain and overall community.
This defense work is promoted as indispensable to the regional economy by the local power structure including political and business leaders.
The emergence of the digital military-industrial complex merges tech giants with traditional defense contractors and military agencies to build artificial intelligence-powered, data-driven warfare systems. The Pentagon recently agreed to massive deals with both Palantir and OpenAI, expanding the arena of defense contractors.
This growing partnership between tech firms and the more traditional defense sector is physically manifested in the proliferation of plans to build hyperscale data centers in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Archbald, home to the Lockheed Martin plant, is at the epicenter of data center development in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
While impacted communities like Archbald oppose these centers based on concerns about the environment and rising utility costs, most political and business leaders, including Cognetti, express only hypocritical token concern to the need to regulate these ventures.
Yet the proliferation of massive AI data centers will keep American workers like those in Northeastern Pennsylvania tied to the endless cycle of imperialist wars for fossil fuels that these centers require.
The digital military-industrial complex influences political candidates directly through traditional means such as channeling funds into political action committees (PACs) and lobbying through local firms. But, more importantly, indirect influencing comes through economic leverage tied to high-tech defense contracts.
In this way, the digital military-industrial complex influences political leaders without even appearing to try. Officeholders and candidates are highly incentivized to remain friendly with these firms so as not to jeopardize jobs and boosts to the regional economy.
They also need their financial support to run in and win elections, as does the political party to which they belong.
At the end of one of Cognetti’s expensive campaign ads, a former Trump voter calls her an “old school tough gal,” cementing her commitment to militarism and rejecting any concerns that she could be persuaded to consider Israel’s genocidal actions.
Pseudo-feminist Cognetti projects herself as a concerned mother in other ads but this concern, of course, does not extend to the children of Gaza or eastern Ukraine who have been slaughtered by weapons produced with Cognetti’s encouragement.
Yet Another Corporate Liberal
Cognetti fits the moniker of what the 1960s New Left movement used to refer to as “corporate liberal” to a tee.[2]
She has come under scrutiny as Scranton mayor for getting the city to purchase the Fidelity Bank Building next to City Hall to refurbish it after taking $14,600 in campaign contributions from Fidelity board members, one of whom is related to her husband.
Cognetti, for her part, claims that the bank building has valuable space that could be used to develop a “real-time crime center,” which will collect live feeds from video cam footage provided by private business owners.[3]
Supported in her bid for Congress by the Pennsylvania State Troopers Association, Cognetti’s mayoral administration invested more than $5 million for police training, recruitment and new technology (including unmanned aerial vehicles) and authorized an increase in the police budget by 22%. This came at the expense of other social services, with Cognetti reducing maternity leave benefits for newer city employees, from 12 weeks paid to unpaid, and issuing other benefit cuts at a time when she was presenting herself as a supporter of paid family leave and working parents.[4]
Growing up in Oregon and attending college at the University of Oregon, Cognetti holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and worked as an investment adviser for Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs.
Living in Scranton for only a few years before being elected Mayor, Cognetti served as a trade advisor in the Biden administration and as a senior adviser to the Under Secretary for International Affairs and as the Managing Director for China Operations in the Obama administration’s Treasury Department, which was at the time engaged in the application of sanctions and economic warfare measures on China.[5]
In April 2025, Cognetti was invited to give a talk before Wall Street’s think tank—the Council on Foreign Relations (aka The Imperial Brain Trust) which has ties to the CIA.
The focus of Cognetti’s talk was Scranton’s social and economic links to Ukraine. Noting how Scranton had large Ukrainian and Polish diasporic communities, Cognetti boasted about how the General Dynamics munitions plant, which runs through downtown Scranton, was producing munitions that went to Ukraine, claiming that this was a point of pride in Scranton. Additionally, Cognetti emphasized how the Ukrainian flag was put up at City Hall and that she and Scranton would continue to support Ukraine.
Cognetti has claimed during her campaign that she is not taking donations from political action committees (PACs); however, federal campaign finance filings show Cognetti has accepted donations from numerous political committees that themselves are awash in cash from corporate PACs, including money from defense contractor Boeing, banking giant JPMorgan Chase and insurance company UnitedHealthcare.
Many of the non-corporate political committees supporting Cognetti are leadership PACs operated by Democratic federal lawmakers to boost their party’s congressional candidates.
During her 2026 campaign to represent Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District, Cognetti has, for example, taken $5,000 from Blue Hen Federal PAC, a committee sponsored by Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE).
Coons’ committee has received hundreds of thousands of dollars this election cycle from a who’s who of corporate and trade association PACs tied to companies such as Visa, FedEx, Pfizer, Northrop Grumman, Eli Lilly, Google, McKinsey and Fox News parent Fox Corp., among several dozen others.[6]
Wider Pattern of Pro-War Democrats
Cognetti’s pseudo-progressivism and deep ties to the military-industrial complex is, unfortunately, par for the course this election cycle among many Democrats.
CovertAction Magazine contributor Abel Tomlinson wrote on his Substack about Democrat Hallie Shoffner, a sixth-generation farmer who is challenging Tom Cotton for the Senate seat in Arkansas.
Tomlinson wrote that “Senator Tom Cotton is one of the worst warmongers in U.S. history, but this does not give Hallie Shoffner a free pass to support war and genocide with a better smile.”
Though Shoffner has nothing on her website about foreign policy, Tomlinson found an interview in a local newspaper in which Shoffner stated that “President Trump was right to bomb Iran” and that she was “proud of the military” for “carrying out a complex mission wonderfully.”
Shoffner also defended Israel’s genocidal conduct in Gaza in terms very similar to Cognetti, stating that Israel “has a right to exist and Israel has a right to defend themselves….Hamas is a terrorist group and they are using their own people as shields, and so Israel does have the right to defend themselves against terrorists who have no regard for human life.”
Shoffner bears some comparison with the Democratic Party’s challenger for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma, N’Kiyla Jasmine Thomas, a nurse associated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who advertises both her mixed-race background and the fact that she is a military spouse.[7]
Thomas told NBC News that, while she supports many aspects of the DSA platform, she does not support defunding the Pentagon, even though the military budget under Donald Trump is more than $1 trillion and diverts needed funding from the social programs Thomas supposedly champions.[8]
CovertAction Magazine has previously detailed the high volume of Democratic Party congressmen and women and political candidates who have CIA or military intelligence or Special Forces backgrounds. The majority of these have adopted hawkish positions while recycling CIA talking points pertaining to Russia Gate and other foreign policy matters.
While it is refreshing to see some upstart candidates opposing aid to Israel, many of these candidates—like Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan—zealously support the war in Ukraine and do not speak out about the wider pattern of U.S. imperialism or how corporate interests drive U.S. foreign policy.
In this election cycle, American voters do not predominantly have the option of voting for a principled anti-war or anti-imperialist candidate yet again—this in a country that claims to be a model democracy and republic.
- Jeremy Kuzmarov contributed to this article.
CovertAction Magazine has covered this extensively. See articles here and here, as examples. ↑
Cognetti’s opponent, Republican Rob Bresnahan, is also an awful candidate deeply in the pocket of corporate interests. Bresnahan campaigned on banning congressional stock trading before becoming one of the most active stock traders in Congress during his first months in office. ↑
Cognetti supported a program to try to heighten surveillance by getting private business owners to connect their surveillance systems with the Scranton police. Cognetti claimed that the increased support for the Scranton police and new police technologies has helped contribute to a decline in violent crime in Scranton. The proposed 2027 Scranton city budget endorsed by Cognetti has more than $3.8 million set aside for public safety, including increased spending for unmanned aerial systems. ↑
Cognetti boasts that, as Scranton mayor, she a) put in place systems to improve financial accountability; b) did away with cash payments for city business; c) professionalized the city’s code enforcement department; d) set up a whistleblower hotline; e) took measures to reduce nepotism in hiring; and f) saved the city money by refusing a government car and gas card, paying for her own travel even for job-related trips, and paying for her own stamps for correspondence like sympathy cards. ↑
See F. William Engdahl, Target China: How Washington and Wall Street Plan to Cage the Asian Dragon (San Diego, CA: Progressive Press, 2014). Cognetti served on the school board form 2017-2018 and as a special assistant to Pennsylvania’s state auditor before becoming mayor. ↑
Cognetti’s campaign has also received $4,000 from the campaign committee of House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (MA), which itself is partly bankrolled by numerous corporate PACs, including those sponsored by Delta Air Lines, Verizon, Allstate Insurance and law and lobbying firm Alston & Bird. When a Palestinian woman tried to run for office on a more progressive platform, Cognetti’s supporters defamed her. Cognetti has been largely silent on ICE terror and appears lukewarm and predominantly supportive of AI data centers. ↑
Thomas is challenging Republican Representative Kevin Hern for Mark Wayne Mullin’s old Senate seat. Hern is a strong supporter of Israel who applauded congressional passage of the 2027 NDAA, which established record military spending. ↑
To her credit, Thomas is rejecting AIPAC funds. ↑
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About the Author
Stephanie Bressler Ph.D. is a former political science and women’s studies professor who advocates for women’s and immigrants’ rights.
Steve Corbett is an award-winning journalist, novelist and short story writer.
Steve can be reached at: stephencorbett01@comcast.net.
